Lockheed Martin reports 340 job cuts

About 340 employees are leaving defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin of Bethesda, mostly through its recently announced buyout program.

Roughly 190 employees accepted the buyout, for which 6,500 employees at its corporate headquarters and Enterprise Business Services division were eligible. They are expected to leave by early October, spokesman Rob Fuller said in a statement.

He did not disclose the location of the workers who are leaving, but of those eligible for the buyout, about 2,000 are in the Washington, D.C., area. The buyout is Lockheed’s second work-force reduction program this year.

Also, the company is cutting 150 jobs in its Enterprise Business Services.

Sinclair Broadcast plans to buy seven TV stations

Sinclair Broadcast Group of Hunt Valley agreed to pay $200 million to acquire Four Points Media Group of Salt Lake City — owner of seven television stations in four markets — from Cerberus Capital Management.

The stations’ markets are Salt Lake City; Austin, Texas; West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Providence, R.I. Together, they reach 2.7 percent of U.S. television households, according to a Sinclair statement. They include two CBS and two CW affiliates.

The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012.

The stations are in prime middle-markets and are a “perfect complement” to Sinclair’s portfolio, David Smith, president and CEO, said in a statement. The acquisition “will allow us to capitalize on operating synergies, including adding these stations under certain existing contracts, leading to both additional earnings and free cash flow next year.”

W.R. Grace wins $3M grant for carbon capture

W.R. Grace & Co. of Columbia won a three-year, $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop post-combustion technologies to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.

Current systems use as much as 30 percent of a plant’s electricity to capture carbon dioxide and can raise power prices by 85 percent, according to Grace information. The company’s goal is to develop a technology that will capture at least 90 percent of a plant’s carbon dioxide emissions at lower cost.

It partners on the project are Battelle, Catacel and the University of South Carolina.

This is Grace’s second DOE grant in the past year. Last September, it won up to $3.3 million to evaluate and enhance advanced biofuel technologies.

Appellate court backs Synutra in baby formula case

Synutra of Rockville, which manufactures and markets infant formula in China, won a court battle this week when a federal appellate court backed a lower court’s ruling to dismiss a $950 million product liability suit stemming from the 2008 Chinese melamine crisis that resulted in a half-dozen deaths and tens of thousands of illnesses.

Noting that the products were manufactured in China and many of the would-be trial witnesses are Chinese, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Deborah K. Chasanow that China, not the U.S., is the proper venue for trying the suit filed by the parents of 53 Chinese babies.

“Maryland’s residents should therefore not be saddled with resolving the conflict,” the panel wrote.

The parents claim their children developed kidney stones and other ailments from drinking Synutra products that contained melamine, an industrial chemical added to some Chinese dairy products to boost their protein levels. Some Chinese dairy executives with other companies have been convicted in connection with the scandal.

DBED: Exports up 8.5 percent this year

Maryland's exports in the first half of the year rose to almost $5.3 billion, up 8.5 percent from the same period in 2010, the Department of Business and Economic Development reported.

Exports to the state’s two largest foreign markets, Canada and China, rose 13 percent and 24 percent, respectively.

Rockville group names business plan winners

Representatives of a recipe and coupon search engine, a Pilates center and a company developing a device to detect premature labor each won $5,000 grand prizes in the Rockville Economic Development Inc. eighth annual StartRight! Women’s Business Plan Competition.

The Bethesda website company, Feastie, is the brainchild of Valerie Coffman, a graduate of the Innovate program, which trains entrepreneurs to commercialize technology from federal and university labs. The other winners are Aliyah Hardy of Pilates Center of Rockville and Karin Hwang of CervoCheck of Baltimore. The winner also receive six months of a virtual office system.

The finalists’ were judged on both their written plan and an oral presentation, covering management, financial, operational, market research and marketing plans.