Corporate Espionage
Yesterday, the deal I've been working on, which has been very hush hush until then (as most M&A* deals should be), was on the front page of the Australian Financial Review. Months of secrecy down the drain with a single newspaper article.
Lots of people scrambling around (in 3 different countries) produced an official party line by 10 o'clock AEST in the morning. Very good scrambling around, if I might say.
We still don't know where the leak came from or what their intention was. I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
I barely talk about my work in this blog (other than a few breakdown updates) but this is very big news. At least for a day anyway. There's over 20 news articles about this the last time I searched Google news. For more info, here's one of them.
It really doesn't change what I'm doing or will be doing in the next few weeks. It could hurry along the process though. Which is a very good thing.
On a more personal note, I'm taking a mental health day today. I needed the rest. I've been rundown lately.
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*M&A - Mergers and Acquisitions
2 comments:
From Reuters:
"A San Miguel source told Reuters it was looking at selling up to 49 percent of National Foods, which it bought for A$1.9 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2005 in its biggest acquisition, to pay down debt and fund a move into mining, power and infrastructure at home."
Well, there is nothing new here. This has been talked about way back in 2005 (the 49% thing) when SMC first put in a bid for NF, in fact it was "leaked" by the President way back then, just after the deal was sealed, leading people to ask "why would they buy it, just to sell it again?"
A good idea, really - buy the company, merge with local entities, get some synergies, take some cash out, and then sell a non-controlling stake, in this case to a company that already has an "interest" in SMC...Kirin.
As for Australian synergies with the Lion Nathan business...you have to wonder about that, as the National Foods business has nothing really to do with the local James Boags business... unless they had further plans to leverage the "services" arms of the companies for common aspects such as Logistics, IT, Business Services etc. Why else would NF have recently restructured it's Executive to have a separate Executive in charge of Logistics, one in charge of IT and Business Services...but keep Phillipines appointed Executives in charge of Finance, and International?
Interesting times for all concerned...
Hey There :)
Its big news indeed..hope youre keeping well..and not working too many hours!
xo
karima
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