Minggu, 17 April 2016

Betaville

Betaville

Exxon Mobil said to have abandoned £70 billion BP takeover deal

Posted: 16 Apr 2016 12:03 PM PDT

Kleinman, of Sky News, today published a rather intriguing story about a £6 billion takeover bid for J Sainsbury that has just been "abandoned". The thing is, the market never knew about this takeover bid in the first place.

Still, Kleinman's story is extremely detailed. If you haven't read it, click on the link below:

http://news.sky.com/story/1679845/cvc-and-qatar-abandon-6bn-sainsbury-s-bid

The level of detail in Kleinman's tale implies the story must be bang on but it presents a rather large conundrum for Sunday newspapers up against a Saturday deadline: should the Sunday business pages follow the story for tomorrow's edition given the deal is old and no longer "live"?

Indeed, when I worked full-time in newsrooms there was always a lively debate (also known as screaming rows) with various news editors, section heads and rival colleagues about whether running "old" or "stale" deal stories was really worthwhile for the readers. I mean, some of my bosses were vehemently against running those type of stories because it wasn't "news" (you can see their point) if the deal is no longer being worked on.

But M&A reporters (including myself) tend to be biased given they toile pretty hard to dig up extremely sensitive information and there is always the argument that whilst the deal might have been shelved it could quite easily be rekindled (I saw this happen on numerous occasions), so the the "old" or "stale" story is worth running and in the readers' interest.

And it's tough times at the moment in the M&A reporting game, especially in the UK, as the first quarter has seen a bit of slowdown in volumes, meaning there are less public company deal stories to go for and the deals that are being worked on are kept extremely hush hush.

So, to make up for the lack "live" deals tales it nows appears to be in vogue to run deals-abandoned stories.

Well, if that's the case here is one I heard last week from an old contact over a drink in rather salubrious Mayfair eaterie.

Apparently, takeover talks between US oil giant Exxon Mobil and London-listed BP got rather serious towards the back end of last year.

However, according my well-placed source the mega merger was "abandoned" at the end of 2015 although it's not entirely clear why. So, I guess that's the end of that then...
Diposting oleh di

Tidak ada komentar:

Posting Komentar

Langganan: Posting Komentar (Atom)