Paramount Skydance (PSKY) has sent a letter to the shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) to urge them to accept the $30 per share offer for the whole company after the board publicly rejected its offer and deemed it “inferior,” compared to Netflix’s (NFLX) earlier today.
The David Ellison-run company on Wednesday has reiterated that his offer provides Warner Bros. shareholders superior value, including “the certainty of 100% cash and no exposure to equity market fluctuations.”
Paramount also alleges that WBD has been absent from the negotiations table and has not engaged with them even after the offer price was raised to $30 per share.
“WBD seeks to mislead its shareholders into believing this is a complicated question about legal documents. In reality, it is all quite simple,” Paramount said in a statement. ” Yet from mid-September all the way through to December 4, what is glaring is the absolute resistance on the part of WBD to even engage in a single negotiating session with Paramount or its advisors, and a refusal even to provide a mark-up of any transaction document.”
Paramount said in the statement that WBD board did not even consider that the $30 per share all-cash offer “could reasonably be expected to lead to a superior proposal” under the transaction agreement with Netflix.
“This failure is yet another example of WBD’s pattern of ignoring Paramount’s value-maximizing offer, perhaps in the hopes it will just go away. But Paramount is committed to its offer and looks forward to WBD shareholders choosing a Paramount transaction over Netflix,” Paramount said.