On your hook, Elon, so stop whining about bots and stop speculating about a lower cost of swallowing. When we agreed on an offer of $ 54.20 per share in cash, you waived your right to conduct due diligence. Look busy and make every effort to go beyond the deal, as you are legally obliged to do.
This was not exactly the tone of a statement on Twitter on Tuesday about how he “commits to complete the transaction at the agreed price and conditions”, but it may be so. After days of diverting comments from Elon Musk, Twitter is trying to get the script back to basics. A $ 44 billion deal (35 billion pounds) has been negotiated and a bidder cannot speculate on whether to put it on hold until he looks under the hood again.
With regard to the pure rights and mistakes of opposition, sympathy is entirely on Twitter. Once the terms of the takeover have been agreed, it doesn’t matter if the ratio of useless bots – or fake accounts – on a social media site is below 5% (as the company says) or a multiple of that figure. Musk had a chance to ask for 5% proof before concluding a binding contract, but he did not take it. As one of his big pre-bids boasts about how he will remove spam content and restore Twitter to real users, he can’t say he wasn’t aware of the debate over the accuracy of Twitter’s measurement system. His behavior is disgraceful.
However, it can be effective. The Twitter board will have a choice of only two unattractive options if Musk says he is willing to continue only at a lower bid. The first would be to refuse to play ball and ask the courts to impose the takeover agreement. This time it involves a long battle and, almost certainly, another blow to the stock price, which has already collapsed to its pre-$ 37 bid. The second option would be to turn around and negotiate.
The assumption here is that the Twitter board will accept the humiliation of renegotiation, mutter a few words about market volatility, and clothe the reverse as an act of pragmatism. There will still be no guarantee of conditions, of course. But, as Neil Campling, head of technology research at Mirabaud, says, no new entrant will emerge to save the day, and “Musk knows he has all the cards in this poker game.”
One rather hopes that the Twitter board will try to solve the problem. Musk’s tactics increasingly resemble a cynical trick to weaken his target before he starts killing. We can enjoy the sport – and the Twitter board can probably be accused of being naive – but the simple principle behind this saga is still worth defending. Tenderers must keep their promises.
Vodafone’s challenge is to make deals fast
The feeling that Vodafone is a big beast moving terribly slowly will not change as CEO Nick Reed offers such boring summaries for the end of the year: “Our short-term operational and portfolio priorities remain unchanged from those announced six months ago. “He said, along with figures for the whole year. The pulses did not race.
To be honest with Read, the operating figures within Vodafone’s “adjusted” profit of € 15.2 billion, an increase of 5%, were right. Profit margins were the best since 2009. In the UK, the withdrawal rate – the ratio of customers leaving – was the lowest ever. The only real drawback was Germany, where the operation appears to be slowly adapting to regulatory changes.
But the focus of investors today is on these “portfolio priorities”, which means making deals to make Vodafone’s empire simpler and take advantage of the wave of telecommunications consolidation in Europe. On this front, Read announced “live opportunities in a number of markets,” but investors have already speculated that this is a lot. The challenge is to find an opportunity.
Competition regulators are circling the corporate dance floor, so no one can pretend that making deals is easy, but Reed needs to know that he is under increasing pressure to do some form of shaking over the next 12 months. A combo with Three in the UK is an obvious possibility, but the list of ideas goes through Spain, Italy, Portugal and probably the Netherlands.
The arrival of Emirates Telecommunications Group as a nearly 10% shareholder is unlikely to heat up immediately, as the public position of the UAE-based group is (so far) sweetly supportive. But the other 90% of investors also matter. They bought the thesis that Vodafone has a value that needs to be unlocked, but the soothing share price remains stubbornly unsettled.
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