Reading this morning’s press reports on Murdoch’s £10.75 per share agreed offer to buy out the outstanding 61% of Sky he doesn’t already own, one thing becomes clear. With the bid coming from 21st Century Fox this time rather than News Corp, the consensus narrative is that this is expected to reduce the regulatory risks […]
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The initial flurry of newswire headlines (*1. see end of article) seemed to focus on the offer price of $107.50 per Time Warner share, with the narrative that AT&T was overpaying. I disagree. The bid is sensibly pitched. The issue markets should be focusing on instead, is whether the bid will ever reach completion in […]
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Only four trading days to go before the Brexit vote, so if you believe the current polls are more accurate than for the Scottish referendum, you are probably already underweight or short Sterling, UK Banks and groups exposed to UK domestic consumption (advertising, retail, hotels & restaurants, property and even some German auto manufacturers etc) […]
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As the layers are peeled away, there is a shocker in the Mediaset numbers. This is the woefully low EBIT margins currently being delivered from the core Italian commercial TV activities. With its Mediaset Premium results for 2015 now finally revealed (yes and you only have to go to page 337 of Mediaset’s 2015 annual […]
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Facebook shares had a good bounce on its blistering Q1 results which, oh so conveniently, accompanied its announcement of a stock split into new non-voting C class shares. This is a similar ploy the one Vere Rothermere used a few years ago with the DMGT scrip issue as a way of enabling him (well at […]
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When Vincent Bollore forked out the equivalent of €864m on a 3.5% stake in Mediaset and a 88.9% stake in Mediset Premium, do you think he was provided with more financial details relating to the scale of MS Premium’s losses than has hitherto been released to the markets? With an implied cost for this pay […]
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Reviewing last week’s Mediaset results I was struck by a sense of deja vue. Here was a company that for a third consecutive year was denying that it was not trying to sell its lossmaking PayTV unit (Mediaset Premium) in the face of supposedly well sourced rumour to the contrary, this time to Vincent Bollore’s […]
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The story is an old one. Broadcaster facing erosion of its distribution monopoly buys successful production business to supplement the lack of creative output from its own in-house content origination arm. Whether it was TVS’s purchase of MTM, Thames TV’s acquisition of Reeves or Pearson’s serial offending with Grundy and then All American, the narrative […]
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