Fresh analysis released last month on the economic impact of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the satellite industries attracted by its location in Indiana make it clear the General Assembly is on the right track in moving legislation to bolster the track and the jobs it helps create.
Hoosiers are often thought of as resistant to change (daylight-saving time, anyone?).
The athletic footwear and clothing company said Thursday that its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings dropped 18 percent due to lackluster sales at stores open at least a year.
I have a favorite excuse for failure in business: “It takes money to make money.”
Often with great pride, elected officials and those seeking elective office exclaim that Indiana is a paragon of fiscal probity and that bountiful state reserves demonstrate the caliber of Hoosier leadership.
A pack of conferencing critics had their eyes opened to Indy’s arts pleasures. In turn, they opened my eyes to some things I shouldn’t take for granted.
Johnson & Johnson won approval for the first in a new family of diabetes drugs, giving the New Jersey-based drugmaker an edge over Eli Lilly and Co. and other rivals developing similar medicines. On Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared the drug, known as canagliflozin, to treat adults with Type 2 diabetes. It will be sold under the brand name Invokana and may generate as much as $800 million in annual sales, Tony Butler, an analyst at Barclays Plc in New York, told Bloomberg News. The drug is part of a class called SGLT2 inhibitors, which expel sugar in the urine after the kidneys filter it out of the blood. Similar drugs are being developed by Indianapolis-based Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and AstraZeneca plc.
Medical claims will rise more than 67 percent—the third-highest rate in the nation—for Indiana residents buying individual health insurance policies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, according to a study by the Society of Actuaries. The projected increase is partly due to sicker people joining the insurance pool. The study says most states will see increases, and assumes every state will expand its Medicaid program, but that's uncertain in Indiana. The Obama administration says the study ignores subsidies to help with premiums. Middle-class households can buy subsidized insurance in new marketplaces Oct. 1. The report doesn't cover employer plans.
Dow AgroSciences LLC will formally open a 175,000-square-foot building on April 10, which will be home to 200 researchers working on plant biotechnology. Dow AgroSciences first announced the $340 million expansion in March 2010, saying it would lead to an additional 577 high-paying jobs over the following five years. The company, which is a subsidiary of Michigan-based Dow Chemical Co., said most of the positions would pay $65,000 to $95,000 annually. Dow AgroSciences had sales last year of $6.4 billion, and produced earnings before taxes, interest, depreciation and amortization of $977 million.
Over his four-year tenure, Lee Rosenthal helped WXIN-TV Channel 59 more than double the airtime it devotes to news.
Members of the state’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee voted 12-0 on Tuesday morning to stall legislation that would give central Indiana voters the ability to choose if they want to pay higher taxes for expanded mass transit.
Good things are happening in the philanthropic community.
Building owner Kite Realty Group Trust has agreed to renovate the aging facility’s ice rinks to enable the hockey team to play more games there next season.
The Indiana Ice have come to an agreement with owner Kite Realty Group to use the Pan Am Plaza skating facility as a training center and venue for games after renovations this summer. It also will be open to the public for other ice-related activities.
After six years of unsuccessfully recommending measures that could have made it easier for a suitor to acquire Eli Lilly and Co., the drugmaker’s board has given up this year. The board decided not to place two measures before shareholders again during Lilly’s May 6 annual meeting—one to require annual election of directors and another to remove an 80-percent super-majority requirement to approve a takeover of the company. In a proxy statement filed in March, the board said it opted against another vote because “we have concluded that the proposals would not be successful in 2013.”
Indiana University Health set a goal this year to cut expenses 20 percent to 25 percent over the next four years. That’s $1 billion to $1.2 billion annually, based on IU Health’s expenses last year. Even though President Obama’s 2010 health reform law likely will expand health insurance coverage to an extra 500,000 Hoosiers over the next few years, IU Health officials expect the amount the hospital system receives per patient to fall as the federal government, employers and patients all push back on sky-high health care costs. Most other hospitals are in the same boat. Community Health Network—whose Indianapolis market share is second only to IU Health’s—started trying to cut its expenses back in 2009, even before the health reform law passed. It set a goal to trim $300 million—about 20 percent of expenses—by 2015. Community is more than one-third of the way toward its goal, progress it achieved by streamlining its supply chain and leaving many vacant positions unfilled. It is now focusing on cutting waste out of its internal processes.
The city of Indianapolis is poised to pay Citizens Energy Group $6.5 million to buy a 19-acre parcel of real estate it’s targeting as the centerpiece of a life sciences corridor called 16 Tech. The site at 1220 Waterway Blvd. would accommodate about 1 million square feet of space for a single tenant or multiple users, said Deron Kintner, executive director of the Indianapolis Bond Bank. He is promoting the property as an ideal location for the proposed life-sciences-focused research institute supported by Gov. Mike Pence and Eli Lilly and Co. CEO John Lechleiter. Real estate developers and brokers say the city’s purchase of the Citizens property could help cement 16 Tech as an attractive option for life sciences and research firms looking to locate or expand in Indianapolis.
WellPoint Inc.’s top brass all enjoyed double-digit bumps in 2012 compensation, according to a proxy released April 2, even though the company’s stock price fell and it admittedly did not meet its financial goals. The Indianapolis-based health insurer’s board approved higher salaries and larger potential stock awards heading into 2012 after most of its top executives saw their pay hold steady or decline in 2011. The company’s performance merited its executives' receiving only 83 percent of their target stock awards. But because the board had already established larger pools of stock to award to executives, the value of those awards still rose over previous years. Bonus amounts fell in 2012 compared with the previous year. Former CEO Angela Braly received compensation of $20.6 million last year after she was allowed to stay on as an employee until year's end so that additional stock awards kicked in. WellPoint spokeswoman Kristin Binns said WellPoint achieved important goals in 2012.
Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business will launch a new MBA program for midcareer physicians in an attempt to help doctors figure out how to curb the health care industry’s soaring costs. According to Bloomberg News, about 30 students will join the program in its first year. Their first course will discuss the policy changes coming to health care as a result of President Obama’s 2010 health reform law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Unlike most MD-MBA programs, which target medical students, the Business of Medicine MBA is only for currently practicing doctors who are around 40 to 55 years old and are taking on greater accountability for patient outcomes and costs.
Eli Lilly and Co. plans to double the size of a manufacturing plant already under construction southwest of downtown, investing another $180 million on insulin production and related products. The Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant announced in November that it would spend $140 million to construct an 80,000-square-foot plant for filling cartridges for insulin-injecting pens. The plant, on South Harding Street, adjoins the existing manufacturing complex known as Lilly Technology Center. The new $180 million investment would add 84,000 square feet to the project, allowing Lilly to add another cartridge-filling line, the firm announced Tuesday. The space also would be used to increase Lilly’s manufacturing capacity for the active ingredient in insulin. About 175 workers will staff the plant once it’s in full operation. The jobs will be filled by existing and new employees, according to Lilly spokesman Ed Sagebiel. In addition, Lilly is planning several other projects for its Indianapolis operations totaling $80 million, including a $40 million product-inspection center. The firm has submitted a request to city officials for a tax abatement on the full $400 million investment, between the two phases of the new plant and ancillary projects, Sagebiel said. Lilly’s request calls for a 10-year abatement that would save the firm $30 million. Construction of the production area for insulin’s active ingredient could be complete by December and in operation by March 2014, according to the company. Work on the additional cartridge filling line could be finished by 2016.
Participation in Indianapolis’ massive annual Race for the Cure fundraising event took a hit last year as controversy swirled around policies at the national Susan G. Komen organization. This year, Mother Nature is getting the blame.
Scott Miller, 45, will leave the Indy Chamber after a short tenure that included leading the body through mergers with several like-minded groups. He tells IBJ he felt that he had already accomplished his major goals and wanted to shift to the private sector.
The campus with the highest-paid faculty was Purdue at West Lafayette, where the average salary was $101,000, followed closely by IU-Bloomington, where salaries averaged $98,400.
The Indianapolis delegation will hit the cities of Hyderabad and New Delhi. Visits will focus on information technology, life sciences, and research groups, organizers said.
Eli Lilly and Co. wants the city of Indianapolis to give it $30.6 million in tax breaks on a $400 million project that includes a new manufacturing facility and improvements to existing operations downtown. The Metropolitan Development Commission will weigh two Lilly requests for 10-year tax abatements at its meeting at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Over the last several months, the pharmaceuticals giant has rolled out plans for a manufacturing plant southwest of downtown where the firm will manufacture cartridges for insulin. Construction is already under way for the 164,000-square-foot plant on South Harding Street, adjoining Lilly’s existing manufacturing complex known as Lilly Technology Center. Lilly’s investment in the project is estimated at $320 million. In addition, it is planning a new inspection facility that will add another 30,000 square feet to the project, plus renovations to existing buildings on the Lilly Technology Center campus and the Lilly Corporate Center. As a result of the project, the firm said it will be able to retain 175 Indianapolis employees who will earn an average of $30.96 per hour, according to the abatement requests. Over the 10-year period of the two abatements, Lilly still would pay $22.2 million in taxes on the new construction, renovations and equipment.
Matrix-Bio Inc., a Fort Wayne-based diagnostics company, has signed a licensing and marketing agreement for a breast cancer test with New Jersey-based giant Quest Diagnostics. Under the agreement, Quest will have the rights to use metabolic breast cancer biomarkers developed by Matrix-Bio to create a new lab test to detect the recurrence of breast cancer. Quest will co-fund clinical studies with Matrix-Bio and, if those are successful, market the test as a lab service in the United States and other countries. Quest also has the option to pursue an appropriate regulatory pathway for an in vitro diagnostic version of the test. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Two Purdue University professors have received a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to understand why some children grow out of stuttering. They will use their findings to develop a speech therapy screening tool to identify which preschool children are not likely to recover from stuttering and should receive therapy immediately. Professors Anne Smith and Christine Weber-Fox will use the five-year grant to follow 100 children who stutter. Their research, which began with Smith in 1988, has been funded by the NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders for more than 25 years and has received more than $13 million in grant awards.
Ball State University's School of Nursing is partnering with Indianapolis-based hospital system Community Health Network to create the Nursing Academy, an accelerated degree program designed to increase the number of registered nurses in Indiana. The Nursing Academy will kick off this fall by offering students classes at Ball State, online and via video conferencing. Its students also will work at Community’s eight hospitals. The Community Health Network Foundation will fund scholarships for the 24 students representing the academy's inaugural class. The academy hopes to ramp up to enroll 48 students each year.
