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Its latest rates do away with data caps, though HD video will cost a pretty penny.

The one-time debtors that took the company out of bankruptcy are now looking for a buyer.

Houlihan Lokey has been hired to sell the Los Angeles-based company and is reaching out to the “usual suspects” as potential buyers, according to a source familiar with the process. A spokeswoman for the company could not immediately be reached for comment late Wednesday.

The sale effort comes just six months after the company, known for its colorful basics and its even more colorful past, exited bankruptcy.

Despite the well-documented woes before its bankruptcy in October — including a long string of losses, operational difficulties and the dramatic ouster and battle with its founder Dov Charney — American Apparel is seen as having some continuing appeal in the marketplace.

Even so, just who the “usual suspects” are in this case is not entirely clear.

“I have no idea what the proposition is so I don’t know if I’d be interested or not,” said Charney, reached by phone Wednesday. “There’s nothing else I would say. I’ve heard about it. No one’s approached me [about buying]. I don’t know what the terms are.”

Charney, who is now working on a new apparel line based in the Los Angeles area, declined comment when asked if he was still working with Hagan Capital Group and Silver Creek Capital Partners, the two firms he had aligned himself with in January on a $300 million offer to buy American Apparel.

“In December 2015, I submitted a $525 million indication of interest, and now less than a year after they went bankrupt, they’re struggling and trying to sell the company,” Charney said. “That I find astonishing….They’ve stripped the company of its assets. They’ve fired all the creatives with a brutal corporate control battle. They’ve lost hundreds of workers. It’s astonishing.”

After Charney’s bid failed in the bankruptcy process, the company’s creditors, including Goldman Sachs and Pentwater Capital Management, traded $230 million in debt for equity and now control the firm.

Financial observers expected the company to eventually change hands again, the question was always how long the creditors would wait before trying to cash out their investment.

Led by chief executive officer Paula Schneider, the brand has a sweatshop-free Made in America positioning that could be appealing as consumers grow more conscious of how and where their goods are made.

But there’s plenty of work to do. The brand, which once had sales of more than $600 million, has been cutting back to avoid excess inventory and inefficiencies and is also shifting away from the overt sex appeal it become known for under Charney and opting instead to focus on social issues to add some spice to the brand’s marketing. There were also reports this week that the firm was considering decamping from its longtime Los Angeles home to a less-expensive state.

One source speaking on condition of anonymity said American Apparel is expected to cap this year with less than $400 million in revenue.

Gapping down
In reaction to disappointing earnings/guidance:

M&A news:

Select financial related names showing weakness: BBVA -1.9%, SAN -1.7%, RBS -1.6%, DB -1%

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Gapping up
In reaction to strong earnings/guidance:

M&A news: SEMI +41.7% (to be acquired by GlobalWafers for $12.00 per share)

Select metals/mining stocks trading higher: RIO +2.2%, BBL +2%, FCX +1.8%, BHP +1.7%, MT +1.6%, SAND +1.6%,AG +1.5%, SBGL +1.1%, AU +0.8%, GDX +0.7%,

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AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD

It is hard to imagine now, but Britain once led the nuclear revolution.

Ernest Rutherford first broke the nuclei of atoms at Manchester University in 1917. Our Queen opened the world's first nuclear power plant in 1956 at Calder Hall.

Such were the halcyon days of British atomic confidence, before defeatism took hold and free market ideology was pushed to pedantic extremes.

Most of Britain's ageing reactors will be phased out over the next decade, leaving a gaping hole in electricity supply. By historic irony the country has drifted into a position where it now depends on an ailing state-owned French company to build its two reactors at Hinkley Point, with help from the Chinese Communist Party.

The horrors Hinkley are by now well-known. The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) is not yet working anywhere. The Olkiluoto plant in Finland is nine years late and three times over budget. EDF's Flamanville project is not faring much better.

What is clear is that the costs of 'old nuclear' have spun out of control everywhere in the developed world. It is too expensive to keep trying to refine an inherently dangerous technology dating back sixty years in a Sisyphean attempt to make it less threatening after Chernobyl and Fukushima.

The capital cost of new nuclear plants in Europe and the US has risen from $1,000 per kilowatt in the 1970s to around $5,500 today in real terms. Hinkley will be nearer $8,000. Hence the lapidary term 'negative learning' coined by Yale scientist Arnulf Grubler.

The standard light water reactors were solid workhorses in their day - and averted huge releases of CO2 from fossil fuels - but they operate at 100 times atmospheric pressure. They need vast domes to prevent them blowing up and releasing deadly radioactive gases across hundreds of miles.

This nuclear cost spiral has been happening just as solar and wind costs plummet, and the verdict is in. The nuclear share of global power has dropped to 10.7pc from 17.6pc in 1996. Ten new reactors were built last year, but eight were in China. In Europe they are shutting down.

There is an alternative. Research into a radical new wave of safer, cleaner, and cheaper reactors is suddenly reaching critical mass, some are entirely compatible with the intermittency of wind and solar.

This is what Theresa May should be looking at as she launches her industrialisation drive and fashions an energy policy fit for the 21st Century.

The Washington think tank Third Way has identified fifty advanced reactor projects in North America, including eight based on molten salt fuel, ten on liquid-metal, and some based on fusion designs.

The US Energy Department has thrown its huge research power behind this push for a "meltdown-free" reactor cheap enough for mass production. It even explored micro modular variants for large jet aircraft at a forum in March, and Boeing has filed a patent to do exactly that with a laser-powered fusion-fission engine.

One of the US-backed projects is a "waste annihilating molten salt reactor", which uses up spent nuclear fuel and lethal plutonium residue. As it happens, Britain's start-up company Moltex Energy is working on similar lines, and this country needs the technology even more urgently than the US.

"We have the largest plutonium stockpile in the world and we don't know what to do with it," said Stephen Tindale from the Alvin Weinberg Foundation.

Moltex founder Ian Scott estimates that his molten salt design can cut costs to almost a quarter of the Hinkley tariff. "We think we can come in at a levelized £29 per megawatt hour," he said.

"That is radically cheaper than gas or coal in Europe. It could have a massive impact on the UK economy and it would be a terrible shame if we lose it," he said.

Molten salt reactors were built by the US physicist Alvin Weinberg at the Oak Ridge Laboratories in the 1960s, but were never pursued because the Pentagon wanted the plutonium residue from light water reactors to build nuclear warheads.

They dissolve the nuclear fuel in molten salts rather than using dry pellets of uranium. Advocates say a melt-down is impossible, and there can be no chain-reaction along the lines of Fukushima. If the reactor gets too hot, a freeze plug melts and the salts drain off. They cool down and turn solid. The fission process stops automatically.

"It is inherently stable. You could break every containment barrier and still not get a leak of cesium or iodine outside the reactor," said Dr Scott. The plants operate at atmospheric pressure so they are much smaller and safer.

The Moltex reactor can run off existing spent nuclear fuel, cleaning up the legacy headaches of old nuclear plants. "We can process nuclear waste very cheaply instead of burying it at enormous cost in steel tanks for 200,000 years underground," he said. The plan is switch to thorium as a "greener" source of fuel once Britain's stockpile of nuclear waste has been consumed.

The Moltex design slashes costs by using a convection process that avoids pumping molten salt around the system. This reduces corrosion, the metallurgy barrier has bedevilled molten salt projects.

Dr Scott is the former chief scientist of Unilever and his technical advisory board includes Derek Fray at Cambridge, Paul Madden at Oxford, and Tim Abram at Manchester. The design is one of several projects being examined by the UK government in its competition for the best small modular reactor.

"We have done everything entirely without government so far, and frankly we have had much more interest in Canada where we were welcomed with open arms by the regulators," said Dr Scott.

Canada is now the crucible for molten salt reactors. Terrestrial Energy in Toronto is the most advanced such project in the world with an integral molten salt reactor, and is already pre-licensed. "We can bring our reactor to the commercial market in the 2020s," said the chief executive Simon Irish.

"Once we put a shovel to the ground we can build it in three to four years. The parts can be manufactured on a mass scale. We believe we can produce power for 40-50 US dollars per megawatt hour," he said.

That is £31 to £38, a third of Hinkley. The reactor core - relatively cheap to make - is simply removed and replaced after seven years.

Molten reactors have a double advantage. They operate at 700 degrees centrigade, much hotter than light water reactors. This dry 'high quality heat' is itself valuable. It can drive steam electrolysis, make ammonia fertilizers or polymers, and can even be turned into methanol for synthetic transport fuels.

Mr Irish said his 190 MW design is ideal for a new energy order dominated by renewables. "We can deploy extra power at peak times and pull it back into the troughs, and we can do it within minutes like a natural gas turbine. We tick all the boxes," he said. Old workhorse reactors cannot be switched on and off at will.

I do not wish to neglect a flurry of other designs that may have equal promise, nor can I vouch for the technical and cost claims. Specialist readers will delve further, and make their own judgment. What is clear is that nuclear technology is in ferment.

In a sense we have rare chance to go back to the drawing board. Britain still has a superb stable of nuclear scientists and talent but no longer faces a fortress of vested interests with horrendous sunk costs. It could leap frog the field.

The British state can borrow for twenty years at 1.2pc and it should do so with zest to break out of the austerity cage, launching a blast of fiscal stimulus to carry the country through the post-Brexit adjustment while at the same time giving our engineering industries a shot of adrenaline.

A gamble on the untested technology of advanced reactors might prove a costly flop but it is hard to see how it could be worse than a blank cheque for an obsolete nuclear model that will bleed us into the 2060s. At least we can take back our energy destiny.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Volvo Car Group has agreed a $300 million alliance with Uber to develop self-driving cars, the latest move by traditional vehicle manufacturers to team up with Silicon Valley firms long seen as disruptive threats to their industry.

The partnership will see the Swedish-based carmaker, owned by China's Geely, and ride-hailing service Uber pool resources into initially developing the autonomous driving capabilities of its flagship XC90 SUV. The investment will be roughly shared equally by the two companies.

Uber will purchase Volvos and then install its own driverless control system for the specific needs of its ride-hailing service.

Volvo will use the same vehicle for its own autonomous driving project, which is based on a plan that still envisages having a driver in the car.

The investment will go towards researching and developing both hardware, such as sensors used to detect traffic and obstacles, as well as software for the self driving cars.