Category Archives for "Broadcasters"

AT&T spins out Warner Media – focus on the pipes rather than the sewage!

I’ll say this for new CEO, John Stankey, he’s got balls to spin off the $100bn Warner Media business his predecessor had bought only back in mid 2018. Presumably given John had managed the business briefly ahead of being elevated to COO and then to CEO, he either didn’t like what he saw, or saw […]

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Tf1 + M6 = another French champion?

Someone didn’t seem to get the memo from Macron that French culture and particularly, ‘French exceptionalism’ is no longer de rigeuer and once again corporate France has retreated back to a defensive consolidation along nationalism lines. So much for a sense of European identity.  On the positive side, consolidating two commercial TV operators in the […]

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Comcast’s buyers curse

“Accept the Recommended Comcast Offer Immediately”[!!!] If I was a Comcast shareholder I would be concerned about the apparent enthusiasm with which the Sky board were recommending that their shareholders accept their managements revised offer for Sky.  Whoever was pulling the strings over at Sky (Murdoch, Disney?), they have played a blinder; extracting a 125% […]

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ITV – new dog, but same old tired tricks!

The commercial TV industry is littered with failed acquisitions of production companies, but that doesn’t seem to stop newcomers from falling into the same trap. New management at ITV ought to take note, given the reports that they are considering purchasing Big Brother producer, Endemol.   The strategic rational of moving upstream into content origination […]

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Do they know something? Informative conformity and stocks

The herding instinct is strong in markets. Solomon Asch would characterise this as ‘informative conformity’ where the participant would disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes and yield to the group think. In Asch’s experiments, the results were remarkable, particularly given the exclusion of outside variables beyond the comparative data (the height of the columns […]

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Prosieben – a sub +1% growth stock or just oversold?

Spare a thought for those long suffering shareholders of German commercial TV stocks, RTL and Prosieben as Morgan Stanley dumped on the stocks with a negative report on Friday, sending them down a further 7% and -6% respectively against the DAX index that was up +1%. Presumably it was another rendition of the argument that […]

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AT&T Time Warner offer – OK with judge, but now less so for TWX shareholders

Time Warner shareholders may feel a sense of relief that the AT&T bid is now clear to proceed, but the harsh reality is that they are being screwed.  Time value and a declining performance and share price of AT&T has seriously eroded the original offer premium to … ZERO. Indeed, it could be strongly argued […]

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