News

A New York hedge fund that earlier this year flipped the board of Depomed Inc. and installed a new CEO to boost the company’s value said Monday that it will cut 40 percent of its staff and move the drug company’s headquarters out of California.

The move is necessary, Newark-based Depomed (NASDAQ: DEPO) said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, because it is turning over sales of its pain drug Nucynta to Collegium Pharmaceutical Inc. and won’t need as large of a workforce or space.

Longtime Bay Area retailer Jeremy’s has withdrawn plans for a store in Oakland and will instead shut down entirely, after saying permitting delays had made it unable to open the new location in time for Black Friday.

The typical San Francisco millennial can only afford to buy 135 square feet of housing, the lowest buying power in the country, according to personal finance company SmartAsset. . . San Francisco also requires discretionary review of all major projects, which adds months for new development. Other cities allow new buildings to be built if they conform to existing zoning codes. The median time from initial applications to completions ranged from 38 months to projects under 10,000 square feet to 71 months for projects over 250,000 square feet, according to Paragon.

A new study from the San Francisco-based Pacific Research Institute has ranked the regulatory climate for small businesses in California the worst out of all 50 states — and the Bay Area is a prime example of why.

Business leaders in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, southern Alameda and northern Santa Cruz counties predict a hiring boom in 2015. Almost 64 percent of 217 companies surveyed plan on staffing more people this year, according to the annual CEO Business Climate Survey by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

The Germany-based drug maker makes the blood-clotting hemophilia A drug Kogenate in Berkeley and recommitted to that facility in 2011 with a four-year contract for its unionized workforce. But the company said Tuesday that two experimental drugs will add to its pipeline and it needs to expand German facilities in Leverkusen and Wuppertal by 2020.

After a two-year office space binge, San Francisco tech tenants seem to be taking a bit of a breather.

A new study says the beer industry contributes as much as $34.2 billion each year to California’s economy and creates 241,640 local jobs. The study by the National Beer Wholesalers Association and the Beer Institute said those jobs represent about $11.1 billion in wages and benefits.