The domination of these three browsers would make Facebook’s effort an uphill battle. But it has 900 million members that it can market the browser to. It is worth remembering that Google’s Chrome was only released at the end of 2008. Google made a successful attempt to convert visitors to its search feature to convert them from Internet Explorer and Firefox.By some measures, Chrome is the most widely used browser in the world

The first report of the possible buyout was reported by website Pocket-Lint. Its editors wrote:

Pocket-lint has heard from one of its trusted sources that the social networking giant is looking to buy Opera Software, the company behind the Opera web browser.

Douglas A. McIntyre

DT lost $39 billion when federal officials killed a deal for AT&T (NYSE: T) to buy T-Mobile. The German company stepped away with a $4 billion break-up fee. That is not nearly enough to maintain and build the infrastructure T-Mobile needs to compete in new 4G technology. T-Mobile also has nothing close to the marketing money AT&T and Verizon Wireless have. Neither does T-Mobile have the Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone — the greatest customer magnet in the industry.

DT has access to capital to pump billions of dollars into T-Mobile, but it will not. T-Mobile has only 35 million subscribers. Fourth place in the market is not attractive, especially when even the third place company — Sprint-Nextel (NYSE: S) — is struggling with losses and subscriber attrition. AT&T and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) are too big and have too much market share to be challenged. And the wireless subscriber level in the U.S. is nearly 300 million. In other words, without a growing pie, the battle is over market share.

There is often speculation that Sprint and T-Mobile might combine. Yet, two weak companies cannot make a strong one. Sprint is also saddled with debt, and the infrastructures of the firms are not compatible.

T-Mobile has been orphaned by its own parent, and no company will risk picking it up.

Douglas A. McIntyre

The companies announced that SAP America has entered into an agreement to acquire Ariba for its cloud-based business commerce network at a price of $45.00 per share.  This generates and enterprise value (equity and debt) of about $4.3 billion.  The Ariba board of directors has already approved the transaction unanimously and the buyout represents a 20% premium over the May 21 closing price.

Today’s acquisition will combine Ariba’s buyer-seller collaboration network with SAP’s customer base and business process expertise “to create new models for business-to-business collaboration in the cloud.”

SAP is worth almost $70 billion in market value and its $58.77 share price for ADRs compares to a 52-week range of $47.39 to $72.52. Ariba shares were up 0.8% at $37.96 before being halted and the 52-week range is $21.90 to $40.45. With Thomson Reuters having a consensus estimate of $0.99 EPS for 2012, SAP is effectively paying 45-times earnings for Ariba.

JON C. OGG

RailAmerica, Inc. (NYSE: RA) recently announced the redemption of $74 million in its remaining 9.25% notes due in 2017.  That is not enough to move the needle on a stock by much that is worth over $1 billion in market value.  What can move a stock this much is takeover chatter.  The Jacksonville Business Journal is quoting Trains Magazine noting that Fortress Investment Group LLC is looking to sell its majority stake in RailAmerica.

Warren Buffett was listed as on potential acquirer and RailAmerica has 45 individual railroad lines with approximately 7,500 miles of track throughout 28 states in America and another three Canadian provinces.

RailAmerica shares are up almost 6% at $22.81 against a 52-week trading range of $11.06 to $23.90.  Its market value is listed as $1.15 billion according to Yahoo! Finance.

Until news gets more concrete, we would only treat reports of this sort as a market rumor.

JON C. OGG

Wanda is transforming into a global cinema chain owner with this now culminating two of the world’s largest movie markets.  Wanda is private and most recently had more than $16 billion in annual sales from its commercial development and entertainment operations.  It currently owns some 86 theaters in China which was a total of about 730 movie screens.

So, here is Wanda is getting: 346 multiplex theaters located mostly in North America and a total of just over 5,000 movie screens.  This comes to a value of almost $517,000 per screen or just over $7.5 million per theater on average.

Cinemark Holdings Inc. (NYSE: CNK) operates 459 theatres with 5,181 screens in the United States and in the Americas.  It has a market value today of $2.6 billion and shares are up almost 1% at $23.09 against a 52-week range of $17.10 to $24.45.  That value is roughly the same as the AMC deal today.  The value here is almost $502,000 per screen or just over $5.65 million per screen.

Regal Entertainment Group (NYSE: RGC) recently said that is the largest and most geographically diverse theatre circuit in the United States: 6,580 screens in 522 theatres in 37 states and D.C. as of April 26, 2012.  Shares are up 3.3% at $14.04 against a 52-week range of $11.15 to $14.74 and its market value is listed as $2.16 billion as of now. This value is about $328,000 per screen and about $4.13 million per theater.

Carmike Cinemas Inc. (NASDAQ: CKEC) is the baby of the group with a market value of only $262 million.  As of December 31, 2011, it owned, operated, or had an interest in 237 theatres with 2,254 screens located in 35 states. Shares are up 3.4% at $14.79 against a 52-week range of $5.14 to $15.80.  The value here is down at about $116,000 per screen or about %1.1 million per theater.

Whether or not this drives up the price of feature films will only be known through time, and that may depend upon the movie studios more than the actual theaters.  Still, the value of movie screens and movie theaters just went up.

Not bad considering that the lion share of profits for theaters come from selling popcorn, food, fountain drinks, and candy.

JON C. OGG

What is interesting here is that this suddenly makes the new portfolio management team at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK-A)(NYSE: BRK-B) have to consider whether or not the “forever” time period applies to its relatively new investment here.

HealthCare Partners operates centers in Central Florida, Southern Nevada and also in Southern California. The outfit has just over 150 clinics, about 700 staff physicians, and it has a network comprised of over 8,300 doctors who operate independently. It provides and coordinates these services to over 667,000 managed care patients on a comprehensive capitated basis.

The terms of the deal call for DaVita to pay $3.66 billion in cash from its cash on hand and to borrow under its credit facility and to take on new debt.  The company also plans to issue almost 9.4 million shares valued at another $758 million or so before the dilution and there may be another $250 million or so in cash payments to partners if certain milestones are reached.

HealthCare Partners generated about $2.4 billion in sales and operating income was roughly $488 million in 2011.  DaVita generated $6.98 billion in sales with $1.13 billion in operating income in 2011.

Our question is whether or not this implies that DaVita is wanting to diversify further and further away from kidney care.  HealthCare Partners is called “a leader in multispecialty integrated and coordinated care delivery” and its website shows a much more general angle of care compared to DaVita.

Buffett’s most recent Berkshire Hathaway holdings shows in the filing that his 6 million shares were worth $90.17 at the March 31 cut-off date. DaVita shares are now down 1.8% at $79.35.

JON C. OGG

The acquisition will result in the formation of a new company to be called (something like) Eaton Global Corp. plc and will be based in Ireland. Alexander Cutler, Eaton’s current CEO and Chairman, will head the new company. The deal is expected to close in the second half of 2012, pending shareholder and regulatory approvals.

Current Eaton shareholders will receive one share of the new company’s stock for every share of Eaton they now own. When the deal is completed, Eaton’s current shareholders will own about 73% of the new company. The stock is expected to continue trading on the NYSE under the ‘ETN’ stock symbol.

The combined company will have a market cap of around $25 billion, about the same size as Illinois Tool Works Inc. (NYSE: ITW) and slightly larger than Johnson Controls Inc. (NYSE: JCI). Another electrical equipment maker, Parker Hannifin Corp. (NYSE: PH), is about half the size of the combined Eaton-Cooper entity.

Shares of Cooper are up 25% in the first half-hour of trading this morning, at $69.80 in a 52-week range of $41.15-$71.37. Eaton stock is down about -0.6% at $42.13 in a 52-week range of $33.09-$53.23.

Paul Ausick

A report at Reuters names South Korea’s SK Hynix and US chip maker GlobalFoundries as two firms the unhappy bondholders have begun discussions with. At the time that Micron was declared the winning bidder, the only other competitor was a combined bid from two Japanese private equity firms.

If a couple of private equity firms think that Elpida is worth less than Micron thinks it’s worth, then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to believe that either Hynix or GlobalFoundries will think Elpida is worth more. Elpida’s debt is more than double the price Micron has offered to pay, so it’s no surprise that the bondholders want to smoke out a higher bid. At best they’re probably hoping to get another bid that is slightly better than Micron’s in the hope that Micron will bid again. Another possibility is that one of the private equity firms will take part with one of the chip makers, lowering the amount of capital at risk, but likely to muddy the waters over who’s in charge and what the strategy should be going forward.

Micron’s shares are up 0.8% in the pre-market, at $5.67 in a 52-week range of $3.97-$10.23.

Paul Ausick

Icahn’s offer of $30/share for CVR’s two refineries and majority stake in fertilizer maker CVR Partners L.P. (NYSE: UAN) also includes a contingency payment if he is able to sell the company’s bits for more than that. The two refineries are relatively small, totaling about 185,000 barrels/day together, and are not likely to fetch much more than $200-$250 million. The value will be in the crude stocks, and that’s been dropping every day for more than a month now. The fertilizer operation is solid, but small.

Don’t be surprised if Icahn holds on to CVR for longer than many people expected. The value is in the crude and he can probably afford to wait for the price to go back up.

Paul Ausick

The announcement is a coup for Yahoo!’s interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, although the buyout must have been in the works long before he began his job earlier this month. What Yahoo! did not say as its reported on the agreement is what it will do with the money. That will be as crucial to Yahoo!’s share price, and perhaps its future, as anything the company has done in the past year — with the possible exception of changing CEOs twice.

Yahoo!’s market cap is just short of $19 billion, so the firm certainly could offer a dividend. That will not satisfy shareholders who have concerns about the viability of the portal company over the longer term. Yahoo! could buy back close to 20% of its shares and automatically raise its earnings per share. Shareholders may not be impressed with that move. Share buybacks rarely have been a way for shareholders to gain long-term value in troubled companies.

Beyond a these traditional uses of capital to enhance shareholder value are others that are more radical. One is a special dividend. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) did this in 2004. AOL (NYSE: AOL) plans to make a similar move with the just over $1 billion it got from the license and sales of some of its patents to Microsoft. Each was part of a plan to get cash on its balance sheet to shareholders immediately. The sum per share, however, in Yahoo!’s case would be relatively modest. Yahoo! has more than 1.2 billion shares outstanding.

If none of these is the route Yahoo! takes, the board and management are left with the option of making a quick M&A deal to enhance the company’s position as a content company. Yahoo!’s weakness in social media is obvious. But the $4 billion it has left after taxes may not be enough to buy a social media firm. Twitter, for example, has a valuation of at least $8 billion, based on the last time it raised money. If Yahoo! could raise additional cash to make an offer, a bidding war would ensue. Yahoo! does not have access to the capital necessary to win an auction. There are plenty of smaller social media companies, but not many that would make Yahoo! a force in the sector.

Yahoo! could also buy a large traditional media company and try to strengthen that company’s online presence. Yahoo! has the traffic to make such a plan work. Among the corporations it could afford is Gannett (NYSE: GCI), the largest newspaper company in the United States. It has a market cap of $3 billion. But, aside from Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK-B), who can afford to own newspapers as a hobby? Not a single analyst on Wall St. believes that papers have much of a long-term future.

Yahoo! is about to have a lot of money. Along with that will be a several options for what to do with it, none of which is terribly attractive.

Douglas A. McIntyre