Business this week

From The Economist print edition

VNU, a business-information group based in the Netherlands that owns the Nielsen media-ratings service and Billboard magazine, agreed to pay $7 billion for IMS Health, an American company that collates worldwide information on drugs sales for the pharmaceutical industry.

Unocal sold Northrock Resources, a subsidiary that operates oil and gas assets in Canada, to Pogo Producing, a Houston oil firm, for $1.8 billion. The deal was announced shortly before Unocal's board was due to meet to discuss rival takeover bids it has received from Chevron and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

Qualcomm filed a lawsuit against Broadcom accusing the chipmaker of infringing its wireless-technology patents. The tit-for-tat move comes a week after Broadcom initiated antitrust litigation against Qualcomm.

Sprint, a telecoms firm, bought an affiliated mobile-phone company that had launched a lawsuit to halt its $35 billion merger with Nextel Communications. Sprint will pay $1.3 billion for US Unwired, which will now drop its objection that the merger violated a deal with Sprint not to impede its market.

DreamWorks Animation issued its second profit warning in two months and called off a secondary share offer worth $500m. The studio, which specialises in computer-generated films, was overly optimistic about sales of “Shrek 2” DVDs.

The Bank of Italy controversially gave the go-ahead for Banca Popolare Italiana to make formal its bid for Banca Antonveneta, a larger rival. Antonveneta was first targeted by ABN Amro, a Dutch bank that is hoping to be the first foreign institution to take over a large Italian bank.

Lego sold its Legoland theme-parks to Blackstone for euro375m ($453m). The private-equity firm will form a company to revamp the parks and other attractions that will be 30% owned by Lego. The Danish toymaker, famous for its colourful building bricks, has seen a slide in sales recently.

The OECD warned the 12 countries of the euro area that unless they introduced structural reform, average annual GDP growth would drop to 0.9% between 2020 and 2030 and employment would fall by an annual average of 0.7% (over the same period). The 25-member EU is aiming for GDP of 3% by 2010.

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