LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Paying a 38% premium is usually a sure-fire way to destroy value. Not so with bookmaker Flutter Entertainment, which is offering $6.1 billion in shares to buy Canadian peer Stars Group. Cost savings alone almost justify the generous price, while post-deal revenue boosters look credible.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - The collapsed 36 billion euro marriage of carmakers Renault and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles still makes a lot of sense. Yet that becomes less true with every day that passes.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Adam Neumann is in a bind. The WeWork founder needs to raise at least $3 billion through an initial public offering to unlock another $6 billion of bank credit. But The We Company has shelved its float due to weak demand from investors. Without the cash, growth will dip, potentially pushing the office-sharing startup’s value even lower.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - The new European Commission has got off to a good start before it has even started work. Denmark’s Margrethe Vestager will hold onto the competition tsar role in which she has already spent five years ruffling feathers on both sides of the Atlantic. That wins incoming president of the European Union executive, Ursula von der Leyen, kudos even before she takes office.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Pity Adam Neumann. Mere months ago the WeWork co-founder’s bankers touted a $65 billion public-market value for the office sublessor’s parent, according to news reports. Now his biggest backer, Japan's SoftBank, is urging him to scrap an initial public offering that may peg The We Company's worth at less than $20 billion, according to the Financial Times. The problem is that WeWork may not last long without the proceeds of an IPO.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has prorogued parliament, cutting the time available for lawmakers to thwart a planned Oct. 31 EU departure. What does this mean for Brexit and the UK economy? Plus: we pick through the wreckage of China’s crashing automotive market.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Few legacies are either wholly good or bad. Volkswagen’s current management could be forgiven for feeling particularly ambivalent about the heritage of Ferdinand Piech, the company’s former chief executive and chairman who died aged 82 on Sunday.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Who gets to tax Google and Facebook? That’s the kernel of a highly technical debate going on between 130 countries via the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Major European governments want more cash from Big Tech groups, but the Americans are likely to resist. It makes a self-imposed 2020 deadline tricky - and raises the possibility of uncoordinated local levies followed by punitive U.S. countermeasures.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - SoftBank is stretching the concept of “skin in the game” to breaking point. The Japanese technology group wants to lend up to $20 billion to employees, including Chief Executive Masayoshi Son, to buy into its $108 billion Vision Fund 2, the Wall Street Journal reported. Son’s backers, like Apple and Microsoft, will welcome the move to align staff’s incentives with their own. But it magnifies SoftBank’s losses if the vehicle blows up.
LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - How much is a song worth? Two people who should know are the Chic founder and his manager, who have started a company to buy some of the world’s most famous back catalogues. They explain how music investing works and why many songwriters are miffed with Spotify.
Hong Kong's metro system will stay shut on Saturday, the rail operator said, paralysing transport in the Asian financial hub after a night of chaos in which police shot a teenage boy and pro-democracy protesters torched businesses and metro stations.