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Touch America plans layoffs
BUTTE (AP) – Touch America is planning to announce 75 layoffs and a pay cut for top executives because of ailing finances, The Montana Standard reported late Wednesday.
Associated Press Billings Gazette
The newspaper said employees were told in a memo about the impending announcement, but company officials would neither confirm nor deny the report.
"I can’t say anything until the conference call tomorrow," company spokesman Cort Freeman told the newspaper Wednesday night.
The Butte-based telecom, formerly the Montana Power Co., has hundreds of employees in several states. Its largest concentration of workers, about 200, is in Butte.
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Touch America, which operates a fiber-optic cable system and provides broadband and Internet services to customers, is expected to announce its third-quarter earnings Thursday, with the conference call scheduled for 11:30 a.m.
In February, Touch America became a standalone company after the sale of its remaining Montana Power assets – the transmission and distribution system – to South Dakota-based NorthWestern Energy.
The company’s stock has been creeping upward recently and closed at 61 cents a share Wednesday. On Oct. 31, the stock closed at a low of 44 cents.
Montana Power’s stock reached a high of $65.75 in March 2000. When MPC began trading as Touch America last Feb. 15, the price was $3.83.
The New York Stock Exchange has notified Touch America that it no longer complies with the minimum standards to be listed on the Big Board. The NYSE requires companies to keep their stock value above $1, and Touch America dropped below that minimum on July 31, meaning that the company could be delisted.
Touch America is the focus of several pending lawsuits.
The first shareholders’ lawsuit brought by Montana lawyers alleges that the transformation to Touch America was illegal because executives didn’t get approval by investors. Subsequent lawsuits, including one filed jointly by law firms in Arkansas and New York, charge Touch America managers with misrepresenting the company’s financial position to investors.
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Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.
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