Greenhill Capital Partners is backing Acrisure, a Michigan-based insurance agency operator, by investing $20 million. The PE firm’s deal plans to back the mergers and acquisitions minded insurance company’s expansion.

Greenhill Capital Partners is currently managing four PE funds consisting of two US private equity funds, a European PE fund and a US venture capital fund. They have a successful track record investing in energy, insurance, telecommunications, financial services, telecommunications and education and business services industries.

Seventeen separate deals build Acrisure and the private equity firm’s investment in the firm will be utilized to support the future growth initiatives of the company. The size of the stake provided to the firm has not been disclosed and calls needing comments have not been returned either.

Diamond Castle Partners is a New York based equity firm which bought Suture Express Inc. Suture Express is a distributor of disposable medical and surgical products. Linden LLC and CHS Private Equity LP are the investment arms of Code Hennessy & Simmons LLC. They are a group of investors who exited the company after an ownership of more than three years.

These PE investors had initially bought the company from its founders and have made great contributions in expanding the company’s product offerings and customer base. The joint private equity ownership team helped improve the customer base of Suture Express and its product offerings alike.

Diamond Castle Partners have bought the disposable medical products company, Suture Express Inc. Diamond Castle Partners has made investments across various fields including entertainment, Internet and technology, advertising and media, manufacturing and food services industries.

US drugmaker Cephalon Inc is planning to expand into generic drug business to diversify its product line. With an increase in its shares by 1.5 percent, the company is looking to expand internationally. Cephalon announced that they would be buying Mepha AG for about $590 million for expansion.

Mepha AG, the Swiss generic drugmaker is owned by Germany’s Merckle family and markets above 120 products in 50 countries. Mepha had sales of about $377 million in 2009 and Cephalon is looking to double the size of its international business with the deal.

Cephalon gained popularity with its sleep disorder drug Provigil. Nuvigil, its successor drug, also features in its product line along with pain product Fentora and cancer drug Treanda. Mepha features multiple products including Diclofenac for pain, as gel and patch. The merger move by Cephalon denotes a departure from its usual mergers and acquisitions strategy.

Internet giant yahoo reported a $153 million net profit in the fourth quarter of 2009, but the sales of the company continue to fall. But still, this was the best quarterly financial performance since Carol.A.Bartz took over as the chief executive a year ago. This profit is good as compared to $303 million loss in the same period last year. However, the revenues fell by 4% to $1.7 billion.

The shares of Yahoo surged by 1% in the after-hours trading as the news of profits was announced. Yahoo struggled throughout the year due to global downturn and trimmed the budget by slashing more than 2,000 jobs. Ms. Bartz said that the fourth quarter marked a strong finish to 2009, and that this was a transformative year for Yahoo.

Yahoo reported 11 cents per share and said that it would have made 15 cents per share, if not the charges tied with a proposed partnership with Microsoft. Still it was more than the average estimates of 11 cents per share by analysts. Yahoo had been struggling since December 2007, as Google has enhanced its dictatorship in the search market.

Microsoft reported a quarterly profit and revenue that soared as compared to last year profits. This was a result of the sales of the company’s latest operating system, Windows 7. The news came as a boost for the software giants whose stock rose about 0.6% in the after hours trading, after it had slided 2% during the regular trading hours.

Microsoft reported that its profits climbed to $6.7 billion, or 74 cents per share which is 60% from the last year. The company broke the trend of three quarters’ declining sales amounting to a record $19 billion. This was a really good result from Microsoft. There was confusion over the earnings which consolidated the effects of deferred revenue from sales of Windows 7 and its free upgrade. This deferred revenue was around $1.7 billion. Excluding this revenue the profit was 60 cents per share.

Google reported quarterly sales in double digits for the first time in the year. Google is in a turbulent confrontation with China, but the online advertising business of the company is in full flow driving Google far ahead of its rivals.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a conference that they were back in business full blast”. This is after the company reported a fivefold jump in the net income as compared to the earlier year and that its sales grew by 17% the fastest pace in the year. He said that the fourth quarter was an extraordinary end to what was a roller coaster year. He was also optimistic about the future growth prospective.

Amazon.com shares surged after the annual profits of the online retailer soared 42%. This was against the expectations of Wall Street and showed that even in the shaky economy the consumers were comfortable in spending some money through online shopping.

Amazon said that there was no decline in the number of customers despite recession. Recent reports show that Amazon will continue to make profits in the coming months and the revenue in the current quarter is tipped to grow even more than expectations. Hence the company has announced a surprising $2 billion share buyback. This comes out despite the fact that the company’s stocks are trading near its record high.

Per capita income is often used to measure the wealth of a nation’s population, generally in comparison to others. Per capita income is the amount received by each individual, of the annual income of the country. It is reported in units of currency per year and is calculated by dividing the total personal income by the midyear population.

The USA has one of the highest per capita income figures and there are two common ways of presenting per capita income data. The PPP method stands for Purchasing Power Parity and adjusts for the cost of living in each country. The Atlas method is the second method which adjusts the figures for currency values and inflation according to different schemes.

The most common way of calculating using the PPP method is to use the USA as the base for comparing the price of a particular product. This is taken as the base because when done in this way, the figures for USA remain the same for both PPP and Atlas.