Operating at the Intersection of Technology and the Capital Markets
Category: M&A
One of the great distortions caused by the joint fiscal and monetary policy of 2020 and 2021 is that equities and the lowest-rated non-investment grade credits are two of the all too rare places where investors may earn a return. Savers and Fixed Income investors be damned. Many companies are enjoying their stocks trading at … Continue reading Investors Should Ask More of Their Management Teams
Time is wasting away. If you are a big fan of a target company's management team, pay them the extra EBITDA multiple turn if that is what is required to execute your deal. I did not say "gift" them the incremental purchase consideration. Make the management earn it. Create a Management Incentive Plan ("MIP"), for … Continue reading Don’t Allow Pride To Scuttle Your M&A Transaction
Many investors are aware of disruptive FinTech companies such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Betterment, PayPal, Robinhood, Square and Stripe to name a few. These companies are disrupting the legacy FinTech landscape as well as traditional Banks in the pursuit of customers, deposits and payment volume. There is a new disruptive FinTech organization in town … Continue reading Bank & FinTech Consolidation to Continue. Central Banks as Disruptors.
Newly public Endeavor Group (tkr: EDR) is valued at $13 billion. The spin transaction that we recommend is of Endeavor's "Owned Sports Properties" or "OSP", segment which primarily consists of the UFC led by UFC co-founder and president Dana White. That segment grew March Q revenue by 22% Y-O-Y to $284 million (see table below) … Continue reading Endeavor Should Spin-Off The UFC
Based on the inbound traffic to our CEORater and TEK2day properties our best guess is that M&A due diligence is taking place for a deal between some combination of Fiserv (FISV), FIS Global (FIS) and Global Payments (GPN). The last time we saw this type of activity on our platform was in the several months … Continue reading Deals Brewing Based On CEORater and TEK2day Traffic?
Amazon has likely done the math and concluded that acquiring a proven film library (MGM owns the rights to the Bond franchise) has a superior risk reward as compared to building a content library from scratch. It remains to be seen how competitive such a prospective deal would be as Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger … Continue reading Amazon & MGM? Bezos & Bond?
Will Apple, Disney or Netflix pursue an acquisition of NewCo? Last year we wrote that AT&T should sell WarnerMedia. On Monday AT&T (tkr: T) led by John Stankey agreed to spin-off its WarnerMedia asset and to combine it with John Malone's Discovery (tkr: DISCA) in a new, publicly-traded company led by Discovery CEO David Zaslav. … Continue reading AT&T Took Our Advice But It Does Not Solve The Scale Problem
PayPal recently announced that it is moving core applications to Google Cloud. The PayPal Google Cloud relationship is not new (read more here). However, what is interesting to us is that Bill Ready (Google Commerce leader having joined Google in January 2020) is PayPal's former COO. Further, Google Commerce could use a boost in its … Continue reading PayPal’s Google Cloud Relationship Could Foreshadow A Future Deal
Our past two articles focused on Advanced Automation manifested through the application of broadly-defined Artificial Intelligence as applied to Enterprise Software. Continuing the Advanced Automation theme, we expect food producers, automobile producers, retailers and other operations to accelerate their adoption of various forms of advanced automation including Robotics and automated payments (think Amazon Go's cashierless … Continue reading Inflation and Regulation Will Accelerate Adoption of Advanced Automation
Perhaps that recommendation is a bit harsh and unexpected coming from me, someone who is a staunch advocate of strategic M&A. However, the fact is that interest rates are historically low and valuations will remain historically high until such time as interest rates begin to rise. As we recently wrote, equity valuations have the looming … Continue reading Put Your Strategic M&A Team On Ice
