Is there an oil price where Shell’s BG offer doesn’t make sense? Listening to Shell’s narrative, the position was initially that the oil price was going to rebound into 2016 and beyond, but then as this got progressively pushed back as prices relapsed, the emphasis was placed on the natural hedge that the share component […]
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For those of you with the GrowthRater web App, the somewhat sorry tale of Pearson will be old hat and you’ll have been out of the path of this train for some time now, as can be seen from our valuation timeline below. Unfortunately for Pearson, media investors seem to be particularly intolerant to disappointment […]
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“Omnicom demonstrated superior and proven performance in the area of data analytics, planning and buying, innovation, talent and financial value” – P&G global brand officer Marc Pritchard on last week’s announcement that it will be replacing Publicis Groupe’s Starcom Mediavest with Omnicom’s OMG for its North American media-buying, worth around $2.66bn pa. While the […]
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After almost a year since announcing the planned spin-off of its remaining holding in Alibaba, Yahoo’s board of Directors “after careful review.. has unanimously decided to suspend work on the pending plan”. Tax reasons are cited for the volte-face, in that the IRS (as we reported only last week) were unimpressed by the whole scheme […]
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Du Pont and Dow Chemical reported to be in merger talks? When we flagged Du Pont’s new, but supposedly ‘temporary’ CEO, Edward Breen as a man to watch (6 Oct post “du Pont – So bad its now good!), given his record at TYCO, we had not expected him to have such a rapid impact […]
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Has Yellen seen the movie Margin Call, I wonder? In it, Jeremy Iron’s classic Wall Street boss (John Tuld) referred to 3 ways of making a living: be first, be smarter, or cheat. Of course in financial markets these are not mutually exclusive options where Governments habitually use their central banks to operate their own […]
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So having failed to rejuvenate the core and divert attention to crystallising value from selling down the peripheral assets, Marissa Mayer and the Yahoo board are now left with the one last option, sell the rump. But with under $5bn of sales and barely profitable, what might it be worth and does the proposed spinoff […]
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Is the Fed that junkie that keeps on promising to kick the habit because they know the dire consequences if they don’t, but just want that last fix because it feels so good and they’re frightened of cold turkey? How many times has the Fed now signalled it will come off the QE juice but […]
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