Business News

Steris PLC is in talks to combine with Cantel Medical Corp. , according to people familiar with the matter, in a deal that would bring together two big providers of sterilization products.

The companies are discussing a mostly stock deal that could be completed as soon as Tuesday, assuming talks don’t fall apart, the people said.

Cantel has a market value of around $3.5 billion, while Steris’s is around $17.3 billion.

Dublin-based Steris, which has a U.S. presence in Mentor, Ohio, sells sterilization equipment, surgical tables, and other products and services used in hospitals and laboratories.

Little Falls, N.J.-based Cantel

After a wild year in financial markets, many investors ended 2020 with at least a thing or two to smile about. Stocks overall posted solid gains for the year, and coronavirus vaccines are slowly being doled out to the public, bolstering hopes for economic growth this year.

But with interest rates so low, these are rough times for fixed-income investors who need income now from their portfolios. Here’s some advice from investment pros for those investors, as well as those with fixed-income portfolios geared more toward the medium or long term.

If you need income now

For investors in or

Shares in China’s three major telecommunications companies dropped in Hong Kong on Friday, after index compilers said they would remove the stocks from their benchmarks due to a U.S. government investment ban.

The removals come after a period of uncertainty about whether the shares would be covered by the ban, and flip flops by the New York Stock Exchange about whether to delist American depositary receipts issued by the three companies, China Mobile Ltd. , China Telecom Corp. and China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd.

Guidance from the Treasury Department this week made it clear that the publicly traded units would