Pennsylvania-based Marmon/Keystone has opened a metals service center in Mount Juliet, near Interstate 40 and 25 miles east of downtown Nashville. This is the first Tennessee-based facility for the division of Berkshire Hathaway, which was founded in Butler, Pa., in 1907 and works with a range of local companies as well as machine and fabrication shops.

Product offerings include aluminum and stainless pipe and tubing, along with cold drawn seamless, cold rolled electric weld, drawn over mandrel and hot rolled seamless steel tubing. The 43,000 square-foot facility houses a team of four employees who operate two 10-ton overhead cranes and two fully-automated Amada band saws with a 21" OD capacity.

Officials at the Defense Logistics Agency have granted Brentwood-based AMI Metals another year-long option to its contract to make various aluminum parts. The new work is worth $49 million and will be for several branches of the military.

Timna Tanners, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has downgraded shares of Noranda Aluminum Holding to 'neutral' from 'buy' following publication of the company's Q1 results. Tanners also has lowered her price target to $5 from $8, saying there are no catalysts for a turnaround at Franklin-based Noranda, which she says sports a "stretched balance sheet" and "may need to take greater steps to preserve cash."

Shares of Noranda (Ticker: NOR) soared yesterday but are down almost 7 percent today.

Noranda Aluminum has completed a pair of debt transactions that will enable it to pay off $275 million of debt that would have matured in 2015. The company's new debt is split into $175 million of notes and the addition of $110 million to its existing term loan.

Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Joe France has lifted his price target for shares of hospital chain Vanguard Health Systems to $18 from $17. He has reiterated his 'buy' rating on the company, whose shares (Ticker: VHS) have climbed 40 percent over the past three months and are now changing hands around $14.70.

David Gagliano at Barclays Capital didn't do Noranda Aluminum shareholders any favors Thursday when he lowered his price target for the Franklin-based company to $7 from $8 following its Q4 report. Noranda (Ticker: NOR) shares gave up more than 11 percent Thursday but are recovering a bit this morning. In early trading, they were changing hands around $5.10.