Business in Winnipeg

[vid]

Originally Posted by Andy6

If it doesn't work, obviously the location will close and the problem will solve itself. I think your fear is that it will work and thereby confirm the obvious fact that most people don't really want to bike to their bank and that Thunder Bay is not destined to become some sort of Paris or Amsterdam of civilized walkability anytime soon.

My fear is that more people will follow suit and our downtown will become an empty shell of parking lots and crime, like Winnipeg's. (No offense.)

I think we're doing quite well in the parking lot to buildings ratio.

[1ajs]

whats the vacancy rate vid?

[wags_in_the_peg]

I hear there will be big news from Standard Aero in the next week or so!

[vid]

Originally Posted by 1ajs

whats the vacancy rate vid?

Supposedly the highest in the country, but it isn't like entire buildings are vacant. Most larger building are about 30 to 60% occupied, so we can't really tear them down. We'd probably do better if we had free parking downtown, that's the main draw for suburban areas. All the big malls brag about how you don't have to pay to park there.

[wags_in_the_peg]

an investment giant like this needs to build a new building

IGM Financial income up 14.1 per cent
By Geoff Kirbyson

IGM Financial Inc. continued its double-digit ways in the third quarter.
The Winnipeg-based financial services giant reported net income for the three months ended Sept. 30 of $218.4 million, (82 cents per share) a 14.1 per cent increase from $191.4 million (72 cents per share) in the same quarter a year ago.

Profit growth of more than 10 per cent has become commonplace at IGM, the largest mutual fund company in the country and parent to Investors Group and Mackenzie Financial.

There is no indication that profits will stop flowing any time soon as the sales force at Investors Group has hit a record high.

The number of consultants selling Investors Group’s mutual funds and other financial products hit an all-time high of 4,225 at the end of the third quarter, up from 3,917 at the beginning of the year. It’s the 13th consecutive quarter of growth since the summer of 2004, during which time the company’s distribution network has grown by 31 per cent.

[newflyer]

Profits jump 12% at MTS Allstream

Fri Nov 2 2007

By Geoff Kirbyson
DOUBLE-DIGIT growth in its wireless, high-speed Internet and television divisions propelled MTS Allstream to a $45.5-million profit in its third quarter.

That represented more than a 12-per-cent jump for the Winnipeg-based telco compared to the $40.5-million profit a year ago.

On a per-share basis, the company earned 70 cents for the period ending Sept. 30, up from 59 cents for the year-earlier quarter.

Revenue for the quarter was $475.9 million, down slightly from $477.9 million a year ago.

Pierre Blouin, CEO of the Winnipeg-based telco, described the quarter as "pretty positive".

"We continue to improve our profitability and we're delivering the results we said we would deliver," he said in an interview.

"We're demonstrating that even though there were hard times 18 months or two years ago, that the restructuring we've done and the realignment to growth services and more focus nationally is starting to pay off."

Revenue for the company's growth services, including cellular phones, Internet and television, was $194.7 million for the quarter, up nearly 13 per cent from $172.0 million a year ago.

Legacy services, including local phone service and long distance, meanwhile, brought in $305.9 million in the quarter, down 8.0 per cent from $281.2 million.

Blouin said the company's efforts to squeeze costs out of its operations have been fruitful. Thus far this year it has eliminated $33 million in expenses and he said the final tally for 2007 should ring in between $40 million and $50 million.

Based on MTS Allstream's performance this year, Blouin said the company has upped its earnings forecasts for continuing operations.

Earnings per share for 2007 are expected to be in the $2.65 to $2.85 range, up from the previous outlook of $2.55 to $2.75.

After a couple of high-profile job-reduction programs in the last couple of years -- cuts that affected both its national and Manitoba divisions -- Blouin said there are no further plans to reduce its workforce.

"It's just business as usual," he said.
Blouin said MTS Allstream is still interested in potentially becoming Canada's fourth national wireless player. He said he's optimistic the rules for next year's spectrum auction will be made public in the coming weeks.

MTS shares (MBT/TSX) closed down nine cents to $46.91 on volume of 620,213 in Thursday's trading.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca

[newflyer]

Another great day in Manitoba Business....

Great-West Lifeco's income soars again


Sat Nov 3 2007

By Geoff Kirbyson



Ray McFeetors has nearly run out of superlatives to describe the financial performance of Great-West Lifeco.
The Winnipeg-based insurance giant reported net income excluding a one-time item of $558 million ($0.625 per share) for its third quarter ended Sept. 30, a 17 per cent increase from $477 million ($0.537 per share) a year ago.

Perhaps weary of describing yet another record-setting quarter, the CEO of Manitoba's biggest company said he's stopped focusing on the vast quantity of money and shifted to the quality.

"It was an outstanding quarter," he said in an interview Friday. "(The board) debated whether the quality of earnings this quarter was the highest ever. Not only did we produce 17 per cent growth in earnings for the quarter and year-to-date but we strengthened our reserves. These aren't single events or windfall gains that are unique to the quarter. They come from core growth in the business."

An insurance company holds a certain amount of capital in reserves to protect against uncertain future events, such as changing mortality rates or adverse interest rate movements.

The one fly in the ointment for Lifeco in the quarter was a one-time $95-million after-tax provision related to the distribution of surpluses from "certain Canadian retirement plans." Factoring it in brought the company's net income for the three-month period down to $461 million, or $0.52 per share.


For the first nine months of the year, Lifeco reported net income, including the one-time provision, of $1.52 billion, or $1.703 per share. That's up from $1.38 billion or $1.554 per share for the January-to-September period in 2006.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca

[newflyer]

IMRIS MRI equipment to be used worldwide


Sat Nov 3 2007

By Martin Cash



Wayne Glowacki / Winnipeg Free Press
IMRIS CEO David Graves shows off the company's IMRISneuro surgical suite.


With $40 million of new money in the bank, IMRIS Inc. CEO David Graves says the company is equipped to roll out its inter-operative surgical MRI equipment to hospitals around the world.
Close to one million IMRIS shares traded Friday during the company's first day as a TSX-listed company. The shares closed at $6, the same price investors paid in the initial public offering.

With the eighth unit being installed and another six sold, there will soon be 14 IMRISneuro surgical suites in hospitals from Beijing to Calgary.

"We're very excited about the real opportunity we have to make a difference in the lives of patients," Graves said.

The company plans to use its new money to enhance both its sales and production capacity. Graves said its 75,000-square-foot facility in Winnipeg is big enough for growth.

The company markets a unit for neurosurgery, and has a cardio unit in development that is expected to be ready for shipping early in 2009.


Graves has been credited with providing the leadership and capital that has vaulted the company into the strong position it enjoys today, since acquiring IMRIS from previous owners -- which included the Crocus Investment Fund -- in 2005.

At the time, the company had a reputation of being promising but dangerously deep in debt.

"When I first started talking to the former owners it was fairly innocent at the start," Graves said. "The company was at a challenging time in its development. They had used up a lot of capital that had been invested. But I quickly made a determination that there was value and I was willing to risk my own capital to get that value out."

Graves beefed up the staff to 90 people, brought on some experienced industry players, and moved the company into a larger space.

Calgary's Foothills Medical Centre was the first hospital to use IMRIS's equipment that allows neurosurgeons to take an image before, during and after neurosurgery without having to move the patient. The equipment has been used in close to 900 surgeries at Foothills.

Dr. Garnette Sutherland, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Calgary and a surgeon at Foothills, said there's ample evidence the equipment is making a difference.

In 20 per cent of procedures to remove tumours from the pituitary gland, the surgical suite determined some tumour tissue remained, allowing surgeons to complete the operation and eliminate the need for subsequent operations.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

[newflyer]

Here is an interesting link called Downtown Trends.

Its an information report published by the Downtown BIZ.

Alot of interesting facts within..

http://www.downtownwinnipegbiz.com/
index/trends

[1ajs]

newflyer you getting the downtownbuzz emails to?

[1ajs]

this is not good......


Fears grow at newspapers amid recent CanWest layoffs

Last Updated: Sunday, November 11, 2007 | 10:52 PM ET

The Canadian Press


Tensions are running high in CanWest newsrooms from Montreal to Vancouver in the wake of recent layoffs at the company's television stations and fears that more cuts are ahead amid an apparent push to centralize editorial operations.
"Everybody in the newsroom has received a letter with the buyout offer," said an editor at the Vancouver Sun who didn't want to be identified.
"And in the case of the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal — those are non-unionized newsrooms so the company can do whatever it wants to do in a non-union situation. People are very fearful not just about layoffs but for the industry; deskers are quite depressed about the future of newspapers in general."
CanWest, Canada's biggest media company, is defending its decision to centralize some of its television operations and lay off 200 people at local Global stations, saying it was part of an effort to make their newsrooms more "leading edge."
Buyouts have also been offered and taken at some of the chain's largest daily newspapers, including the Montreal Gazette and the Vancouver Sun and Province.
CanWest, based in Winnipeg, employed 10,645 people at the end of its 2006 fiscal year at newspaper, internet and broadcast businesses in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

"The media landscape has changed fairly dramatically and traditional newsroom structures have not evolved enough to be able to fully respond to this new 'always on' environment," Dervla Kelly, CanWest's corporate communications officer, said in an e-mailed.
"Our papers are each looking at how they need to evolve their newsrooms to be more … fluid in their approach to content. Each of them are deciding locally what changes make the most sense for their paper, but a key focus for all is to look at how they can place more resources on delivering 'hyper-local' news, creating unique content, as well as place more resources focused on the web."
Contrary to fears inside CanWest newsrooms, Kelly said, the company is not centralizing its newspapers and cutting back on local coverage — the goal, in fact, is to bolster local coverage and simply defer some pagination duties to CanWest Editorial Services in Hamilton, Ont.
"This will allow them to put more focus and resources on generating content and less on packaging and moving content around. This does mean that some production-type jobs have been eliminated, but new positions have also been created that are focused on content and on the web."
Many aren't buying it, suggesting CanWest is making a dramatic attempt to prove to their debt-holders that it can afford to buy Alliance Atlantis and its array of successful specialty channels.
The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union filed a complaint with the CRTC on Friday against CanWest, saying it will be in breach of its broadcast licences if it moves ahead with plans to centralize its Global television operations without the federal agency's approval.
'Same old bugaboo'
"Why are they doing this? One reason is because they have that same old bugaboo of a lot of debt, but also on Nov. 19 they begin hearings about their purchase of Alliance Atlantis," the union's Peter Murdoch said in an interview.
"They're squeezing every which way they can in order to scrape up the change to buy Alliance Atlantis."
CanWest is only putting up 30 per cent of the money involved in the $2.3 billion Alliance Atlantis purchase. The rest is being provided by its U.S. partner, Goldman Sachs.
Centralizing news operations in an attempt to cut costs is nothing new — Quebecor has been doing it for years, for example — but it's a risky gamble for a media company, observers say.
"There are some real el-cheapo stations in the States that tried it and it was quite a flop," Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, said in an interview from Florida.
"At the very least, newspapers and local TV stations are really the sources of local news information. They're still the strongest game in town, and usually the only game in town, and the one place where newspapers have the internet beat," Edmonds said.
Erosion of local news coverage a concern: CAJ
"Centralizing is really a dangerous experiment. The viewer or the reader is smart enough to figure out the difference between locally originated news and something that's put together at a distant point, and then you risk losing that reader or that viewer forever."
Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, says her organization's members are frustrated by the lack of clear information being provided by CanWest about its future plans. A steady erosion of local news coverage is the most worrisome potential scenario, she said.
"That's our No. 1 concern," she said. "If it does shake out that there are fewer reporters in newsrooms across the country, we see that as being really detrimental for the quality of local coverage. You have to invest in good-quality journalism and it's really hard to do that when you're shrinking newsrooms."
The entire CanWest situation, others say, is symptomatic of the slow death of newspapers as media companies attempt to compete against YouTube instead of focusing on producing quality journalism.
"You'd like to think there's a breaking point, just like there was for nurses and teachers," Murdoch said. "I think at some point, journalists are going to say: 'Wait a minute, we have a real problem here in terms of own craft, our own ethics, our own standards.' And we're going to have to say and do things about it that are a little more activist than we have been in the past."
The Vancouver Sun editor said many in his newsroom are pondering taking the buyout, not because they fear they'll be laid off eventually anyway, but because of declining journalistic standards in the newspaper business.
"We were told that we're not a newspaper anymore, we're a newsroom," he said with a sigh. "We care a lot about our craft, and the standards are going out the window.
"The quality is secondary, as far as the people who are our bosses are concerned. They really don't seem to care anymore about the things that we care about. That's why people are taking the buyouts."

[newflyer]

Bricks are bursting
Wellington West grows too quickly for HQ; starts expansion
Fri Nov 16 2007

By Murray McNeill


PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

Wellington West’s Charlie Spiring at the Waterfront Drive HQ. Acquisitions and internal expansion have ballooned staff.
WELLINGTON West Capital Corp. has outgrown its corporate headquarters on Waterfront Drive and is in the midst of a major expansion that could see it adding two more floors to its four-storey building.

"We're just growing so fast," Charlie Spiring, the company's chief executive officer, said in an interview Thursday. "And we have some pretty bullish plans (for further growth)."

Spiring said company executives will need to decide within the next six months whether to add more floors, or do something else. The other options would be to lease space in nearby office buildings, or to acquire a vacant property in the area and build a second office building.

"I think (adding two more floors) makes the most sense," he said.

To meet its immediate need for more space, the company is spending an estimated $350,000 to convert 10,000 square feet of restaurant space on the main floor of its building into new office space. That project should be complete by the end of next month.

The company has also leased 15,000 to 20,000 square feet of space on three floors in an adjoining office building at 93 Lombard Ave. That building is owned by MPN Holdings Ltd., the Winnipeg property management and development firm that developed the Wellington West building, and co-owns it along with the financial services firm.

However, Spiring said leasing space in the building next door and converting the former Allora restaurant space to office space will only provide short-term relief. That's why the company needs to decide fairly soon on a longer-term solution.

He said adding two more floors to the existing 450,000-square-foot building will likely cost between $4 million and $5 million. That's almost as much as it cost to build the four-storey structure -- that was about $6 million -- and reflects the rising cost of new construction.

Founded in 1993, employee-owned Wellington West has become one of the fastest-growing independent, full-service investment firms in Canada, with more than $9.4 billion in assets under management. Since the start of this year, it has added more than 10 new teams of investment advisers, and it continues to aggressively recruit throughout the country.

Spiring said Wellington West officials originally thought the four-storey building would satisfy its space needs for at least 10 years. But thanks to internal growth and growth through acquisitions, the company has more than tripled the size of its head office staff in the last six years.

He said about 150 people now work in the building, and up to 100 more may be added over the next 18 to 24 months as the company continues to acquire more firms and to grow its operations.

Even if the company does add two more floors to the existing building, Spiring said it may still have to acquire another building in the area or buy some vacant land and build a second office complex.

"We have thought of doing that. Some of our divisions are pretty independent and could operate a block or two away."

He said company officials would prefer to keep everything within a couple of blocks of where it is now.

"Being close to Portage and Main is pretty important. And we love this location. This is the best place in the city."

murray.mcneill@freepress.mb.ca

[newflyer]

This is great news for Waterfront Ave. Nothing like adding more highly paid employees to the area, This is a great company and is growing at a great clip.

I still expect there will be a new office building in the area within a couple years, either with or without Wellington West as the lead tenant.

[1ajs]

Arts groups rail against CanWest-Goldman Sachs deal for Alliance Atlantis

Last Updated: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 | 3:14 PM ET

CBC News


The proposed takeover of Alliance Atlantis by CanWest Global Communications and its U.S. partner Goldman Sachs came under fire again on Tuesday from Canadian arts groups.
At CRTC hearings in Gatineau, Que., ACTRA and the Writers Guild of Canada called on the country's broadcast regulator to block the acquisition.
Maureen Parker, the executive director of the writers guild, said her group doesn't object to CanWest's purchase of Alliance Atlantis specialty channels, but raised concerns about Goldman Sachs' role in the deal.
"Had CanWest chosen to partner with a Canadian investor, or even a foreign partner with less than 50 per cent of equity and debt, we would not be here today,” Parker said.
CanWest is contributing about 36 per cent of the money in the takeover, while Goldman Sachs is putting up 64 per cent. The partners say CanWest will retain control of the venture by holding a majority of the voting shares.
"Increased foreign control of broadcasting would damage our cultural sovereignty, deepen the crisis in Canadian drama and potentially jeopardize Canadian content rules," said Richard
Hardacre, the national president of ACTRA.
Leonard Asper, the CEO of CanWest, was to deliver a closing statement on the takeover at the CRTC hearing later on Tuesday.

[newflyer]

I know this was posted elsewhere .. but thought it was also business related. Manitoba is in growth mode.

Come Back East, Young Man NOV 29 2007 01:40 PM

Manitoba's population is growing at a rate not seen in a quarter century, and part of that is due to keeping young Manitobans in their home province.
Manitoba's chief statistician Wilf Falk says new Statistics Canada numbers estimate that nearly 200 more people came to Manitoba than left for Alberta in the third quarter this year.

And Falk told CJOB's Richard Cloutier that's good news...

(play audio)

Falk adds its partly because the bloom is coming off the Alberta rose with that province's high cost of living.

Falk expects upcoming Stats Can figures to reveal that Manitoba's population grew by 12-thousand people this past year, the biggest growth in 24 years.

CJOB's Brenton Driedger reporting.

[newflyer]

Come Back East, Young Man

I need not be asked twice.

[wags_in_the_peg]

now, if only we got an NHL team, all would be good

[h0twired]

Originally Posted by newflyer

I know this was posted elsewhere .. but thought it was also business related. Manitoba is in growth mode.

Come Back East, Young Man NOV 29 2007 01:40 PM

Manitoba's population is growing at a rate not seen in a quarter century, and part of that is due to keeping young Manitobans in their home province.
Manitoba's chief statistician Wilf Falk says new Statistics Canada numbers estimate that nearly 200 more people came to Manitoba than left for Alberta in the third quarter this year.

And Falk told CJOB's Richard Cloutier that's good news...

(play audio)

Falk adds its partly because the bloom is coming off the Alberta rose with that province's high cost of living.

Falk expects upcoming Stats Can figures to reveal that Manitoba's population grew by 12-thousand people this past year, the biggest growth in 24 years.

CJOB's Brenton Driedger reporting.

So did the additional 200 people that came to Manitoba come from Alberta or is that net growth overall? For example did 5000 Manitobans leave for Alberta while 5200 Albertans move to Manitoba?

At any rate 200 is a pretty small number and Alberta is still growing despite the few people who couldn't make a go of it here and returned to their home provinces.

The 12,000 person population growth is also kind of interesting. I am curious to see how much of that is "biological growth" as in how many babies were born compared to old people dying.

[drew]

^ it's mostly immigrants. We are at about 10k per year.

[Greco Roman]

Originally Posted by drew

^ it's mostly immigrants. We are at about 10k per year.

And the strategy is to eventually make that 20K/yr.