Word: merger
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fight was a quintessential '90s struggle that reflected the merger mania sweeping the communications industry and the quest for films, TV shows and other programming to run on the much anticipated electronic superhighway. Companies now feel compelled to bulk up to colossal size to compete with giants like Time Warner or huge telephone-cable-TV combines like the proposed merger of Bell Atlantic and Tele-Communications...
...advisers who hunkered down to a Sunday-afternoon skull session in the well-appointed 49th-floor midtown- Manhattan offices of Robert Greenhill, the chairman of investment firm Smith Barney Shearson. Four days earlier, on Jan. 12, Paramount directors had spurned a sweetened Viacom bid and backed a $10 billion merger with Barry Diller's QVC home-shopping network. Unless Viacom came back fast and hard, everyone present knew, the fight would soon be over...
...scheme he said would blow away Diller. The novel plan called for issuing a type of security, called a contingent value right, CVR, or "collar," that would guarantee the value of Viacom's bid if Viacom stock failed to reach a certain price level within three years of the merger. The guarantee could cost Viacom an extra $1 billion or so under the worst scenario, but if the stock hit or surpassed the target, the collar would cost the company nothing...
...left Viacom with $10 billion of debt and exacted a heavy toll on the company's shareholders and allies. Redstone concedes that the battle forced him to cough up some $1.5 billion more than he intended to pay when Viacom and Paramount unveiled their original merger agreement last Sept. 12. Since then the price of Viacom Class-B stock has shrunk more than 50%, falling from 56 3/4 to 25 3/4 last Friday as investors reckoned that the cost ! of the merger would hammer the company's profits for years...
Viacom couldn't afford to let Blockbuster get away, because Redstone needed the video chain's financial clout to defeat Diller and then help pay interest on the debt after the Paramount merger. So Greenhill, whose firm earned $12.5 million for advising Viacom, resorted to a game of high-stakes financial chicken. He allowed the Blockbuster talks to break off rather than accede to Berrard's demands. At the same time, Greenhill instructed Levitt to maintain contact with his pal Berrard. The strategy paid off on Christmas Day, when Levitt, calling from New Jersey on his Jeep Cherokee car phone...