tyb
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire to invest $10-billion in Occidental for Anadarko buy
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc will put $10 billion behind Occidental Petroleum Corp’s bid as it tries to see off competition from Chevron Corp to buy smaller rival Anadarko Petroleum Corp.
Occidental and Chevron Corp are locked in the biggest oil-industry takeover in years as they eye Anadarko’s prized assets in West Texas’ huge Permian shale oil field.
Anadarko on Monday agreed to start negotiations with Occidental on its $38 billion cash-and-stock bid, compared with Chevron’s offer of $33 billion.
Analysts said Buffett’s seal of approval supports Occidental’s push to get the deal done but comes at a high cost.
Berkshire’s preferred stock will accrue dividends at 8 per cent per annum, compared with about 5 per cent yield on common equity and 4 per cent on term debt, Tudor Pickering Holt analyst Matthew Portillo said.
Berkshire Hathaway will get 100,000 preferred shares and a warrant to purchase up to 80 million shares of Occidental at $62.50 apiece in a private offering.
“For Occidental shareholder, our view is this is a fairly expensive cost of financing for the transaction even though it carries a kind of nice headline of having Berkshire Hathaway participate in the potential financing here.”
Shares of Occidental were down 3.9 per cent at $57.76, while those in Anadarko were down about 1.6 per cent at $71.71. Chevron shares were up 3.5 per cent at $121.81.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, Chevron has four days after being notified by Anadarko’s board to respond with a counter-offer. If Anadarko proceeds with a sale to Occidental, it will have to pay Chevron a $1 billion deal breakup fee.
Occidental and Chevron, two of the largest oil and gas producers in the Permian by production volumes, argue they can best squeeze more oil from Anadarko’s 240,000 acres in the area.
The two companies control land adjacent to Anadarko’s properties and expect a deal will add deposits that can produce supplies for decades using low-cost drilling techniques.
Berkshire’s backing for Occidental’s bid comes after analysts’ and investors widely perceived Anadarko’s return to negotiation as a breakthrough in Occidental Chief Executive Vicki Hollub’s two-year effort to buy the company.
Berkshire’s investment is contingent upon Occidental entering into a deal with Anadarko and completing the proposed acquisition.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-warren-buffetts-berkshire-to-invest-10-billion-in-occidental-for/
See this too
U.S. SEC freezes assets over suspected insider trading in Anadarko
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday obtained an asset freeze in connection with suspected insider trading in Anadarko Petroleum Corp before the oil company agreed to be acquired by rival Chevron Corp.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-anadarko-petrol-m-a-chevron-sec/u-s-sec-freezes-assets-over-suspected-insider-trading-in-anadarko-idUSKCN1S51KF
not true. could easily pull an ebot(but not with graphics) but don't. You should think about that before you say you have it all "figured out"
5:5 displayed
Google sales growth is slowing, and it sure would be nice to know why
Alphabet’s frustrating lack of disclosures could hurt the company as investors are left to wonder about source of slowdown
Alphabet Inc.’s revenue growth is slowing down, but the lack of details about its business still doesn’t seem to be changing.
The Google parent company GOOG, -8.19% GOOGL, -8.05% reported first-quarter results Monday that showed revenue of $29.5 billion after traffic-acquisition costs, lower than analysts had expected. Overall sales growth for Alphabet slowed to 16.7%, or 18.6% when factoring in TAC, the slowest rate for the online-advertising giant since the fourth quarter of 2015.
For a typical company, an investor could poke through the different segments and find the businesses that have contributed most to the slowdown, then decide if that was scary enough for them to drop the stock. Executives would then be asked specific questions about those segments on a conference call, and respond with more information that would be helpful in making the decision.
Alphabet, though, is not a typical company. It combines all of its advertising revenue — including its massive search business and its large and influential YouTube business — into one completely opaque revenue bucket that dominates its financial performance. It bundles a hardware division, its app store and its Google Cloud enterprise-tech arm, three incredibly disparate businesses, into a single entity that never is separated into its different parts. It bundles everything else into “Other Bets,” a collection of young, money-losing businesses.
Forthcoming executives aren’t Alphabet’s style either. During the company’s conference call with analysts Monday, currency fluctuations and the timing of ad-product changes that were never described were the excuses executives attempted to make. There were a few references to Alphabet’s very strong fourth quarter, where the “tough compare” language starting to emerge. The company sparingly referenced issues with its Pixel smartphone, due to tough competition in the premium smartphone market, but few details emerged there as well.
“Hardware results reflect lower year-on-year sales of Pixel reflecting in part heavy promotional activity industrywide given some of the recent pressures in the premium smartphone market,” Alphabet Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said in what passes as disclosure in a Google earnings call.
Other revenue for Google was $5 billion, up 25% year over year, fueled by Google Cloud and the Google Play Store and “partially offset by hardware,” she noted. But it isn’t clear how much each of those businesses contributed to the overall $5 billion. One analyst asked when investors might look for Alphabet to start breaking out its Cloud business revenue or even its growth rate.
Executives said they would share more information at “an appropriate time.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/guid/0F7ED2CA-6ACA-11E9-AF81-D3EEB031C30C
This is a much different angle then in year's past. Usually financial media stay FAR away from having critical remarks as they know where the bread is buttered.
it certainly not an issue, a little annoying as they cover many of them too well-have glasses-but that's life.
They need to fix the access to the meme folder for posting…..only issue. The rest is just bitching imo
they are simply not reporting it Similar to NFLX who does not report subscriber acquisition costs
(SAC) and have not for a bout 2 plus year's.
Don't like the result's?…don't report them. Have not pulled the 10-Q yet but it's going to say the same thing as Q4-2018. Those been laughable for many year's