PHARMACEUTICALS

PFIZER CONSIDERS SELL-OFF OF CONSUMER PRODUCTS BUSINESS

Pfizer is exploring strategic alternatives, including the possible sale or spin-off of its consumer-products business. Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, which includes the Listerine and Bengay brands, has annual sales of around $3.88 billion.

The move comes as Pfizer struggles to improve its sales and earnings in the wake of patent losses on several important drugs, sluggish sales of key medicines, and an overall more competitive marketplace. This is the first time in three years that Pfizer has taken a major step toward divesting itself of a noncore business.

– Dow Jones Newswires

REAL ESTATE

TOLL BROTHERS SAYS ORDERS FALL BY 29% IN FIRST QUARTER

Toll Brothers, the largest American builder of luxury homes, said fiscal first-quarter orders plunged 29% and cut its 2006 sales forecast as buyers waited to see whether prices would fall. Toll, whose homes cost almost three times the average in America, said sales will rise as little as 4.9% this year, half its previous forecast, the Horsham, Penn.-based company said in a statement yesterday.

– Bloomberg News

AUTOMOBILES

GM TO HALVE DIVIDEND, CUT EXECUTIVE PAY DETROIT – General Motors has taken its restructuring drive to a new level, announcing yesterday that it will halve the dividend it pays to shareholders, slash executive pay, and adjust health-care and pension benefit programs for salaried employees.

– Dow Jones Newswires

TECHNOLOGY

GOOGLE TO MERGE INSTANT MESSAGING WITH E-MAIL SAN FRANCISCO – Online search engine leader Google Inc. is wedding its instant messaging and email services in the same Web browser, hoping the convenience will lure users from the larger communications networks operated by its chief rivals. The new chat feature will provide users of Google’s Gmail service with a list of contacts drawn from past e-mail exchanges and then signal who’s available for online conversations.

– Associated Press

CONSUMER CREDIT

BORROWING GROWTH SLOWS

WASHINGTON – Consumers, weighed down by high debt loads and low savings rates, increased borrowing last year by the smallest amount in 13 years, the Federal Reserve said yesterday.

– Associated Press

IN THE COURTS

CROSS-EXAMINATION GROWS TESTY AT ENRON TRIAL

HOUSTON – In a sometimes testy exchange, the lead attorney for Jeffrey Skilling in the former Enron president’s criminal fraud trial here continued to challenge the government’s lead-off witness about whether he had any basis for claiming that the company put out false or misleading information to the public.

Mr. Skilling faces fraud and conspiracy charges along with his co-defendant, former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay. In his second day of cross-examining former Enron investor relations chief Mark Koenig, attorney Daniel Petrocelli noted that some of the supposedly false financial information had been reviewed and approved by company auditors. In one instance, he pressed Koenig on whether he could be sure that Mr. Skilling was lying when the Enron president made an inaccurate statement during a 2000 conference call with securities analysts.

“I don’t know if it was a mistake or a lie,” Koenig conceded.

However, he added that the correct information was available to Mr. Skilling and others, including himself, within Enron. However, in another instance, Koenig didn’t relent when Mr. Petrocelli pressed him about whether Enron had improperly raised its reported earnings in the fourth quarter of 1999 to meet analyst estimates.

– Dow Jones Newswires