BUSINESS BRIEFS
Some airlines drop fares from summer highs
Advertiser news services
In the past two weeks, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue Airways began offering $49 one-way fares to the San Francisco Bay Area from Southern California airports while AirTran Airways and Virgin America were selling $139 one-way tickets for flights from Los Angeles International Airport to Atlanta or New York.
International fares are hovering at an average of 50 percent more than last year — mostly because of fuel surcharges of as much as $400 — but there are signs of weakening, said Tom Parsons, chief executive of travel Web site www.BestFares.com.
Some foreign carriers began dropping prices by as much as 50 percent, with round-trip fares from Los Angeles to London dropping to about $900 from $1,600.
DOMINO'S WILL DELIVER SUBS, TOO
Domino's, the pizza delivery giant, today will announce plans to roll out a line of four, $4.99 oven-baked sub sandwiches that it will deliver with or without pizzas.
The rollout starts Aug. 25. When complete on Sept. 22, Domino's will become the largest sandwich delivery company in the nation, says CEO Dave Brandon.
The move comes five months after Pizza Hut began delivering baked pasta dishes as well as pizzas.
And it will be a wake-up call for sub shops Subway and Quiznos, which find themselves competing with pizza chains.
TOSHIBA RELEASING NEW DVD PLAYER
NEW YORK — After losing out in the battle to define the high-definition successor of the DVD, Toshiba Corp. has turned its attention to the next best thing: the DVD.
Today, the Japanese electronics company is releasing a new DVD player that it says does more than previous models to improve the look of DVDs on high-definition TVs.
The XD-E500 will sell for a suggested price of $149.99, twice as much as regular "upconverting" players, which also improve the look of a DVD, but it is less than half the price of a Blu-ray player.
The Blu-ray disc, championed by Sony Corp., early this year beat out Toshiba's HD DVD to become the dominant format for high-definition discs. Toshiba has stopped making HD DVD players.
Louis Masses, director of product planning for the audio and video group at Toshiba America Consumer Products, stressed that the XD-E500 is not meant to compete with or replace Blu-ray.
BUSCH CEO MAY GET $10M CONTRACT
August Busch IV, president and CEO of Anheuser-Busch Cos., is negotiating a consulting contract that will pay him more than $10 million after the merger transaction with InBev NV is completed.
InBev, the maker of Beck's and Stella Artois, agreed to buy the Budweiser brewer for $52 billion last month in a deal that will make the Belgium-based company the world's biggest beer seller.
Busch, at the request of InBev's CEO, would advise on new products and business, review marketing programs, meet with retailers, wholesalers and advertisers, and attend media events, the filing said.
L.A. TIMES GETS NEW PUBLISHER
Former DirecTV Group Inc. CEO Eddy Hartenstein was named publisher of the Los Angeles Times, the Tribune Co. newspaper said on its Web site.
Hartenstein, 57, replaces David Hiller, who resigned on July 14, the same day Chicago-based Tribune began a round of cutbacks and seven months after real-estate billionaire Sam Zell took the company private in a buyout.
Hiller got the job after his predecessor was ousted for refusing to make newsroom cuts.
The newspaper industry is hurting because of a loss of readers and advertising dollars, with circulation at the Times dropping to 774,000 from a peak of 1.2 million in the early 1990s.
