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Coffee Talk (Sara/Mana edition)
Chinais loss, Sarasotais gain
Sarasotais DNAPrint genomics has a new neighbor and player in the local biotech industry. The sign at 930 Cocoanut Ave. announces it is the future home of Worldwide Biotech and Pharmaceutical Co.
George Frudakis, the buildingis owner, and his son, Tony, recently bought the China-based company and are relocating it to Sarasota where they expect it to become a public company. The companyis workers are trying to find a cure for hepatitis C.
If the Frudakis name sounds familiar, thatis because the father and son founded DNAPrint, now at 900 Cocoanut Ave. Tony Frudakis is the former CEO of DNAPrint, a 4-year-old company devoted to developing complex genetic testing and information-resource products for medicines. He remains a director of that company.
Worldwide Biotechis future home, a 4,000-square-foot building, is being renovated, with a lab on the downstairs level and offices on the second floor.
iItis going to be a modern looking building,i Frudakis says. iItis going to be real sharp.i
Florida friendly to business
Good news for Florida.
A poll of 458 U.S. chief executives found that California and New York are the least attractive states for business, while Florida, Texas and Nevada are the most friendly to corporate interests.
Massachusetts, Washington and Hawaii rounded out the list of top five states viewed as unappealing in the new survey by Chief Executive Magazine. Taxation, labor laws and regulations were among factors considered, the survey found.
CEOs liked best Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and Virginia, according to the poll taken in December. Corporate leaders also said they are more upbeat about the economy after President George W. Bushis re-election. The magazineis CEO confidence index rose 6% in December, the first such survey since the Nov. 2 election.
U.S. corporate leaders polled in November by the Business Roundtable also said they were more optimistic about the economy. The outlook index, determined by a poll of 131 of the Washington-based Business Roundtableis members, was 98.9 for the fourth quarter, the second-highest mark after a record of 101.7 in the third quarter this year.
Law firms come through
Itis not just pension funds that try to make a killing in the venture capital industry. Lawyers are highly dependent on the business of funding the latest cutting-edge entrepreneurs, too.
At least thatis the impression Coffee Talk gets from thumbing through a list of sponsors for the January state VC conference in Orlando, put on by the Florida Venture Forum.
Silicon Valley Bank is shelling out for an invitation-only golf tournament nearby the Omni Orlando Resort at a course designed by PGA star Greg Norman. Other usual suspects such as Raymond James Financial Inc. and its VC fund, Ballast Point Ventures LP, are kicking in, too.
But there are almost as many law firms trying to make their presence known at the 14th annual conference as venture capitalists.
Critic says job picture better
Labor economist Bruce Nissen is a little happier with state employment after reviewing the November numbers.
Nissen, research director at Florida International Universityis Center for Labor Research and Studies in Miami, often throws cold water on the claims of some politicians that the Sunshine State is just a job-creation machine.
Polls and the state governmentis labor bureau, the Agency for Workforce Innovation, like to compare monthly job statistics to the same month a year earlier. Nissen, a Columbia University PhD, says itis more meaningful to look at how much the working-age population has increased and how many jobs have been created since the most recent recession.
It has been Nissenis contention for some years now that Florida employment is not nearly as robust as it was before March 2001, the start of the last recession.
In November of this year, 20,500 new jobs were added to Florida payrolls, says Nissen. Not bad, he says, though not as good as October, when payrolls expanded by 27,900 jobs.
But Nissen estimates that Florida is still 273,400 jobs shy of what the state had in 2001. That projection factors in an 8.4% increase in the working-age population of Florida since March of that year.
iState job creation is moving in the right direction,i says Nissen, ibut not fast enough to get us back to where we were in early 2001. At this rate it will be more than a year before we have jobs growing as rapidly as the working population is growing.i
Blue sky for bankers
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the U.S. governmentis protector of bank savers, doesnit think itis going to need to bail out any Florida financial institutions in the near future.
The agencyis latest report on Florida banking says lending and profits are both up. For the first six months of this year, overall lending in the state was up 24%. The national rate was 11%.
Commercial real estate lending continued to be strong. The Sarasota metropolitan statistical area is fifth in the country in terms of capital exposure to commercial real estate loans, according to the FDIC. Itis one of six Florida markets in the national top 20.
Although earnings growth during the first quarter of 2004 was slow, Florida banks recovered some momentum during the summer. Net income for Florida community banks came in at a record high of $220 million during the second quarter of the year. For the same three months in 2003, net income for the community banks was $172 million.
Small-business lending is also on the upswing, the FDIC says, while commercial bankruptcies in Florida eased up.
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