Posts for Ticker ‘VIA-B’

24/7 Wall St. TV: Viacom + Time Warner = Next Big Media Merger

No one would be surprised to see Sumner Redstone, the 86-year-old head of Viacom (NYSE:VIA), and Jeff Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner (NYSE:TWX), wearing disguises to their private meetings in coffee shops around Manhattan. The “merger” of GE’s (NYSE:GE) NBCU with the content assets of Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) is likely to have investment bankers looking at the logical combinations of other big media companies.

Time Warner and Viacom are particularly well matched. Each has a movie studio, and the flagship businesses of both companies are extremely successful cable channels. Read More »

Posted on: December 3, 2009 – 12:20 pm in Editor's Picks, Media, Mergers and Buy Outs, TV, , , , , ,

NBC Universal Gets A $30 Billion Valuation

TVNBC Universal, the entertainment arm of GE (NYSE:GE) which is 20% owned by Vivendi, is worth $30 billion. That is the figure that GE and Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA), the cable company that intends to take control of NBCU agree on. Vivendi may be willing to take $6 billion for its piece of NBCU and if so, the valuation is to some extent academic. The $30 billion will also decide how much money Comcast will put into the joint venture that will own NBCU.

The Wall Street Journal has made the point that Vivendi could walk away from selling its stake and ruin the entire transaction, but it is hard to see what the French company would gain from that. Read More »

Posted on: November 9, 2009 – 5:12 am in Media, Mergers and Buy Outs, , ,

Top Analyst Upgrades (ANF, CSCO, KO, GR, HMY, KSS, NWS-A, DIS, VIA-B)

These are this Wednesday mornings top pre-market analyst upgrades and positive research calls we have seen early on from Wall Street:

Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF) Raised to Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley.
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) Raised to Outperform at William Blair.
Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) Raised to Buy at Deutsche Bank.
Goodrich (NYSE: GR) Raised to Outperform at FBR Capital.
Harmony Gold (NYSE: HMY) Raised to Buy at Nomura.
Kohl’s (NYSE: KSS) Raised to Overweight at Morgan Stanley.
News Corp (NWS-A) Raised to Buy at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) Raised to Neutral at BofA/Merrill Lynch.
Viacom B (VIA-B) Raised to Neutral at BofA/Merrill Lynch.

You can join our open email distribution list which goes out several times per week for reminders of the top day trader alerts, analyst upgrades and downgrades, IPO’s, key secondary offerings, guru investor data on Buffett and others, mergers, and more.

JON C. OGG

Posted on: October 7, 2009 – 7:59 am in Analyst Calls, , , , , , , , ,