- Murdoch seeks to negotiate Dow deal away from spotlight
- ABN leaves door open to consortium
- Atticus slams planned D.Boerse-ISE deal – source
- ICE confident 2 months into CBOT waiting game
- More headlines below
- Alltel Shares Advance on WSJ Report of Buyout Talks
- Airbus losses drag EADS into the red
- News Corp. Third-Quarter Profit Rises 6.2% on Films
- Heard on the Street: A New Test for Dow Jones – Thomson-Reuters Deal Raises Challenges
For Newswires Unit
Murdoch seeks to negotiate Dow deal away from spotlight
- The Times of London
Rupert Murdoch said yesterday that he hoped to negotiate to buy Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, out of the spotlight, in deference to the company’s owners, the Bancroft family.
The chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent of The Times, refused to set out detailed plans for the future of Dow Jones, as News Corp reported a 6 per cent increase in net income during the first three months of 2007.
Mr Murdoch said that the Bancrofts had “the right to deliberate on this decision in private” and that he “intended to honour their privacy on this [results] call today” – and he declined to spell out potential “areas for collaboration between our two companies”.
He did justify the $5 billion (£2.5 billion) approach in general terms, by saying that there were “two sorts of newspaper”: local newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer or the New York Post; and financial newspapers which “were something totally different”…..
ABN leaves door open to consortium
- Financial Times
ABN Amro on Monday left the door open for a consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland to make an offer for the Dutch lender, even though talks between the two sides broke down on Sunday night.
The Dutch bank will call an extraordinary meeting, probably in June, at which a vote will be taken on “the alternatives available to [shareholders] at that time”, it said on Monday.
The meeting is designed to let shareholders vote on the sale of ABN Amro’s US subsidiary, LaSalle, to Bank of America for $21bn (£10.5bn), part of a broader deal to sell the Dutch bank to Barclays…
Atticus slams planned D.Boerse-ISE deal – source
- Reuters
U.S. asset manager Atticus Capital is "very annoyed" over Deutsche Boerse’s (DB1Gn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research planned $2.8 billion acquisition of U.S. International Securities Exchange (ISE.N: Quote, Profile, Research, a Deutsche Boerse source said.
The source close to the German stock exchange operator’s supervisory board said on Wednesday that all supervisory board members as well as the executive board had received a letter from Atticus Capital criticising the deal.
Atticus Capital is Deutsche Boerse’s second-biggest shareholder and has pushed for bigger payouts of excess capital — something Deutsche Boerse put on hold following its agreed takeover of ISE….
ICE confident 2 months into CBOT waiting game
- Reuters
IntercontinentalExchange Inc. Research is confident its bid for CBOT Holdings Inc.
will be accepted and that it will be able to integrate the much larger exchange, Chief Executive Jeffrey Sprecher said on Wednesday.The upstart Atlanta energy exchange made a higher, unsolicited bid for the Chicago Board of Trade parent in March, throwing into chaos Chicago Mercantile Exchange Holdings Inc.’s (CME.N: Quote, Profile, Research plan to buy the number two U.S. futures exchange.
Almost two months on, ICE is waiting to hear whether CBOT is prepared to change course. CBOT’s board has been doing due diligence on the surprise ICE bid for several weeks and has said it will be done with that process soon…..
Alltel Shares Advance on WSJ Report of Buyout Talks
- Bloomberg
Alltel Corp. shares rose to their highest level in more than seven years after the Wall Street Journal reported the mobile-phone company is holding takeover talks with three groups of buyout firms.
Blackstone Group, TPG Capital LLC and Carlyle Group are among the companies meeting with Alltel management, the newspaper said, citing unidentified people familiar with the situation. The stock advanced 2.1 percent to $66.56 today, giving Alltel a market value of about $23 billion.
Private-equity firms may bid almost $70 a share for the Little Rock, Arkansas-based company, said Michael Nelson, an analyst at Stanford Group Co. Alltel, which provides wireless service mainly in rural areas of the U.S., said in February that it was exploring “a broad spectrum of options.”….
Airbus losses drag EADS into the red
- Financial Times
EADS, the leading European aerospace and defence group, reported a deficit for the first three months of the year under the burden of the losses and heavy restructuring costs of its Airbus commercial aircraft division.
The group said on Thursday that it had a net loss of €10m in the first three months compared with a net profit of €522m a year ago chiefly caused by a €688m restructuring provision at Airbus and the continuing costs of the A380 recovery programme.
The flagship A380 superjumbo programme is running more than two years late, as the group struggles to bring the world’s biggest commercial jet into series production. The first aircraft is due for delivery to Singapore Airlines in October…..
News Corp. Third-Quarter Profit Rises 6.2% on Films
- Bloomberg
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which is bidding $5 billion for Dow Jones & Co., said third-quarter profit rose 6.2 percent on sales gains at Fox News and movie studios.
Net income increased to $871 million, or 27 cents a share, in the three months ended March 31, from $820 million, or 26 cents, a year earlier, New York-based News Corp. said today in a statement. Sales rose 21 percent to $7.53 billion, beating the average analyst estimate of $6.73 billion.
Fox News, the most-watched U.S. news channel, raised rates and helped boost cable-network profit by 34 percent, while movie unit earnings soared 82 percent, buoyed by the box-office hit “Night at the Museum.” The gains illustrate why Murdoch was able to offer 65 percent more for Dow Jones than its stock market value…..
Heard on
the Street: A New Test for Dow Jones – Thomson-Reuters Deal Raises Challenges For Newswires Unit
- Wall Street Journal
When News Corp. launched its $60 a share bid for Dow Jones & Co., the first reaction — positive and negative — focused on what Rupert Murdoch would do if he controlled the parent of The Wall Street Journal.
But a separate proposed merger, the impending $17.6 billion deal between Reuters Group PLC and Thomson Corp., could have an impact. It could make some lesser-known but currently more-profitable elements of Dow Jones key factors as the company’s controlling shareholders weigh Mr. Murdoch’s offer.
The proposed tie-up between Reuters and Thomson surfaced just days after Mr. Murdoch’s bid became public. Such a deal promises to change the landscape for financial news and data…..
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