Los Angeles Times - 13.11.2019

LATIMES.COM/BUSINESS WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019C3

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is working with one of the big-

gest U.S. healthcare providers to develop new digital

tools, giving the internet giant deep access to the person-

al health information of millions of Americans.

The partnership with Ascension, a nonprofit Catholic

healthcare provider with more than 150 hospitals in 20

states, is wide-ranging and includes developing software

that uses artificial intelligence to improve patient out-

comes, Ascension said Monday in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal reported the partnership ear-

lier and said the deal had originally been struck last year.

All sharing of information complies with federal pri-

vacy laws and Ascension’s strict requirements for data

handling, the healthcare company said in the statement.

The partnership hadn’t previously been disclosed, in-

cluding to patients whose data may have been involved,

the Journal reported.

As part of the work, Google employees may have had

access to data including hospital records and patient

names, but the company declined to elaborate.

Google has built a significant healthcare team and is

experimenting with using artificial intelligence to im-

prove healthcare.

Google accesses

patient data with

Ascension deal

bloomberg

Alphabet Inc.’s “mighty” Google faced an unlikely fig-

ure in a London court Monday: a cab driver from south

London.

The search company sued Goooglie Cars’ sole direc-

tor, Sohail Nagi, for about $12,800, arguing that the cabbie

had been “unfairly free-riding off its reputation” by pre-

senting the company name in Google’s style — using a

very similar font and color scheme as the ones in the tech

giant’s logo.

In 2012, after a two-month discussion with Google,

Nagi agreed to change his logo to black with cricket balls

in place of the O’s to represent the cricket term for a slow

spinning ball — a “googly.” Google’s lawyer, Maxwell Keay,

said this hadn’t been implemented, however, and the logo

was changed only this year, after Google filed its suit

against the taxi company. Judge Gordon Nurse ruled in

favor of Google after the tech giant agreed to cap its legal

costs at 10,000 pounds, about half of what it incurred. Nagi

was ordered to pay the sum within 28 days.

“I’m a very poor man, and it’s very hard to survive,”

Nagi told the court.

Nurse didn’t give Google everything it wanted. The

judge rejected Google’s request that Goooglie Cars

change its name.

Google didn’t return requests for comment.

Cabbie sued over

his Goooglie logo

bloomberg

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National Crime Prevention

Lake Balboa, Mon.

Filmsters

Tiffany

Hollywood Hills, Tue.-Wed.

Vice Media

Sounds of LA

Hyde Park, Sun.

Attachment Inc.

The Little Things

Hollywood, Mon.

Warner Bros. Pictures Inc.

The Beta Test

Downtown L.A., Wed.

Purple Envelope

Mank

Culver City, Thu.-Sat.

Netflix Productions

S .W. A .T.

Santa Clarita, Mon.

Topanga Productions

NCIS: Los Angeles

Van Nuys, Mon.-Wed.

CBS Corp.

Betrayed

Woodland Hills, Tue.

Bright Road Productions Inc.

Dr. 90210

Beverly Hills, Wed.-Thu.

Entertainment One

Fresh Off the Boat

Bel-Air, Mon.

20th Century Fox Television

For All Mankind

Westlake, Mon.-Tue.

Mesquite Productions

The Voice

Marina del Rey, Mon.

Finnmax

Good Trouble

Florence, Mon.-Fri.

Hop, Skip And Jump

Productions Inc.

The Rookie

East Hollywood, Mon.-Tue.

Foxburg Productions

Dave & Buster's

Westchester, Mon.

Artistic Endeavors Inc.

The Outlaw Johnny Black

Tujunga Canyons, Mon.-Fri.

Outlaw JB

Survival

Altadena, Mon.-Sat.

XVII Entertainment

Television

Overall shoot days were up 5% last week for TV, film and

commercial shoots in the Los Angeles area compared with the

same period last year, according to FilmL.A. Inc.

FilmL.A. Inc.; cities of Beverly Hills and Santa Clarita

Thomas Suh Lauder Los Angeles Times

Note: Permits are subject to last-minute changes.

Production days for three main categories

Sampling of permitted shoots this week

+20% -23% unch.

Nov. 4-10, 2019 (488 total shoot days)

Nov. 5-11, 2018 (466 total shoot days)

290 89 109

242 115 109

Television Features Commercials

Commercials

Features

2

5

5

5

10

10

405

210

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

101

Los Angeles

60

170

110

118

710

110

105

14

Where the cameras roll

Fiat Chrysler Automo-
biles has been manufactur-
ing more cars and trucks
than its U.S. dealers are will-
ing to accept, at one point
creating a nationwide stock
of about 40,000 unordered
vehicles and stoking tension
with some of its retailers.
Four dealers, two of
whom spoke on the condi-
tion they not be named, said
Fiat Chrysler has revived
what’s known in industry
circles as a “sales bank.” The
practice is decades old and
frowned upon by investors
and analysts because it can
obscure an automaker’s in-
ventory figures. Dealers
don’t like it because it can
amp up the pressure compa-
nies place on them to take
delivery of vehicles they
don’t want.
Chrysler implemented
sales banks in the run-up to
the two times it needed res-
cues from the U.S. govern-
ment, in 1980 and 2009. Al-
though the company is no-
where near that sort of trou-
ble — it just reported a
record quarterly profit — the
surging supply of unas-
signed vehicles coincided
with a period when the com-
pany was pursuing mergers.
After efforts to combine with
France’s Renault fell
through, it announced a
tie-up with Peugeot owner
PSA Group last month.
Fiat Chrysler denies that
it has restarted a sales bank.
The company says it put a
predictive analytics system
in place early this year that
aims to better align its sup-
ply chain and manufactur-

ing plans with anticipated

dealer orders.

“We’re producing pre-

specificationed vehicles

against predicted demand

so the right vehicles are

available when dealers need

them,” said Niel Golightly,

Fiat Chrysler’s global chief

communications officer.

The modeling has proved ac-

curate, he said, as Fiat

Chrysler has ended quarters

with as few as 1,000 vehicles

that it’s ordered and been

unable to sell to dealers.

At the close of the third

quarter, the number of un-

ordered cars was at roughly

5,000 vehicles. Although that

amounts to a rounding error

for a company that sells

more than 500,000 vehicles a

quarter in the U.S., the proc-

ess still left some dealers an-

gered by pressure tactics

they say can lead to bad be-

havior.

Fiat Chrysler recently

agreed to pay a $40-million

penalty related to filing

years of sales reports the

U.S. Securities and Ex-

change Commission said

were fraudulent. One way

the company inflated fig-

ures, the SEC said in Sep-

tember, was by paying deal-

ers to report fake sales.

The predictive analytics

strategy was put in place by

North American Chief Op-

erating Officer Mark Stew-

art, who joined in December

from Amazon.com Inc. Im-

plementing the system and

increasing the required lead

time for dealers to order cars

saved the automaker about

$441 million this year

through the third quarter,

Golightly said. The com-

pany has reduced inventory

by about 120,000 cars during

that span, he said.

Auto sales have been

slowing industrywide this

year, and the Italian Ameri-

can automaker started

building up the bank of

unassigned cars this sum-

mer. Some dealers were

looking to pare back inven-

tory after being burned by

rising interest rates that in-

creased the cost of holding

cars, and what some say was

a lack of incentive support

from the company to boost

sales of older models.

Although Fiat Chrysler’s

U.S. sales and market share

were roughly flat last quar-

ter, it struggled along with

other automakers to move

old model-year inventory off

dealers’ lots. It took Fiat

Chrysler dealers 101 days on

average to sell each vehicle

during the quarter, 24 more

days than the industry aver-

age, according to market re-

searcher Edmunds.

Chief Executive Mike

Manley told analysts last

month that the company

earned a record quarterly

operating profit despite par-

ing back shipments to re-

duce inventory. North

America generated the lion’s

share of income.

“Working with our dealer

network to achieve and

maintain discipline with

stock levels continues to be

one of our top priorities,”

Manley said on the call,

hours after a preliminary

merger agreement with PSA

was announced. “In North

America, our dealer stock is

now in line with demand.”

The sales bank concept

dates from at least the 1960s.

After Chrysler secured fed-

eral loan guarantees in 1979,

then-CEO Lee Iacocca

swore the company would

never resort to it again. He

summed it up in his top-sell-

ing autobiography as “noth-

ing more than an excuse to

keep the plants running

when we didn’t have dealer

orders for the cars.”

But in 2006, Chrysler

started stockpiling unas-

signed cars again, at one

point accumulating a glut of

100,000 vehicles. The U.S.

government backstopped

the company’s 2009 bank-

ruptcy and arranged for

Chrysler to emerge with Ita-

ly’s Fiat as a partner.

David Kelleher, a Phila-

delphia-area Fiat Chrysler

dealer, said that although

the sales bank was a past

problem, he’s confident the

company isn’t going to fall

back into bad habits.

“They’re not making this

a practice. It’s a one-off,”

said Kelleher, who sits on the

automaker’s council.

“That’s in my rear-view mir-

ror, and I’m pleased with the

way Chrysler handled it.”

Last week, Fiat Chrysler

sales representatives told

some dealers it would allo-

cate them vehicles for No-

vember and December all at

once, and that it may restrict

orders for certain models,

two dealers said. They saw

this as a bid to work through

inventory by prodding deal-

ers to order cars that remain

in the sales bank.

Fiat Chrysler said the re-

strictions apply only to cer-

tain vehicle configurations

for which demand exceeds

production capacity. The

supply of unassigned vehi-

cles will wax and wane in a

predictable fashion going

forward, Golightly said.

Robert Loehr, who owns

a Fiat Chrysler dealership in

metro Atlanta and sits on

the company’s dealer advis-

ory council, said the stock of

unassigned cars has an up-

side — it allowed him to re-

stock some higher-end Lar-

amie trim Ram trucks on

short notice.

“They’ll ask you to take

some stuff along the way

that you may not necessarily

want, but you may need oth-

ers,” he said. “It’s a give-and-

take relationship.”

Coppola writes for

Bloomberg.

SOMEdealers accuse Fiat Chrysler of reviving a decades-old and frowned-upon industry inventory practice.

John BazemoreAssociated Press

A Fiat Chrysler ‘sales bank?’

Automaker irks some

dealers as it pushes

them to take 40,000

cars they didn’t want.

By Gabrielle Coppola

Top U.S. milk processor
Dean Foods Co. filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy pro-
tection and is in advanced
talks with Dairy Farmers of
America Inc. about a poten-
tial sale.
Dean listed assets and li-
abilities of as much as $10 bil-
lion each in court papers
filed Tuesday in Houston,
and it said in a statement
that it has commitments for
$850 million in bankruptcy
financing from existing lend-
ers led by Rabobank. The fil-
ing allows Dean to keep op-
erating while it works on a
plan to pay creditors and
turn the business around.
Losses have piled up af-
ter Dean’s biggest customer,
Walmart Inc., built its own
milk plant. The company
has been squeezed by fierce
competition and the rising
price of milk, which has in-
creased costs and eroded
profit margins.
Americans are drinking
less cow milk, with nut milks
and bottled water cutting
into its popularity. On top of
that, retailers have been sell-
ing their house brands of
milk at a loss to increase
store traffic, Hoai Ngo of
Bloomberg Intelligence
wrote in a note.
Dean shares have tum-
bled 79% this year, the worst
performance among peers

tracked by Bloomberg. The

stock’s trading was halted

Tuesday. Its bonds dropped

to fresh lows, plunging to as

little as 14.5 cents on the dol-

lar, according to Trace trad-

ing data. As recently as Jan-

uary of last year, the bonds

were trading at full value.

The Dallas company’s fil-

ing and debtor-in-pos-

session financing reduce the

recovery value for debt hold-

ers and “could drive prices

lower,” Ngo wrote.

A transaction between

Dean and Dairy Farmers of

America is still under review,

and no agreement for the

purchase of Dean’s assets

has been reached, Dairy Far-

mers of America Executive

Vice President Monica Mas-

sey said in an emailed state-

ment. Other bidders may

emerge during the bank-

ruptcy process, Massey said,

adding that her company’s

offer would be contingent

upon various approvals, in-

cluding a review of Dean

Foods’ assets and clearance

from U.S. antitrust regula-

tors.

Dairy Farmers of Ameri-

ca monitored Dean’s finan-

cial performance “closely

since the business began

showing signs of distress”

and began “preparing for

various scenarios, including

a bankruptcy filing, in order

to minimize the impact,”

Massey said.

According to Rabobank,

Dairy Farmers of America is

the sixth-biggest dairy com-

pany in the world by sales,

and Dean Foods is No. 11.

The Central States

Southeast & Southwest

Areas Pension Plan is listed

as the company’s largest un-

secured creditor, with a

$722.4-million claim along-

side Dean’s $700 million of

unsecured notes that ma-

ture in 2023.

Dean’s bankruptcy was

the “clearest option” for ad-

dressing the pension and

debt load, Wells Fargo equity

analyst John Baumgartner

said in a note. Challenges in

the milk category on top of

the unfunded pension liabil-

ities were “too much to over-

come,” he said.

Dean has been hemor-

rhaging executives as well as

cash, with Chief Financial

Officer Jody Macedonio and

general counsel Russell

Coleman stepping down in

September. Scott Mills, who

was Dean’s vice president

of commercial finance,

joined another company last

week.

Chief Executive Eric Be-

ringause, who joined the

company just over three

months ago, said the current

path, led by a new senior

management team, would

lead to a turnaround.

Dean expects a cash loss

of $286 million for the 10-

month period through Au-

gust 2020. The budget also

predicts about $15 million of

cash on the balance sheet by

the end of the period.

Top milk seller files for bankruptcy

bloomberg

JUGS OF McArthur Dairy milk, a Dean brand. Nut

milks and bottled water are cutting into milk sales.

Wilfredo LeeAssociated Press