Seeking Alpha’s roundup of statements, announcements, and remarks that could impact markets, sectors, or individual stocks.
- Paramount Skydance (PSKY) CEO David Ellison said that his company plans to “finish what we started” with its launch of a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
“We’re really here to finish what we started,” Ellison told CNBC on Monday. “We put the company in play.”
Paramount submitted three separate bids for WBD before the company opened up a formal sales process. WBD announced last week that it had accepted a takeover bid from Netflix (NFLX) of $27.75 in cash and stock for its streaming and studio assets and will proceed with plans to spin out its TV and cable stations as a separate company. Comcast (CMCSA) had also bid on the company.
In its latest move, Paramount plans to go to directly to WBD shareholders with a $30 per share offer for the entire company, CNBC said.
“We’re sitting on Wall Street, where cash is still king. We are offering shareholders $17.6 billion more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix, and we believe when they see what it is currently in our offer that that’s what they’ll vote for,” Ellison said.
- Ellison also indicated that he doesn’t believe the Netflix-WBD deal would be able to pass regulatory scrutiny.
“Allowing the No. 1 streaming service to combine with the No. 3 streaming service is anticompetitive,” Ellison told CNBC on Monday.
Top streaming companies in the U.S. include Netflix (NFLX), Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) YouTube, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), Paramount Skydance (PSKY), Disney (DIS), Apple (AAPL), and Comcast (CMCSA).
- Meanwhile, President Trump said he plans to get involved in the review process for the merger, adding the Netflix deal “could be a problem” due to Netflix’s massive footprint in the streaming market.
“They have a very big market share,” Trump told reporters on Sunday, according to CNBC. “And when they have Warner Brothers, you know, that share goes up a lot.”
Despite his apparent reservations about the deal, Trump went on to praise Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos.
“He’s a great person,” Trump told reporters. “He’s done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things, and he’s got a lot of interesting things happening, aside from what you’re talking about.”
- Comcast (CMCSA) President Mike Cavanagh said his company’s bid for WBD had been light on cash because it didn’t want to strain its balance sheet.
“We are not interested in stressing the Comcast balance sheet,” Cavanagh said Monday during a UBS conference, according to CNBC. “As a result, that meant our proposal was light, relative to other proposals from what I gather, on cash.”
Cavanaugh said Comcast’s bid included “a significant chunk of equity in a combined entertainment company” that would have merged NBC Universal and WDB’s studios and HBO Max into a publicly traded entity controlled by Comcast.
“We respect and understand the decision of the Warner Brothers board to obviously prefer the certainty of high levels of cash or collared stock,” Cavanagh added.