Business & Finance

Venture capital firm Warburg Pincus is paying $1.1 billion for TransDigm Holding Co., a designer and maker of components for commercial and military aircraft, The Wall Street Journal reported. TransDigm of Richmond Heights, Ohio, is owned by Odyssey Investment Partners. Warburg Pincus is based in New York.

In a change of global marketing strategy, financial services giant UBS formally dropped the name Warburg from its corporate identity, ending an association that began in 1998. The move also applies to UBS's American subsidiary, PaineWebber, with which it merged two years later. The decision, announced last November, took effect Monday and means that all of the company's services and branches will be known simply as UBS. The company's headquarters are in Zurich, Switzerland.

DeBeers, the world's dominant supplier of uncut diamonds, will shake up its list of customers, effective Jan. 1, the Financial Times reported. It said the company "is believed to have shed" roughly 35 distributors, cutters, and traders, while adding 10 others in a bid to stimulate demand at the retail level. Diamond jewelry has lagged other luxury goods in sales for the past decade, the Financial Times said.

In what potentially could reshape home-lending practices, E*Trade Mortgage Corp. plans to offer portable, fixed-rate loans that customers may transfer from one dwelling to another, The Wall Street Journal reported. The new instrument will not be available for refinancing, however, and the Journal noted that E*Trade is not a major player in the industry, accounting for less than 1 percent of the $2.5 trillion in home mortgages taken out last year in the US. The lender is a unit of E*Trade Group of Menlo Park, Calif.