Haim Romano, the new CEO of Partner Communications Ltd., is slashing the company’s workforce, people familiar with the matter told Thursday.

The Orange franchisee, which is controlled by Ilan Ben- Dov, will fire about 1,000 of its 8,000 employees starting next week as part of streamlining measures it is taking to deal with worsening financial results, the sources said.

Most of the employees who will be laid off are from customer- service centers. The company will also close two service centers, and others will be consolidated to create one-stop shop centers.

The firings are part of Romano’s new strategy to focus on fostering customer relations rather than building market share. The Read more…

EMI, the British music firm, will sell its recorded music unit for 1.2 billion.

Universal Music has agreed to the price and will include artists such as Coldplay, the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

While EMI, has a history dating in the UK dating back to 1897, it was taken over by a private equity company around the time of the GFC and has recently been in the hands of Citigroup.

Citigroup seized ownership of EMI in February after previous owner Terra Firma failed to pass a solvency test.

Universal Music is a unit of Vivendi, a French media company.

U.S. markets shot higher Friday after the upper house in the Italian Parliament passed its 2012 budget bill and Greece swore in a new government.

Italy’s lower house must also pass the bill. If it does, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has pledged to resign. Coupled with Thursday’s news that Italy had conducted a successful auction of one-year bonds, worries of a collapsing eurozone eased.

Greece’s new interim coalition government was put into place Friday, with Lucas Papademos as the prime minister.

On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average continued to recover from Wednesday’s 389-point drop.

After gaining 112 points Thursday, the DJIA added an additional 259.89 points or 2.17 percent to 12,153.68.

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National and regional home sales slipped predictably in September as the peak summer sales period waned, according to an index by the National Association of Realtors that measures pending sales.

The group’s pending home sales index fell 4.6 percent nationally in September, and 6.2 percent in the Midwest, the NAR said. Read more…

WASHINGTON The American economy added 80,000 jobs in October, and job growth in the two previous months was much stronger than first thought, an encouraging sign as the nation searches for a way out of the jobs crisis.

The unemployment rate dropped to 9 percent from 9.1 percent, the first time it has fallen since July and the lowest rate since April, the government said Friday.

“Those are pretty good signs,” said Michael Hanson, senior economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “We’re hanging in there.”

Economists surveyed by FactSet, a provider of financial data, had expected a gain of 100,000 jobs. Read more…

US stocks fell on Friday, ending four weeks of back-to-back gains, as political instability resurfaced in Europe and investors braced for a confidence vote in Greece after US markets close.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 61.23 points, or 0.5 per cent, to 11,983.24. The Standard Poor’s 500 Index lost 7.92 points, or 0.6 per cent, to 1253.23. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 11.82 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 2686.15.

SPI futures dropped 27 points to 4258, indicating losses at the start of local sharemarket trade on Monday.

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