Massachusetts groups have been awarded $130 million under the annual allocation of the US Treasury Department’s New Markets Tax Credit program. Bay State recipients include Massachusetts Housing Investment Corp., a private nonprofit investor and lender that received a New Markets Tax Credit allocation award of $65 million. A group of local economists has established the Boston Chapter of the National Association for Business Economics. While modeled after the National Association for Business Economics in Washington, NABE Boston is an independent organization that seeks to provide a local forum where people interested in economics can share ideas and network, its organizers said. AstraZeneca PLC, a British drug maker with a presence in Massachusetts, said first-quarter profits fell 31 percent. The company, which is facing generic competition, also announced Thursday that it has received a subpoena from legal authorities in Massachusetts. Net profit for the three months to March 31 was $1.01 billion, down from $1.63 billion a year earlier. Revenue was 13 percent lower at $6.39 billion. The company said generic competition for bipolar medication Seroquel IR, hypertension drug Atacand, and cholesterol drug Crestor drove revenue down. The company said it received a subpoena March 28 from the US attorney’s office in Boston seeking documents relating to standards at its facility in Macclesfield, northwest England. It did not give further details. Funding for the earliest stage companies by angel investors hit $22.9 billion last year, a 1.8 percent bump over 2011, but the total number of individuals willing to risk money by backing the earliest stage companies fell by 15.8 percent. While fewer angel investors, or wealthy individuals who fund new companies, were active last year, the ones who did invest spent more, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, which released its annual angel investment report on Thursday. The average investment amount climbed to $85,435 for 2012, a 20.9 percent jump compared with $70,690 in 2011. Many more female investors were active in 2012, according to the report. Stock shares of Akamai Technologies Inc. were up nearly 19 percent in morning trading Thursday after the Cambridge-based provider of Internet content delivery services issued strong results for its first quarter. The New York Times Co., parent of The Boston Globe, BostonGlobe.com, and Boston.com, said Thursday that first-quarter revenues fell 2 percent to $465.9 million as a “difficult advertising environment continued.” Dunkin' Brands Group Inc., the Canton-based parent company of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, said Thursday that sales at Dunkin' Donuts stores open at least a year, a key retail metric, rose 1.7 percent. | | |
