Tag Archive for 'M&A'

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Emergence of a New Global Business Player

Published on September 2, 2010 in Global Strategy and International Business. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Burger King agreed on Thursday to sell itself to the investment firm 3G Capital for about $4 billion, including the assumption of debt, marking the second time in eight years that the fast-food giant has taken itself private. The agreement on Thursday for Burger King Holdings to be acquired by a Brazilian-backed investment firm, like a deal two years ago for Anheuser-Busch that involved some of the same investors, is one of those emblematic transactions that seem to herald the emergence of a new global business player.

The growth of the Brazilian economy in recent years has created a whole new class of wealthy entrepreneurs who are looking for opportunities to invest their fortunes and are not daunted by the idea of trying their luck beyond Brazil’s borders. Traditionally, Brazilian business has been dominated by an often cautious elite based in São Paulo, the country’s industrial and financial hub. But the economic surge of the last decade has changed that.

One thing is clear, though: Brazil’s dominance in all phases of the global beef industry. The country is already the leading beef exporter and now, thanks to the Burger King deal on Thursday, it has another outlet to encourage consumption globally [Source].

Intel Acquires New Capabilities

Published on September 1, 2010 in Global Strategy and High Tech & Media. 1 Comment Tags: , .

Over the last two weeks Intel has bought the wireless business of Infineon for $1.4 billion and McAfee for $7.68 billion, as well as the cable modem business of Texas Instruments for an undisclosed price.

Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, noted that more and more devices were connecting to the Internet, and said the wireless connectivity was a sector where the company saw “growth potential.” Furthermore, Intel CEO Paul Otellini lays out the rationale for this deal in a press release:

Intel’s goal is to expand its mobile and embedded product offerings to support additional customers and market segments, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks, and embedded computing devices. Through this effort, Intel will pair WLS’s best-in-class cellular technology with its core strengths to enable the delivery of low-power, Intel-based platforms that combine its applications processor with an expanded portfolio of wireless options—bringing together Intel’s leadership in Wi-Fi and WiMAX with WLS’s leadership in 2G and 3G, and a combined path to accelerate 4G LTE.”

Source.

Disney’s Digital Shopping Spree

Published on July 29, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

The purchase of game maker Playdom may help Disney’s brands with the Facebook generation

Four years ago, Bob Iger, the chief executive officer of Walt Disney, tried to build a cell-phone business. Disney created a family-oriented mobile service that included a global positioning system so parents could track their kids. Too few consumers signed up, and the company killed the operation after 15 months. Disney Interactive, the division that ran the ill-fated cell service, is still unprofitable. It lost $55 million last quarter.

Iger retains his enthusiasm for digital business and has switched strategies to buying rather than building. He wants to acquire social games and other online services that come with established customers and talented creators—and can help sell Disney’s famous brands.

“You don’t get the kind of growth we want by building from the inside,” he says.

[Full Story]

Google to Acquire Air Travel Data Company

Published on July 2, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

A new Google search tool to allow people to search easily for air travel and book travel plans is now on the runway. Google said Thursday that it had agreed to acquire ITA Software, a 14-year-old company that makes software that organizes flight and pricing information, for $700 million in cash.

Given that about half of airline tickets are sold online these days, it’s perhaps no surprise that Google has just snapped up ITA Software in a deal worth some $700m. The search behemoth says it is getting its hands on ITA, which gathers and processes flight information such as seat pricing and availability, to make it easier for people to find quickly the flights they want at the very best prices [Source].

Apple Hunts for Startups

Published on May 3, 2010 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Apple is accelerating the rate of acquisitions as the company vies with Google for mobile technologies and talent. Since returning to Apple as CEO in 1997, Jobs has made 13 acquisitions, according to Bloomberg data. Of those, five happened in the past seven months alone.

“The pace has really picked up, there seems to be a strategic shift,” said Charlie Wolf, an analyst with Needham & Co. in New York. “It looks like there’s an acquisition frenzy going on between Google and Apple in the sense that there’s an increasing urgency on Apple’s part to stay even if not ahead of Google in the phone space and apps space.”

Patent filings may provide clues to potential targets. Apple recently sought patent protection for mobile purchasing and touch-screen technology. Even with the new attention to M&A, Apple will maintain its strategy of focusing on smaller companies rather than taking on the risks of integrating large ones into Apple’s culture.

With more than $23.1 billion in cash, Apple has plenty of money to keep purchasing small startups. Counting long-term investments that the company can “liquidate in a day,” Apple had $41.7 billion in cash at the end of the last quarter, Broadpoint’s Marshall said, In comparison, Google had about $26.5 billion, he said [Source 1] [Source 2].

Silicon Valley Gears Up for M&A

Published on April 4, 2010 in High Tech & Media and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Silicon Valley companies looking to put their cash to work may drive a wave of mergers this year, bankers and venture capitalists say.

Companies are eager to make acquisitions because many of them have cut research budgets. Meaning many of them are not as able to fall back on their own ingenuity to fuel growth. More businesses are relying on acquisitions to find their next new product or service [Source].

Venture capitalists had their busiest quarter (2010Q1) in recent memory, with nine venture-backed companies going public and a record-breaking 111 companies changing hands in mergers and acquisitions according to a report released Thursday by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (Source: Charts). Out of the 111 M&A deals, 81 took place in the information technology sector.

The Era of the Renminbi?

Published on November 21, 2009 in International Finance. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

RenminbiA recent side-by-side comparison of the U.S. and Chinese economies produced a startling result: There were $34.8 billion of initial public offerings in China this year and only $13.7 billion in the U.S.

With numbers like that, is it any surprise that Western fund managers are scrambling to get a bite of the immensely profitable Chinese market for new companies? As the New York Times reported, U.S.-based Blackstone Group has formed a partnership with Shanghai’s municipal government to raise a $732 million private equity fund.

What’s different this time is that Blackstone’s fund is denominated in the Chinese currency, which is officially called the renminbi. Blackstone’s idea is to take advantage of capital from China’s increasingly wealthy institutional and private investors. The fund will then use the investments to buy companies and take them public, earning a hopefully large profit along the way. There is plenty of interest in the Chinese market for new companies—Carlyle Group announced this week that it had invested $60 million in three Chinese growth companies. So there is no shortage of domestic companies ripe for turnaround [Source].

Citi’s Transformation

Published on January 15, 2009 in Global Strategy and International Finance. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

citi“TOO big to fail, too shit to buy” is the way some Citigroup insiders describe their employer. Not for much longer. On January 13th Citigroup announced that it had reached a deal to spin out Smith Barney, its broking arm, into a joint venture with Morgan Stanley’s broker. The agreement presages even more dramatic changes. The bank has brought forward its fourth-quarter results to January 16th and expectations are high that Vikram Pandit, Citi’s chief executive, will unveil plans to slim the bank further and faster.

Full coverage of Citi’s transformation can be found here “DealBook”

What lesson can be learned from Citi’s faillure:

“Universal banking need not fail. But smaller, focused organisations are easier to run than large, sprawling ones—Citigroup has more employees than the American navy and, apparently, greater destructive power. Mr Weill’s creation, backed by a host of executives, directors and investors ever since, has proved horribly flawed. Unlike HSBC, another giant, Citi has been built through deal making and it shows. Acquisitions were poorly integrated. Cultures overlapped rather than melded (the resilience of the Smith Barney name is one telling indicator). Risk management was dismal. The big balance-sheet was deployed recklessly. It may be inevitable that some banks are too big to fail; but the lesson of Citi is that they can also be too big to manage.”

“The second shift in thinking signalled by Citi’s manoeuvres concerns policy. November’s dramatic government intervention may have quelled fears that the bank would go under. But it has not stopped the bleeding at Citi, which remains focused on survival rather than on ramping up credit. Red ink laps around a host of other banks too. Full-year earnings at American banks are likely to be awful. Many eyes are on Bank of America, whose levels of tangible equity are also thin and, with Merrill Lynch and Countrywide to digest, is seeking billions of dollars in additional capital from the government. In Europe Deutsche Bank revealed a fourth-quarter loss of €4.8 billion ($6.3 billion) on January 14th, thanks in part to misplaced trading bets.”

citi_share_price

High leverage is out, (retail) deposit is back…

Published on September 22, 2008 in International Finance. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The last two major investment banks (Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) in the US have changed their status to become bank holding companies, allowing them to take deposits from investors. The changes should enable Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to raise more funds by opening commercial banks.

The move – part of a huge restructuring effort on Wall Street – will also give them access to Federal Reserve support. The US government has announced a $700bn (£382bn) package to tackle the worst financial crisis for decades.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the last two independent investment banks, will become bank holding companies, the Federal Reserve said Sunday night, a move that will fundamentally alter the landscape of Wall Street.

Transforming these investment giants into licensed, deposit-taking banks marked the end of an era for Wall Street. It heralds new regulations and supervision of previously lightly regulated investment banks, as well as an end to the outsize paychecks that helped shape the image of the chest-thumping Wall Street banker.

Source:
Bloomberg
BBC
NYTimes

Too big to fail…

Published on September 17, 2008 in International Finance. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

American finance has a new, if reluctant, kingpin: the government. In a dramatic move on the evening of Tuesday September 16th the Federal Reserve agreed to provide American International Group with a loan of $85 billion (€59 billion) to help it stave off bankruptcy.

In return, either the Fed or Treasury will take effective control of the company, which until recently was an icon of private-sector capitalism. After the historic events of the past fortnight, who would bet that AIG will be the last lumbering giant to need resuscitation? Source.

On another note. Gold prices exploded Wednesday — posting the biggest one-day gain ever in dollar terms ($90.40, or 11.6 percent, to $870.90) — as fears of more credit market turmoil unnerved investors and triggered a flood of safe-haven buying. Read more.