Merger and acquisition activity in the telecommunications market slowed in 2023. Around the globe, such activity reached a mere $61 billion in deal volume, down 15% from 2022. Furthermore, the deal value numbers may be misleadingly high, because a single deal -- an outlier -- made them look respectable. Telecomm Italian agreed to sell its fixed network business to KKR and that is a $23.3 billion deal, almost two fifths of the whole. I'm sure the question on your collective mind right now is -- "Wait: KKR is betting on old-school landlines?" But let us move on to another question. Why this decline in deal value? Here is a short answer. Interest rates have persisted at high levels for years now. Central bankers stopped raising them, but this was a pause AT a high level, with the bankers taking a "high for longer" stance rather than "an even higher peak for shorter". The plateau is more annoying that the peak would have been, if you are tryin...
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Yahoo as an independent corporation is coming to an end. The core business, as I mentioned in a blog entry last week, will become part of Verizon. Other non-core assets will remain as part of a holding company, but that holding company will change its name, so as not to interfere with the value of Verizon's rights to the :"Yahoo" brand. Last week's brief comment was about what Verizon sees in the deal. This, as advertised, is a requiem for Yahoo! Yahoo had its beginnings in 1994, and was first known as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. What Jerry (Yang) and his partner David Filo offered was a web portal combined with a search engine: they offered the keys to the kingdom, letting people play in this new limitless cyberworld. What is more, they did so … for free. You didn’t have to pay anyone a dime to use their search engine, to make their home page your own, or to start receiving email at mail.yahoo.com. This was for the time revolutionary, and the ...
On November 19th, a state court in California enjoined a hostile acquisition on the ground that the bidder misused confidential information. As Wachtell Lipton said in a memo to clients, the case is an instructive instance of how confidentiality agreements can have important unintended consequences. The decision is DEPOMED v. HORIZON PHARMA. Here's a link, if you care to study the point further. The litigation arises in the context of an ongoing consolidation in the world of Big Pharma. I hope to say something more directly about that consolidation in this blog soon. Just take this post as a promissory note.