The hurdles to a Hershey-Cadbury tie-up are by now well aired.
Hershey has a smaller market cap than Cadbury, would need to take on crippling amounts of debt to finance a deal, and the Hershey Charitable Trust would be loath to relinquish control in any new company.
Elsewhere on Friday,
- Investing fads and themes by year, 1996 to present.
- Unintended consequences on Wall Street.
- Chart of the day: How the old gold bugs lost control.
- Analyst date night:
Breaking pre-market news on Friday,
- Gartmore announces intention to list on the LSE - statement.
- Nationwide Building Society posts half-year PBT of £143m - statement.
- Big shareholders ask Goldman Sachs to cut bonuses - WSJ (via Reuters).
Birds Eye Foods is being sold by its private equity owners for $1.3bn to Blackstone’s Pinnacle Foods, it was announced on Thursday. The deal, to be funded with $300m in additional equity from Blackstone and $1bn in debt,
Five private equity groups are among the first-round bidders for Matalan, the privately owned UK discount clothing retailer that is being auctioned with an estimated price tag of about £1.5bn. TPG, Blackstone,
US authorities blocked Minsheng, the Chinese bank, from acquiring a Californian lender in a deal that could have saved almost $300m of taxpayers’ money and $1.4bn from an industry insurance fund, it has emerged.
JPMorgan Cazenove on Thursday stressed that it saw scope to make more of the synergies between itself and the UK broker, as it confirmed details of a £1bn takeover deal. JPMorgan is paying 535p a share for Cazenove – 25p in the form of a dividend next month and the rest when the transaction closes early next year.The transaction consummates the joint venture,
A solution to facilitate a Cadbury-Hershey merger and repel Kraft’s $16.6bn hostile bid for the UK confectioner has been outlined in a letter to Cadbury CEO Todd Stitzer from the special situations team at brokerage GFI,
…and a few words.
There was, to put it mildly, an unusually high level of interest in Colgate Palmolive on Wednesday night.
Both in its shares:
And in its November and December call options:
Hershey’s market capitalisation: $8.6bn
The amount of debt HSY needs to buy Cadbury: $9bn
Jump in HSY 5-year CDS price move after HSY confirmed its interest: 33 per cent
A pretty chart of Hershey’s equity versus 5-year CDS,
JPMorgan will on Thursday unveil a £1bn deal to buy Cazenove, the UK broker with which it has had a joint venture for the past five years. The bank will pay about 535p a share in a deal in which David Mayhew,
Mitsubishi Chemical, Japan’s biggest chemical maker, offered Y228bn ($2.56bn) for Mitsubishi Rayon, reuniting with the synthetic- fiber maker almost 60 years after they split, reports Bloomberg. Mitsubishi Rayon investors will be offered Y380 a share,
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group plans to raise up to Y1,000bn ($11.2bn) in a sale of new shares and delay by two months the planned merger of its securities arm with Morgan Stanley’s Japanese brokerage unit,
Morgan Stanley will not fully integrate its Japanese operations with Mitsubishi UFJ Securities as originally planned in a deal agreed last year with MUFG, Japan’s biggest bank confirmed on Wednesday. Instead there will be two entities,
American Express on Wednesday said it would purchase Revolution Money, an online payments business set up by former AOL chief Steve Case. The $300m deal gives Amex, known as the premium credit card provider with the highest fees,
Hershey and Ferrero on Wednesday revealed that they were weighing up whether to enter the bid battle for Cadbury, the rival UK confectionery company that is fighting off a £9.9bn hostile offer from Kraft Foods of the US.
China Investment Corp has bought a HK$5.5bn ($710m) stake in a Hong Kong-based solar power component maker as the sovereign wealth fund invests in energy and commodities companies to hedge against inflation,
Gavan Nolan of Markit wrote this CDS report
European credit indices tightened slightly today, a creditable performance given the volatility in equity markets. The Markit iTraxx Europe index was about 1bp tighter at 82bp,
Further to Wednesday morning’s Gazprom bid rumours, here’s a Bloomberg screen shot that shows the open interest in Centrica December 09 call options.
So, that’s almost 20,000 contracts.
Either the market believes this hardy perennial of a takeover story,
So, Hershey has entered the fray.
From RNS on Wednesday:
The Hershey Company (”Hershey”) notes the recent press speculation regarding a potential offer for Cadbury. Hershey confirms that it is reviewing its options and at this stage there can be no assurance that any proposal or offer from Hershey will be forthcoming.
Insurance - and particularly life insurance - has become one of Asia’s hotbeds for M&A activity. Here are just some of the deals or bids reported in the last month or so alone:
The biggest - and as yet unresolved - bid is the unsolicited A$11bn ($10.2bn) bid by Axa and Australia’s AMP on November 9 for Axa’s majority-owned Asian business,
It’s over.
As the FT revealed overnight, ITV has finally found a chairman: failed MP former Asda and Energis boss Archie Norman.
And the broadcaster is making the most of Norman’s CV, with a detailed biography in Wednesday’s press release:
It was portrayed as both a godsend for Morgan Stanley and something of a coup for Mitsubishi MUFJ Group, Japan’s biggest bank, when in October 2008 it emerged that MUFG would take a 20 per cent stake in the US bank for $9bn.
Elsewhere on Wednesday,
- The madness of the inflation hawks.
- IPOs are back.
- Adam Smith in 10 minutes.
- Can options spikes be a coincidence?
- Faber on gold, and just about everything else.
US chocolate giant Hershey is considering launching a bid for Cadbury – possibly in partnership with Italy’s Ferrero - that could help the UK confectioner fend off a hostile takeover by Kraft Foods,
Delta Airlines and alliance partners have prepared a $1bn package for Japan Airlines to lure the carrier from a grouping with American Airlines, reports Bloomberg. Delta and other SkyTeam members may buy $500m in Japan Air shares or convertible securities,
SC Johnson & Son has joined the bidding for Sara Lee’s air-freshener business, potentially creating a formidable player in Europe’s household-care products business, reports the WSJ. Bidding for the unit,
Chinatrust plans to pay $660m for a 30% stake in Nan Shan Life, Taiwan’s second-largest life insurer, after losing its bid to buy the business from AIG, reports Bloomberg. Chinatrust, Taiwan’s third-biggest financial company by market cap,
Shares in Hynix Semiconductor, the South Korean chipmaker, fell on Tuesday after Korea Exchange Bank admitted that creditors might be forced to divest part of their stake in a block sale on the stock market.
One of Bank of America’s leading directors described the acquisition of Merrill Lynch as a “bad mistake” that the bank was “pressured” into completing by the government, according to an email turned over to a congressional committee.
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