Business briefs: Gold Crest Mines agrees to reverse acquisition
Gold Crest Mines Inc., a junior mining company in Spokane, is getting into the oil and gas business.
The company, which trades on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board, has agreed to a reverse acquisition with Amazing Energy, a privately held oil and gas exploration company from Texas. The acquisition still is underway, said Terry Dunne, Gold Crest’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Gold Crest’s name will be Amazing Energy Oil and Gas Co. The company has filed for a new trading symbol and a 40-to-1 reverse stock split.
The company’s business focus will be 70,000 acres of leases in the Permian Basin oil and gas fields in Pecos County, Texas.
Potlatch buying land in Alabama, Mississippi
Potlatch Corp. has signed a purchase agreement for 201,000 acres of timberland in Alabama and Mississippi, company officials said Monday.
The $384 million purchase from Resource Management Service LLC is expected to close late this year. The sale will nearly double Potlatch’s southern holdings of timberland, said Mike Covey, Potlatch’s chairman and chief executive officer.
The timberlands acquisition was announced with the company’s quarterly results. Spokane-based Potlatch reported net income of $33.2 million, or 81 cents per share, on revenues of $177.2 million during the third quarter. That compares to net income of $22.2 million, or 54 cents per share, on revenues of $157.9 million during the third quarter of 2013.
Higher prices for sawlogs and lumber products helped boost earnings during the quarter.
Potlatch is a real estate investment trust with 1.4 million acres of timberland in the West, Midwest and South.
Newest iPhone sends Apple sales soaring
SAN FRANCISCO – The iPhone again proved to be the engine behind Apple’s blockbuster financial performance, driving quarterly results well past expectations.
Excitement for the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus models sparked sales of 39.3 million iPhones in the last quarter – a record for the months of July through September – and made up for more disappointing sales of the company’s iPad tablets.
“Those are Picasso-like numbers,” said FBR Capital Markets analyst Daniel Ives, referring to the iPhone, which contributed $23.7 billion in sales, or more than half of the company’s $42.1 billion in quarterly revenue.
Apple said iPhone sales rose 21 percent over the same period a year earlier. By contrast, iPad revenue fell 14 percent, to $5.3 billion for the quarter. While analysts have reported an industry-wide decline in tablet sales, the iPad figures were still lower than Wall Street had expected.
The company said it expects total revenue, from all products, of between $63.5 billion and $66.5 billion during the quarter that ends in December. That suggests Apple likely will beat the expectations of analysts, who were forecasting $63.7 billion in holiday-quarter sales, according to FactSet.