Bits Blog: Makers of Paper Ask Facebook to Change Its New App Name

‘Smart TVs’ Are Next Bet for Makers as Sales Languish

Crisp, high-definition TVs as big as 50 diagonal inches can be had for a few hundred dollars. Why bother upgrading or paying more for a fancy new one? Many people don’t. And if you spend much of your time watching streaming video on a tablet or phone, paying for a better TV seems even more pointless. So for several years now, TV sales have been lackluster.

Electronics manufacturers, though, are not losing hope. And at the 47th International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, scheduled to open on Monday, they will show how they intend to attract more customers. In many cases, it will be by offering so-called smart TVs that can connect to the Internet and run apps.

“Consumers are telling us they’re more interested in connected” televisions, said Benjamin Arnold, an analyst at the NPD Group, the research firm.

For example, at the show, Roku, the manufacturer known for making set-top boxes that include Netflix streaming, will announce designs for integrating its streaming media service directly into television sets. Two Chinese manufacturers, Hisense and TCL, will make the first products based on the designs. Roku, which is based in Saratoga, Calif., will show six television set models at the show with its service built in, said Anthony Wood, the company’s chief executive.

Mr. Wood says Roku is in a position to make a smarter television than others in the industry. He said most TV set makers do not have the resources to make smart televisions with a broad selection of content, partly because many media companies do not want to create versions of their apps for all the different smart TVs on the market. By contrast, there are already more than 1,200 apps available for Roku, including HBO Go, Netflix, Vudu and others, he said.

“Our strategy is to be the dominant platform on the big screen,” Mr. Wood said in an interview.

Samsung, the No. 1 TV manufacturer in the world, is also bullish about Internet-connected TVs. This year more than 75 percent of Samsung TVs will be smart TVs, said Joe Stinziano, an executive vice president for home entertainment at Samsung Electronics America.

But Samsung, like other television makers, is covering its bases by also trying to grab consumers’ attention with flashy new features for the old-fashioned set. The manufacturers have been introducing these kinds of features for a while now to little avail; last year’s crop of sets offered the ability to watch content in 3-D and included screens with quadruple the pixels. Yet shipments of sets last year were down, and with little content to watch, 3-D TVs are a failure so far.

In the United States, sales of Ultra HD TVs in the 12 months that ended in November accounted for less than 1 percent of overall sales of televisions 40 inches or larger. Nonetheless, this year, Samsung is emphasizing curved high-definition TVs, including a high-end 105-inch Ultra HD TV with a curved display.

The slightly concave screen cuts down on reflections from ambient lighting, like the ceiling lights in a living room, for example. It also allows people who are sitting off to the sides, away from the central sweet spot, to get a better viewing experience, Mr. Stinziano said.

“Your eye is curved and this TV is also curved,” he said. “It’s a much more natural feeling.”

Other TV makers like LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba and Sony will also showcase their big-screen Ultra HD TVs at the electronics show this week.

Out of all the TV makers’ tricks, smart TVs appear to be gaining some traction. In the year that ended in November, 22 percent of televisions sold in the United States were Internet-connected TVs, compared with 11 percent in the previous year, according to NPD.

DealBook: Verizon-Vodafone Deal Would Be a Big Payday for Deal Makers

F.D.A. Rule Could Open Generic Drug Makers to Suits

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday signaled its intention to permit generic drug makers to make changes to their safety labels, a move that could open the door to lawsuits against generic drug companies for the first time since a Supreme Court decision barred such suits two years ago.

Consumer advocates applauded the development, calling it a necessary fix for a system that they say is unfair to patients who take generic medicines.

“It’s common sense,” said Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, a senior adviser to the Health Research Group at Public Citizen, which in 2011 petitioned the F.D.A. to pass just such a rule. “It will obviously end this situation where people are being harmed physically and yet, although they are harmed, they have no right to go into court and get redress for serious damages.”

Dozens of lawsuits against generic drug manufacturers have been dismissed since 2011, when the Supreme Court ruled that because the generic companies must, by law, use the same label warnings as their brand name counterparts they cannot be sued for failing to alert patients about the risks of taking their drugs. Last month, the Supreme Court ruled — on similar grounds — that patients also may not sue generic drug makers by claiming that the drug was defectively designed.

The F.D.A.’s intentions came in the form of a bureaucratic step in which the agency must notify the Office of Management and Budget of its plans to publish a proposed new rule. In a summary posted Wednesday on the budget office’s Web site, the F.D.A. said the proposed rule would “create parity” between generic and brand-name drug makers with respect to how they update their labels — the lengthy list of a drug’s uses, dosages and risks.

Under the current system, brand-name manufacturers can change the label if they receive important new information about their drug. If the F.D.A. agrees that the label change is necessary, the generic manufacturers of the drug must also change their labels. The rule change could also allow generic manufacturers to change their labels if they became aware of safety concerns, which could make them liable if a court were to find they failed to warn patients about potential harms.

“It is a first step toward acknowledging that there is a problem with the current system,” said Michael Johnson, a lawyer who represented Gladys Mensing, one of the patients who sued generic drug companies in the 2011 Supreme Court case, Pliva v. Mensing. “It doesn’t make sense to have one set of rules for the name brand and another set of rules for the generics.”

Sandy Walsh, an F.D.A. spokeswoman, noted that the agency had said before that it was considering such a rule change. “It is premature to cite what changes in the regulations might be,” she said in an e-mail. “Discussions are under way.”

The Generic Pharmaceutical Association, an industry group, declined to comment on Wednesday. In the past, generic drug companies have argued against such a change, saying that it could create a chaotic situation in which several different labels existed for the same drug.

Jay Lefkowitz, the lawyer who represented the generic drug makers in both Supreme Court cases, said in an e-mail, “We will obviously look very carefully at whatever the F.D.A. proposes, if in fact it ends up proposing any change at all.”

The notice posted Wednesday indicates the agency’s intent to publish a proposed rule by September, when the public would be asked to comment.

2 Infant Formula Makers to Cut Prices After China Starts an Investigation

Wyeth Nutrition, which Nestlé bought last year, said this week that it had been cooperating with the investigation by the National Development and Reform Commission of China and was responding by cutting prices and improving sales and marketing practices.

Danone, which has also acknowledged that its Dumex unit was cooperating with the Chinese commission, said in an e-mail statement that it was preparing a price cut proposal with details to be disclosed later.

Both companies, along with Mead Johnson Nutrition and Abbott Laboratories, said earlier this week that they were being investigated by the Chinese commission.

In a statement, Wyeth Nutrition said it “decided to implement a price reduction” of products from July 8 through 2014. “The average reduction will be at 11 percent, with the biggest single product price reduction at 20 percent.”

The company said it would not raise prices on any new products over the next year. Wyeth did not give any further details.

Analysts said the investigation could result in fines and tougher rules governing imports into an infant milk market expected to grow to $25 billion by 2017. The firms could face fines ranging from 1 percent to 10 percent of their annual sales, the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted experts as saying.

Some analysts see the inquiry as possibly part of a broader Chinese plan to increase consumption of local infant-milk products. Mothers turned away from Chinese milk powder in 2008 when infant formula tainted with the industrial compound melamine killed at least six babies and made thousands sick with kidney stones.

China has since made efforts to crack down on persistent food safety problems that have included chemical-laced pork and infant milk contaminated with cancer-causing agents.

Some Chinese producers of infant formulas have started forming partnerships with foreign companies to try to increase brand recognition and gain technical expertise.

Foreign brands may also soon have to rely on their Chinese partners if they want greater access to the Chinese market. The Chinese government has expressed an interest in bringing the supply chain under the control of Chinese firms as part of its goal of reducing the number of local infant formula producers to 10 from more than 200 within two years.

Aircraft Makers Shy Away From Risky Bets in Building New Planes

Boeing’s announcement last week that it had begun pitching airlines on an enhanced version of its 777 jet, rather than a whole new plane, underscores how the aerospace industry is pulling back from the risky bets that have led to costly, and humbling, delays on other planes, like Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.

Instead of following the Dreamliner template, in which it sought to create a revolutionary plane brimming with new technology, Boeing is now seeking a safer, more incremental path. It plans to add the most crucial new technologies, like lightweight plastic composite wings and more fuel-efficient engines, to the 777, while avoiding the time and expense of designing a replacement from scratch.

Airbus, too, has expressed concern about the “go for broke” mentality that prompted Boeing to fill the Dreamliner with novel features, including a greater use of composites and a more advanced electrical system to increase the fuel savings.

After smoke and fire erupted from the new lithium-ion batteries on two 787s in January, forcing the grounding of the entire fleet, Airbus dropped its plans to use the volatile batteries on its new A350 jets and went back to more tried-and-true ones.

“Risk, risk, risk,” Tom Enders, the chief of Airbus’s parent company, European Aeronautic Defense and Space, said of Boeing’s approach to the Dreamliner.

Mr. Enders said Airbus had made similar mistakes in designing some of the components on its latest planes. “It’s pushing the technology envelope and not always taking enough care that the technologies were mature when we put them on an aircraft,” he said. “And that doesn’t benefit the customer, obviously.”

Aviation analysts said Boeing had to make a technological leap with the Dreamliner over the last decade to again surpass Airbus in total plane sales, just as it now has to upgrade the 777, its long-range workhorse, to counter a new challenge from the A350.

But while Boeing needed to take radical steps, like molding the entire fuselage of the Dreamliner out of the plastic composites to cut fuel costs by 20 percent, it can achieve similar fuel savings on the 777 by using advanced engines and adding huge composite wings to a metal frame.

The prospect of gaining such savings with a more cautious approach delights both the airlines and Boeing’s investors, who would love to see it complete the development process without the kind of white-knuckle ride — or the extra billions in cash — that the Dreamliner required.

W. James McNerney Jr., Boeing’s chief executive, said recently that “we all remember the times of fighting through the 787 development where the technologies weren’t quite as mature as we hoped they’d be.” He said the company’s strategy in updating the larger 777, and creating two additional versions of the 787, was to “harvest some hard-fought gains” in that technology without taking such big risks.

Mr. McNerney said the new version of the 777, which is still subject to final approval by Boeing’s board, would include much more substantial improvements than most planes derived from existing ones and could be ready by the end of the decade. “So I think we may be in an era where we can absorb somewhat less risk and still deliver a lot of performance,” he added.

The company’s plans for the updated 777, known as the 777X, are also significant because it could be the last new model that Boeing builds before the 2030s. And the updating is not risk-free: advances in engine technology can prove difficult, and the composite wings on the new 777 will be wider and more complicated to fabricate than those on the 787.

Boeing’s efforts to seek advance orders for the plane will also set off an intense new phase in its rivalry with Airbus, one determined more by how efficiently each company can produce the planes than their visions.

“Airbus squandered a decade on the A380,” a gigantic jet that has had disappointing sales, said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va. Boeing, he added, lost the advantage with its troubles on the 787. With the A350, which also has a composite body and wings, he said, “what’s important is that Airbus is catching up.”

Justices to Take Up Case on Generic Drug Makers’ Liability

The injuries that Karen Bartlett suffered after taking a mild pain pill are enough to make anyone squeamish.

Ms. Bartlett, who lives in Plaistow, N.H., developed a rare but severe reaction to the anti-inflammatory drug sulindac after a doctor prescribed it to treat shoulder pain in 2004. Within weeks of taking the drug, her skin began to slough off until nearly two-thirds of it was gone.

She spent almost two months in a burn unit, and months more in a medically induced coma. The reaction permanently damaged her lungs and esophagus and rendered her legally blind.

Ms. Bartlett sued Mutual Pharmaceutical Company, which made the drug she took, a generic pill, arguing that the drug’s design was dangerous and defective. During her trial in 2010 in Federal District Court in Concord, N.H., her burn surgeon described her experience as “hell on earth,” and a jury awarded her $21 million. An appeals court upheld the verdict.

“I wouldn’t want anybody to go through what I went through,” Ms. Bartlett said in a recent interview. “It was horrible. And this medication that I took, sulindac, I don’t think it should be prescribed.”

Now, in a case that is being closely watched by pharmaceutical companies, federal regulators and others, the Supreme Court will hear arguments this month on whether Mutual can be held responsible for Ms. Bartlett’s injuries. The outcome is likely to further clarify the legal recourse for patients who take generic drugs, which now account for 80 percent of all prescriptions in the United States.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court severely limited the conditions under which consumers of generic drugs could sue the manufacturers, ruling in Pliva v. Mensing that such companies did not have control over what warning labels said and therefore could not be sued for not alerting patients to the risks of taking their drugs.

Ms. Bartlett’s case is slightly different because she did not argue that the drug’s warning label was inadequate. She claimed that the drug itself was defective. But Mutual has contended that the rationale is the same since, like the label, it has no control over the drug’s design.

Under federal law, generic companies are not allowed to deviate from the brand-name drug they are copying. Sulindac is the scientific name for Clinoril, a drug similar to ibuprofen that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1978 and is sold by Merck. Like ibuprofen, sulindac is in a class of drugs known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or Nsaids, which are in widespread use.

Mutual is appealing a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, that upheld the jury verdict and argued that even if Mutual could not have changed the drug’s design, it had no obligation to continue selling a defective product and could have taken the drug off the market. Mutual is a subsidiary of Sun Pharmaceutical of India.

Interest groups on both sides say any decision could have serious consequences.

If the court agrees with Mutual and rules that generic companies cannot be sued for defective products, trial lawyers warn that patients will be left with very few options if they are injured by a generic drug.

“The question becomes, can you sue a generic manufacturer for anything?” said Bill Curtis, a Dallas lawyer who specializes in pharmaceutical cases.

But manufacturers of generic drugs and other business groups have said that if the court sides with Ms. Bartlett, the decisions of individual juries could trump the authority of federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration and potentially lead drug makers to remove valuable medicines from the market. The federal government has sided with the generic drug makers in this case even though it opposed the industry in the Mensing case.

“Tort judgments second-guessing F.D.A.’s expert drug safety determination would undermine the federal regime to the extent that they forbade or significantly restricted the marketing of an F.D.A.-approved drug,” the government wrote in its brief to the court.

Keith M. Jensen, Ms. Bartlett’s lawyer, disputed this argument, saying, “that presumes the F.D.A. always has all the information and that drug companies never have incentive to hide it from them.” He said lawsuits like Ms. Bartlett’s could uncover new information about the safety of a drug.

In the case of sulindac, he presented evidence at trial that patients taking the drug were more at risk of developing the condition that Ms. Bartlett contracted, known as toxic epidermal necrolysis, a severe form of a related condition called Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, than those taking other, similar pain drugs. The conditions can be set off by a negative reaction to many drugs, but only rarely.

It is difficult to estimate how common the reactions are because some contend they are underreported, but one recent review of medical literature found that fewer than a handful of people out of a million users of Nsaids would be affected.

Like all Nsaids, sulindac carried a notice on its label that patients could develop Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. But in 2005, after Ms. Bartlett’s reaction, the F.D.A. required that all manufacturers of Nsaids strengthen their labels by specifically listing the risk of developing the skin reactions in the “Warnings” section of the label. That same year, Pfizer removed the pain drug Bextra from the market after the F.D.A. warned that patients were at a heightened risk for developing Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and other skin reactions.

In its brief, the federal government disputed the conclusion that sulindac was unsafe, saying the F.D.A. had reviewed the drug and determined that it could remain on the market.

Ms. Bartlett said that before her injury she was independent, active and loved her job as a secretary at an insurance company. In 2004, she visited her doctor because her shoulder hurt, and he prescribed Clinoril. The pharmacist dispensed a generic version of the drug.

Today, Ms. Bartlett is 53 and legally blind despite 13 eye operations. She said she struggled to reach the mailbox each day and could no longer drive or work. Her lungs are severely damaged, and she has trouble eating.

To her, it makes no difference who made the drug she took. “I think the generic companies as well as brand-name companies, they should be held accountable for the medicines that they put out there,” she said.

Legislation Aims to Undo Limits on Gun Makers' Liability

President Obama's plan to use his executive authority to prevent gun violence came on the heels of proposed legislation intended to give more power to gunshot victims after the fact.

Drug Makers Losing a Bid to Foil Generic Painkillers

In coming months, generic drug producers are expected to introduce cheaper versions of OxyContin and Opana, two long-acting narcotic painkillers, or opioids, that are widely abused.

But in hopes of delaying the move to generics, the makers of the brand name drugs, Purdue Pharma and Endo Pharmaceuticals, have introduced versions that are more resistant to crushing or melting, techniques abusers use to release the pills’ narcotic payloads.

The two drug makers, which say they are motivated not by profit but by public safety, have also been waging a multifront political and legal war to block sales of generics that are not tamper-resistant.

The companies argue that the older designs will feed street demand for strong painkillers, drugs that are involved in more than 15,000 overdose-related deaths a year. While some experts say the new tamper-resistant products are not a cure-all for the abuse problem, others say they represent an important step forward.

“I think it would be a shame if the government would allow generics to come in without any tamper-resistant properties,” said Dr. Lynn R. Webster, a specialist in Salt Lake City who has consulted with companies developing such safeguards. Over the last year, Purdue Pharma and Endo have backed legislation in Congress that would require many opioids to be tamper-resistant, and lobbied in favor of similar state laws.

They have also urged the Food and Drug Administration to give their tamper-resistant designs a stamp of safety approval that other manufacturers would have to match. The agency does not currently differentiate between drugs that have abuse-resistant qualities and those that do not.

Thus far, the companies’ efforts have failed. In mid-December, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit by Endo that would have blocked the F.D.A. from allowing generic versions of its drug, Opana, to go on sale in January. A recent effort by some doctors and local officials in Canada to deter sales of generic versions of OxyContin there fell flat. While companies like Purdue Pharma insist the public’s health is their main concern, others note that producers introduced tamper-resistant versions of their products just as the drugs were about to lose patent protection. In court papers filed in response to Endo’s lawsuit, the F.D.A. described the company’s action as a “thinly veiled attempt to maintain its market share and block generic competition.”

An F.D.A. official, Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton, said the agency expected to issue guidance this month that would lay out the types of scientific data that drug producers would have to submit to support a claim that an opioid’s design or formulation helped to deter its abuse.

Companies are developing a variety of methods to do that. The new OxyContin pill turns into a gummy mass when an abuser crushes it, and the Opana pill is designed to break into large pieces when manipulated. Other methods include pills that contain a second drug reversing the opioid’s narcotic effects if taken inappropriately.

“We understand the value in developing appropriate abuse-resistant technology and we want to find a way of incentivizing that,” said Dr. Throckmorton, the F.D.A.’s deputy director for regulatory programs. “But we also understand the value of generics for patients.”

A study published in 2012 in a medical journal, The Journal of Pain, found that the percentage of people treated at drug-abuse clinics who reported abusing OxyContin fell significantly since the introduction of the tamper-resistant version.

Some of those abusers said they had switched to other long-acting opioids that were easier to abuse like Opana — before its reformulation — or to illicit drugs like heroin, according to the study, which was financed by Purdue Pharma.

But the generic versions of OxyContin and Opana are expected to be significantly cheaper than the tamper-resistant versions of those drugs. At time of introduction in late 2010, the price of the new version of OxyContin was about $6 per 40 milligram tablet, the same then as the price that was not tamper-resistant. Since then, the price of the new version has risen to about $6.80 for that strength tablet. Opana costs about the same amount for a pill of the same pain-killing strength.

Antivirus Makers Work on Software to Catch Malware More Effectively

Consumers and businesses spend billions of dollars every year on antivirus software. But these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses, experts say, because the virus creators move too quickly. That is prompting start-ups and other companies to get creative about new approaches to computer security.

“The bad guys are always trying to be a step ahead,” said Matthew D. Howard, a venture capitalist at Norwest Venture Partners who previously set up the security strategy at Cisco Systems. “And it doesn’t take a lot to be a step ahead.”

Computer viruses used to be the domain of digital mischief makers. But in the mid-2000s, when criminals discovered that malicious software could be profitable, the number of new viruses began to grow exponentially.

In 2000, there were fewer than a million new strains of malware, most of them the work of amateurs. By 2010, there were 49 million new strains, according to AV-Test, a German research institute that tests antivirus products.

The antivirus industry has grown as well, but experts say it is falling behind. By the time its products are able to block new viruses, it is often too late. The bad guys have already had their fun, siphoning out a company’s trade secrets, erasing data or emptying a consumer’s bank account.

A new study by Imperva, a data security firm in Redwood City, Calif., and students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is the latest confirmation of this. Amichai Shulman, Imperva’s chief technology officer, and a group of researchers collected and analyzed 82 new computer viruses and put them up against more than 40 antivirus products, made by top companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Kaspersky Lab. They found that the initial detection rate was less than 5 percent.

On average, it took almost a month for antivirus products to update their detection mechanisms and spot the new viruses. And two of the products with the best detection rates — Avast and Emsisoft — are available free; users are encouraged to pay for additional features. This despite the fact that consumers and businesses spent a combined $7.4 billion on antivirus software last year — nearly half of the $17.7 billion spent on security software in 2011, according to Gartner.

“Existing methodologies we’ve been protecting ourselves with have lost their efficacy,” said Ted Schlein, a security-focused investment partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “This study is just another indicator of that. But the whole concept of detecting what is bad is a broken concept.”

Part of the problem is that antivirus products are inherently reactive. Just as medical researchers have to study a virus before they can create a vaccine, antivirus makers must capture a computer virus, take it apart and identify its “signature” — unique signs in its code — before they can write a program that removes it.

That process can take as little as a few hours or as long as several years. In May, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered Flame, a complex piece of malware that had been stealing data from computers for an estimated five years.

Mikko H. Hypponen, chief researcher at F-Secure, called Flame “a spectacular failure” for the antivirus industry. “We really should have been able to do better,” he wrote in an essay for Wired.com after Flame’s discovery. “But we didn’t. We were out of our league in our own game.”

Symantec and McAfee, which built their businesses on antivirus products, have begun to acknowledge their limitations and to try new approaches. The word “antivirus” does not appear once on their home pages. Symantec rebranded its popular antivirus packages: its consumer product is now called Norton Internet Security, and its corporate offering is now Symantec Endpoint Protection.

“Nobody is saying antivirus is enough,” said Kevin Haley, Symantec’s director of security response. Mr. Haley said Symantec’s antivirus products included a handful of new technologies, like behavior-based blocking, which looks at some 30 characteristics of a file, including when it was created and where else it has been installed, before allowing it to run. “In over two-thirds of cases, malware is detected by one of these other technologies,” he said.

DealBook: The Triumphs and Failures of Deal Makers in 2012

Harry Campbell

It is time to award the Deal Professor A’s, the grade for the best deals and deal makers of 2012. Unfortunately, there were also a large number of F’s this year. Here is the top and bottom of the class, in alphabetical order:

APPLE-AUTHENTEC Apple showed its secretive side, forbidding a $358 million acquisition, AuthenTec, from announcing the deal through a news release or any other public communication other than a brief statement in a securities filing. Apple also negotiated a “crown jewel” lockup with AuthenTec that scared off other potential bidders by giving the electronics maker the option to license almost all of AuthenTec’s useful technology if another company acquired AuthenTec instead. Apple’s heavy hand earns it an F.

BURGER KING Burger King receives an A by going public not through an initial public offering but by selling itself to a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, co-founded by William Ackman’s hedge fund Pershing Square. Burger King showed that SPAC’s can be an alternative to a public offering for even large companies. According to SPAC Analytics, a research service, seven new SPAC’s were announced this last year, raising a combined total of $362 million. Not bad for a structure thought to be dead after the financial crisis.

CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY’S PROXY CONTEST Mr. Ackman earns another A by bringing large-scale activist investing to Canada and shaking up the clubby investment community there. Canadian Pacific’s board of old-line Canadians viewed him as a barbarian at the gate and resisted to the bitter end. But the company’s shareholders preferred Mr. Ackman’s money to high society. It is now trading around its all-time high, much better than J. C. Penney, another investment by Mr. Ackman, which has performed poorly.

CHINACAST EDUCATION Perhaps the saddest deal story of the year. Ned L. Sherwood won a proxy contest with the ChinaCast Education Corporation, an education company based in China that is incorporated in the United States, but the ousted executives subsequently transferred all the company’s valuable Asian assets, leaving Mr. Sherwood and the public shareholders with nothing but a lawsuit in China. The deal highlighted the risks of investing in Chinese companies.

Elliot Associates/Argentina The hedge fund and its cohorts earn an A for clever legal arguments and wrangling intended to force Argentina to pay off the country’s defaulted bonds. While it remains to be seen if the fund will succeed, along the way it has managed to seize an Argentinian frigate in Ghana and made the “pari-passu” clause a conversation topic, while also raising fears the sovereign debt market would be thrown into chaos.

GEORGIA GULF-WESTLAKE CHEMICAL Georgia Gulf’s response to Westlake Chemical’s unsolicited offer was, drop dead. Georgia Gulf subsequently agreed to buy the commodity chemical business of PPG Industry for $2.1 billion, and its stock price soared, thus earning Georgia Gulf’s board an A. A number of other boards were also smart to just say no to hostile bids, including Prestige Brands’ rejection of an amateurish offer from the Mexican pharmaceutical company Genomma Lab Internacional.

HERTZ-DOLLAR THRIFTY It was a deal over two years in the making and it survived an initial shareholder rejection and a competing bid by Avis Budget Group. Hertz Global Holdings this year finally obtained antitrust clearance to buy Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group for $87.50 a share. In its first incarnation, Hertz had agreed to pay about $41 a share, meaning that Dollar Thrifty shareholders not only win an A, but a huge premium for waiting.

THE HEWLETT-PACKARD AND YAHOO BOARDS It wasn’t really a good year for either board but after years of F’s, they each escape with an incomplete. The Yahoo board first resisted, and then capitulated, to a bout of shareholder activism by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund. The board and executive suite have been cleaned out. The question now is whether the new chief executive, Marissa Mayer, will earn her $117 million pay package and, alongside the new board, can turn things around.

As for Hewlett-Packard, I can only shake my head. The H.P. board had already been buffeted by scandal, including the firing of Mark Hurd as chief executive and naming Léo Apotheker as a replacement without meeting him. Then came the news that Mr. Apotheker’s acquisition of Autonomy was being written off to the tune of $8.8 billion. But most of this happened before the board had largely turned over. It still remains to be seen if the new chief, Meg Whitman, and her board can make H.P. a Rocky-like comeback story.

KENNETH COLE The stock market correction in May and April let Kenneth Cole, another designer with a big ownership interest (like Millard S. Drexler at J. Crew, a recipient of an F two years ago) take his company private. Mr. Cole had to bump up his initial offer by only a quarter, earning him an F but keeping him very, very rich.

MULTIPLE BIDDER DEALS One of the more interesting developments this year was the emergence of multiple buyers willing to work together to split assets. Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca, two strategic bidders, partnered to buy and split Amylin Pharmaceuticals 50-50. Similarly, Collective Brands was sold to three bidders, Wolverine World Wide, Golden Gate Capital and Blum Capital Partners, who divided the company’s multiple shoe and clothing brands. (It was named Collective Brands for a reason.)

Both deals raised complex issues of bidder relationships, and Bristol-Myers and AstraZeneca, in particular, were able to win a hot auction. For navigating these difficulties, the buyers get an A for teamwork.

NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE European regulators thwarted a tie-up of Deutsche Börse and NYSE Euronext, shutting down a deal that would have relocated an American institution to Europe. But the A goes for persistence, since last week NYSE agreed to sell itself to the IntercontinentalExchange, thus saving a dying business model.

QUEST SOFTWARE The board of Quest Software wins the shareholder appreciation award and an A for its laserlike focus on shareholder value. Quest had agreed to a takeover by the private equity firm Insight Venture Partners and Quest’s chief executive, Vincent Smith. This would typically end the matter, as an announcement of a management buyout tends to scare away other bidders.

So when Dell showed interest, a special committee of the Quest board gave Dell an incentive to make a competing bid by agreeing to issue an option that would let it acquire a 19.9 percent stake to offset Mr. Smith’s 34 percent stake. This was to help ensure that the highest bidder won. Dell ended up paying more than 20 percent above what Insight and Mr. Smith had offered.

RAILAMERICA-GENESEE & WYOMING Have a problem with your regulator clearing the deal? The two railroads earn an A for problem-solving. Genesee & Wyoming closed the deal by buying RailAmerica and placing it into a trust pending approval of the Surface Transportation Board.

RALCORP It took two public acquisition offers before ConAgra was able to win over Ralcorp. Between the second and third offers, Ralcorp had consummated a value-creating spinoff of its Post cereals division. It gets an A for value creation.

VENOCO Timothy Marquez, chairman and chief executive of Venoco, a California oil company, was able to acquire his publicly traded company with favorable terms and no financing lined up, without resistance from the board. Mr. Marquez did manage to find his financing and complete the acquisition, and in doing so, imitated Tilman J. Fertitta, who took years to take private his own company, Landry’s Restaurants. (Mr. Fertitta earned an F from me for that effort, too.) The board of Venoco earns an F.

Speaking of Mr. Fertitta, he was also busy this year, with Landry’s buying McCormick & Schmick’s, at a price 5 percent lower than his initial bid, as well as Morton’s Steakhouse.

Happy New Year! Eat fish!

Europe Fines Electronics Makers $1.92 Billion

Senior managers at some of the world’s largest electronics companies often used those meetings, mostly in Asia, to fix the price of picture and display tubes for televisions and computer screens, the top European antitrust regulator said Wednesday.

Joaquín Almunia, the E.U. competition commissioner, said he would levy fines totaling almost €1.5 billion, or $1.96 billion, on seven companies involved in the two cartels, which operated for a decade until 2006. Combined, the fines amount to the largest single penalty for price fixing ever imposed by the commission.

The action follows a spate of similar cases in the glass and display sectors, where bulky cathode ray tubes have been supplanted by technologies like liquid crystal display and plasma that allow manufacturers to build far more compact monitors and screens.

Mr. Almunia imposed the strongest penalties on Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and LG Electronics of South Korea.

Mr. Almunia said at a news conference that the cartel activity began in the late 1990s, when the market was still strong for cathode ray tubes, and lasted until 2006 even as that market declined, allowing the conspirators to continue generating strong returns for a technology that was rapidly becoming outmoded.

“The companies were trying to manage through collusion the decline in the market for these kinds of tubes,” Mr. Almunia said. “The undue profits that the companies derived from the collusion may even have artificially slowed down the transition to the more modern products like LCD and plasma displays.”

Excerpts of minutes from meetings held by the cartel members obtained during the investigation showed the efforts they made to fix the market for the older technologies, according to commission officials.

“Producers need to avoid price competition through controlling their production capacity (of flat types in particular),” one excerpt read. Another noted that “mutual cooperation is required to deal with an expected economic downturn” in the second half of 2002.

One of the “greens meetings” took place at the Palm Garden Golf Club and was followed by a “Top Management” meeting in the Terengganu room of a Marriott Hotel, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who asked not to be named because of the legal sensitivity of the case.

The person gave no further details about the location or the meeting. But those details suggested that the conspirators played and ate during the day at a luxury golfing resort near the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur that is equipped with a driving range, infinity-edge swimming pool and tennis courts.

In addition to the “greens meetings,” there were “glass meetings” for lower-level managers, the name probably related to the glass structure of the cathode ray tubes, officials said. They were held in Asia and in European cities including Glasgow, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam and Budapest, commission officials said.

The cartels “feature all the worst kinds of anti-competitive behavior that are strictly forbidden to companies doing business in Europe,” Mr. Almunia said. There had been “serious harm” to producers in Europe and to consumers, he said, since the cathode ray tubes had accounted for up to 70 percent of the price of screens.

The commission’s antitrust division can fine offenders up to 10 percent of their annual worldwide sales, and the fine on Wednesday exceeded the previous record of almost €1.4 billion, which was imposed in 2008, for a car-glass cartel.

But unlike regulators in the United States, the commission has no criminal enforcement powers and cannot prosecute or seek to jail participants for anti-competitive offenses. Many lawyers say that remains a shortcoming of the European system.