New Challenges For the Fixers Of Boeing’s 787

But while airlines love how this lightweight concoction saves fuel, the recent fire on a 787 at Heathrow Airport in London provides the first test of how difficult and costly it will be to repair serious damage. It’s happening at a pivotal moment for Boeing, which is eager to show that even significant damage to a carbon-composite plane like the 787 can be repaired as quickly and effectively as in the old aluminum models. Each day a jet remains grounded costs an airline tens of thousands of dollars.

Investigators believe that the cause of the fire, a pinched wire on an emergency transmitter, was fairly mundane. But the damage was anything but. The high temperatures weakened the supports in a 10-foot stretch at the top of the rear fuselage and seared the paint on the top of the skin, causing the most extensive damage yet to one of the new Dreamliners.

Aviation experts say Boeing will cut out the damaged areas and glue or, probably, bolt a large patch, made of overlapping panels of composite materials, onto the shiny new plane, which is less than a year old. “That’s a little like ‘Phantom of the Opera,’ where the guy had this mask to cover the fact that half his face was missing,” said Hans W. Weber, an aviation consultant in San Diego.

Boeing will also need to install new composite supports, and possibly some made of stronger titanium, to hold that mask in place and shore up the structural integrity of the plane, owned by Ethiopian Airlines. If the damage were more extreme, the plane maker could remove the entire 23-foot-long barrel containing most of the jet’s rear fuselage and snap in another one, though composite experts doubt that it will do so in this case.

Boeing said it was presenting the repair options to the airline and would not discuss them publicly. Its engineers are running computer models to analyze the costs and other trade-offs, like how much the added weight from the bracing might reduce the plane’s heralded fuel savings.

Boeing executives say they have been developing the repair techniques for years, as they gradually increased the use of composite parts in other planes. And many of them are similar to the methods used with aluminum.

“We feel comfortable that we know how to address this issue and most other structural issues as they arise,” Boeing’s chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., said last week.

But some analysts seemed more skeptical, saying the fire on the Ethiopian jet raised a wild card that could make the repairs much more complicated than others on the 70 Dreamliners delivered since late 2011. Boeing said it had made smaller composite repairs on a few 787s that had been hit by lightning or bumped by airport service vehicles or mechanics’ tools.

Given how crucial the innovative jets are to Boeing’s future — it expects to sell thousands of them in the coming decades — “they will do anything at this point to show that that airplane is repairable,” said Robert Mann, an aviation consultant in Port Washington, N.Y. “We’ll know how long it takes them to fix it, but realistically, we may never know what it costs.”

The use of composite materials started on military jets and has grown steadily on commercial planes over the last several decades. Only 1 percent of the weight of Boeing’s 747 jumbo jet came from composite parts when that jet was introduced in 1969. That increased to 11 percent by 1995 on the 777, which has an all-composite tail section. Airbus, the European plane maker, has followed the same trend, using composites on the wings and upper fuselage of the double-decker A380.

Composites now account for half of the 787’s weight, which, together with more efficient engines, cut fuel consumption by 20 percent. The 787’s future rival, the A350, also has a composite fuselage.

Boeing and its suppliers build the 787’s fuselage out of long strands of carbon fiber coated with an epoxy resin. Resembling black masking tape, the strands are layered around a rotating mold by a computer-controlled robot that looks like a spider spinning a barrel-shaped web. The fuselage is built in several sections at plants in Japan, Italy and the United States, where the deafening sounds of metallic clanging have been replaced by the electrical whir of robots and automated systems.

DealBook: SoftBank Chief Is Defiant as Dish Challenges His Bid for Sprint

Yuya Shino/ReutersMasayoshi Son, the chief of SoftBank, the Japanese telecommunications company.

Earlier this month, Charles W. Ergen’s Dish Network made a bold bid to pre-empt Softbank’s $20 billion bid for Sprint Nextel with its own offer.

But SoftBank‘s outspoken chief executive, Masayoshi Son, said on Tuesday that his proposal would prevail — unmodified.

It is the first time that the Japanese telecommunications mogul has spoken out since Dish surprised many with a $25.5 billion offer for Sprint, the country’s third-biggest cellphone service provider.

Dish has said that its cash-and-stock bid for all of Sprint, valued at $7 a share, would create a new wireless titan whose phone, data and video services would rival those from Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

For now, Mr. Son insists that his proposal, a two-step process that would leave 30 percent of Sprint publicly traded, is straightforward and can be closed by mid-July. (The first part of the process, in which SoftBank invested $3.1 billion in the American company to keep it afloat, has already been competed.)

“Charlie’s proposal does not provide any new cash into the company, and it provides heavy burden of debt,” Mr. Son said in a telephone interview. “I believe our deal will go through.”

Mr. Son insisted that he was not surprised by the arrival of Mr. Ergen, who has publicly amassed a cash hoard that many assumed would finance some sort of acquisition. Though Dish had already made a play for Clearwire, Mr. Son said he guessed that the satellite-TV company had even bigger ambitions.

“My guess was right,” he said.

He repeatedly attacked Dish’s bid as unworkable and his rival’s numbers as misleading. By his own reckoning, factoring in both cost savings and potential costs like delays, SoftBank’s offer was worth $7.65 a share, while Dish’s was valued at $6.31.

Chief among Mr. Son’s criticisms was the amount of debt that the interloping offer would pile on to Sprint, which he estimated at $50 billion. In a long presentation to SoftBank’s shareholders, Mr. Son argued that his proposal would increase Sprint’s debt by three times, while Dish’s would do so by nearly six times.

“It would be prohibitively high debt,” he said.

Dish has proudly trumpeted the amount of wireless spectrum the combined company would control, but Mr. Son said that the holdings would be wastefully excessive and expensive to maintain. And it would still require spending what he estimated was $6 billion to upgrade Sprint’s network.

And Mr. Son contended that Mr. Ergen, a wily deal maker whose net worth Forbes estimates is more than $10 billion, is an amateur when it comes to the mobile industry. By contrast, he pointed repeatedly to SoftBank’s rise over the last seven years to become one of Japan’s three biggest wireless companies.

Still, much of SoftBank’s hopes are tied to Sprint’s bid to buy the remainder of Clearwire, an offer that has drawn significant shareholder opposition.

Mr. Son dismissed concerns about the proposal’s fate, saying that Sprint has not signaled any desire or need to raise its offer of $2.97 a share. The company can’t raise its bid without the blessing of its benefactor, SoftBank.

In the worst-case scenario, Sprint will raise its ownership in Clearwire to about 65 percent from 50 percent through agreements to buy out partners in the company, including Intel and Brighthouse.

Speaking of dissident investors who think Sprint’s offer is too low, Mr. Son said, “They can stay as shareholders for however long they want. We are happy with just 65 percent.”

Fair Game: A Shareholder Challenges an Occidental Petroleum Move

Or it was until mid-February, when a bit of boardroom weirdness erupted at Occidental Petroleum, the oil and gas exploration and production company based in Los Angeles and one of Mr. Romick’s holdings.

On Feb. 14, out of the blue, Occidental issued a terse, two-paragraph news release. In it, the company announced the creation of a search committee to identify possible successors for Stephen I. Chazen, the C.E.O. It was the first that shareholders had heard about replacing Mr. Chazen, and Mr. Romick said he felt that there was more to the story than Occidental stated.

Then a Wall Street Journal article pointed to boardroom intrigue at the company and suggested Mr. Chazen was being pushed out. Mr. Romick took action.

“I don’t disagree with the idea that there has to be better succession planning at the company,” Mr. Romick, 49, said last week, “but it was putting the wrong guy out to pasture.” The right guy, he contended, would have been Ray R. Irani, the executive chairman of Occidental’s board and its chief executive before Mr. Chazen for 21 years.

Dr. Irani, 78, has ignited controversy at Occidental before. When he was C.E.O., his rich compensation was criticized, and three years ago, 53 percent of Occidental shares voted at the annual meeting rejected the company’s pay policies. A group of shareholders also threatened to mount a proxy fight to oust four independent directors at the company. Afterward, in 2011, Dr. Irani stepped down as C.E.O., and Mr. Chazen took over.

The current plan is for Dr. Irani to retire altogether from the company in 2014. But when the board released its surprise succession statement regarding Mr. Chazen, some investors became concerned that removing him would allow Dr. Irani to postpone his exit. Trying to tamp down this speculation, the company in early April denied any boardroom strife and said Dr. Irani would retire next year, on schedule.

“This is not the time to ask Dr. Irani to step down,” said Dale Petroskey, a spokesman for Occidental. “He can help to ensure continuity and good execution during this period of transition.” He declined to make any board members available for comment.

Nevertheless, the boardroom imbroglio has drawn investor scrutiny to Occidental’s directors just ahead of its annual meeting on May 3 in Santa Monica, Calif. Under its bylaws, any board member who does not receive support from a majority of voted shares has to resign.

Mr. Romick is among the investors who say it’s about time that Occidental’s board is scrutinized. Its directors are among the most highly paid in corporate America: the nine current directors who served for all of 2012 received an average of $640,000 in annual compensation, most of it in stock.

Aziz D. Syriani, 71, is the lead independent director. The C.E.O. of the Olayan Group, a global trading, services and investment organization, he received stock and cash worth $879,000 last year as an Occidental director.

This year’s proxy statement says the board as a whole met five times in 2012. (The audit committee, which Mr. Syriani heads, met eight times.)

“There is no justification for what they earn,” Mr. Romick said. Moreover, the rich pay may induce directors to put managements’ interests ahead of shareholders’, he said.

Mr. Petroskey of Occidental disagrees. “Directors’ compensation is primarily based on an annual stock grant,” he said. “While the directors have not voted themselves an increase in the amount of shares awarded in the annual grant in more than a decade, the value of the grant has increased in recent years due to the very strong performance of Oxy stock.”

Then there is the lengthy tenure of Occidental’s directors — an average of 12 years. Mr. Syriani has served since 1983, which raises questions among some investors about whether his allegiances lie more with the company than with shareholders. As an April 7 research report by Deutsche Bank noted, under governance guidelines in Britain, such longevity would deem the Occidental board “not independent.”

Mr. Petroskey noted that the New York Stock Exchange, where the company’s shares trade, has no such measure of independence. “There are advantages to having a long-serving director with deep knowledge of the company and its operations,” he said. “The board is united under Mr. Syriani’s leadership on continuing to make the difficult but necessary decisions to move this company toward a strong future.”

Challenges Facing New Chief of Anglo American

Anglo American on Tuesday said Mr. Cutifani, the chief executive of the South African gold producer AngloGold Ashanti, would succeed Cynthia Carroll as chief executive in April. Ms. Carroll announced her resignation from the company in November after more than five years in the job.

The appointment of Mr. Cutifani won the approval of some analysts. They said he had the operational experience to improve earnings by reducing costs and increasing production, and the political connections in South Africa to be able to navigate contentious topics like the reduction of mining jobs.

The questions are whether Anglo American’s powerful board of directors will allow him to push through his strategy and whether he will have enough time to do so before its distressed share price makes it a takeover target, said Paul Gait of Bernstein Research.

Mr. Cutifani has the “operating capability and he speaks very comfortably around technical issues at mining,” Mr. Gait said. But “is he going to have the license to do what he wants to do?”

The list of Anglo American’s challenges has grown in recent years. Minas-Rio, a large iron ore project in Brazil and one of Ms. Carroll’s initiatives, is struggling with rising costs and delays because of licensing problems. In South Africa, the company has been affected by strikes over pay and working conditions. The activities, which had halted production, escalated in August when 34 miners died after the police opened fire at Lonmin’s Marikana mine.

Anglo American also embarked on a review of its platinum business, which accounts for about 40 percent of global production but faces increasing costs, including wages. Shrinking the business might be welcomed by investors and analysts but would undoubtedly stir some political objection. As the largest supplier of platinum, Anglo American is an important employer in South Africa, which has the world’s largest reserves of platinum. The company is to present the results of its review in coming weeks.

Faced with a share price lagging behind that of rivals, some shareholders have demanded Anglo American separate its South African business. Anglo would not be the first company to consider such a move. In November, GoldFields said it would spin off its South African operation, partly because recent strikes had made it more costly.

But analysts at Credit Suisse say the appointment of Mr. Cutifani makes a breakup less likely.

“With his strong operational and South African background, his appointment likely means a commitment to South Africa remains,” a group of Credit Suisse analysts wrote in a note to investors.

In a statement, Mr. Cutifani said Tuesday that he was “delighted to have the opportunity to lead Anglo American at this important stage in its journey, to unlock the company’s very considerable value potential.”

Mr. Cutifani became chief executive at AngloGold in 2007; before that he was chief operating officer of the Canadian nickel company CVRD Inco. He is also president of South Africa’s Chamber of Mines, an industry group.

At AngloGold, Mr. Cutifani is credited with improving the company’s performance despite a raft of problems in the South African gold sector in general and AngloGold in particular.

For years workers have demanded higher-than-inflation pay raises, and the mines must go deeper and deeper to find gold. He successfully fought to keep cost increases within a manageable range. Last year he used the bully pulpit of the Chamber of Mines to help coordinate the sector’s response to South Africa’s labor challenges.

Mr. Cutifani accelerated the company’s development of mines outside South Africa to reduce its exposure to the country. Among investors he is also known for ridding AngloGold of a disastrous book of hedge contracts that it had inherited from a merger. Liquidating the hedge book strained the company’s finances for a period, but later allowed the company to reap higher gains from gold.

AngloGold and Anglo American share a common history. AngloGold was spun off from Anglo American in 2005. Anglo American was once South Africa’s largest conglomerate and the source of the fortunes of the country’s Oppenheimer family.

AngloGold said Tuesday that it had started a formal search to replace Mr. Cutifani. Srinivasan Venkatakrishnan, the firm’s finance chief, and Tony O’Neill, vice president for business and technical development, were named as joint interim chief executives.

William MacNamara contributed reporting.