USA and Canada

Pfizer Inc. has said it will pay $3.6 billion to purchase King Pharmaceuticals, which specializes in pain medications.

New York City-based Pfizer already has a large stake in the pain drug market with its drugs Lyrica and Celebrex, which together accounted for more than $5 billion in sales in 2009. However the company is keen to shore up its portfolio with King's work on ‘abuse-resistant’ pain drugs, while also taking advantage of the opportunity for cost-cutting.

Google has announced its investment in the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC), a project to erect a 350-mile stretch of wind turbines off the US Atlantic coastline.

Stretching down the coast from New Jersey to Virginia, the AWC will be able to connect 6,000 MW of offshore wind turbines—equivalent to 60 per cent of the wind energy that was installed in the whole of the US last year and enough to serve approximately 1.9 million households.

Aberdeen-based energy services company John Wood Group has won a £100 million power station contract in California.

The contract is to construct and commission the conversion of the Tracy Peaker Plant in Tracy, California, owned by GWF Energy, in order to make it more environmentally friendly.

The work will be carried out by the company’s power division, Wood Group GTS.

US gas company Chesapeake Energy is to sell a third of its interest in the Eagle Ford Shale project to China’s CNOOC for $1.08 billion.

Chesapeake will continue to manage the project in South Texas, conducting all leasing, drilling, operation and marketing activities.

CNOOC will fund 75 per cent of Chesapeake's share of drilling and other costs until an additional $1.08 billion has been paid, which Chesapeake expects to happen by the end of 2012.

Mitsubishi Power Systems Americas, Inc. (MPSA) has broken ground on a $100 million wind turbine nacelle manufacturing plant in Fort Smith, Arkansas, crediting a coalition of elected officials and the region's business community for creating the environment that allowed them to site the facility in America's heartland.

The nacelle, which is located at the top of the wind turbine tower and functions to convert wind energy to electric power, consists of the wind turbine rotor axis, generator, multiplying gearbox, control system and electrical equipment.

In a reversal from 2010, the top 20 contract opportunities planned by US federal agencies for fiscal year 2011 are dominated by procurements out of defense agencies.

According to a new report, Top 20 Federal Contract Opportunities, published by market research firm INPUT, now owned by Deltek, more than 80 percent of the approximately $142 billion in total contract value for 2011 will be associated with defense agencies.

The Thompson Group of Companies has acquired Applied Instrument Technologies (AIT) from Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation, although financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed. AIT will be organized as a standalone company within The Thompson Group.

AIT manufactures and markets process analytical instruments including Analect FTIR, PIONIR Near-Infrared, MGA Mass Spectrometers, FXi Gas Chromatographs and RPM Raman analyzers, used by refining, petrochemical, chemical, pharmaceutical and steel industries to optimize their production processes.

The Conference Board of Canada has released a less than conclusive report on BHP Billiton’s hostile $38.6-billion takeover bid for Saskatchewan’s PotashCorp.

The report indicates that there will be little short-term benefit to Canada in terms of jobs if the international mining conglomerate succeeds in its hostile bid for PotashCorp, and that the provincial government’s tax revenue could be hit by as much as C$2 billion over the next ten years.

Bob Vormittag, CEO, VAI, discusses the essential components for any business to compete in the new economy—improve practices, enhance customer service and perfect product lines.

Kenneth H. Marks offers a framework for planning successful deals.

Merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions can be a viable alternative for accomplishing a number of strategic objectives for emerging growth and middle-market companies (those from startup to several hundred million dollars in revenue). Let’s take a high-level view of the buy-side and sell-side processes, and a framework for thinking about and planning each.