Journalists
Robert Cyran moved from the London office to New York, where he covers global technology, pharmaceuticals and special situations. Rob began his career at Forbes magazine, where he assisted in the start-up of the international version of the magazine. Before working at breakingviews he worked as a market researcher and reporter covering the pharmaceutical industry. Robert has a Masters degree in economics from Birmingham University and an undergraduate degree from George Washington University.
Restrictions to thwart takeovers usually benefit managers, not shareholders. Mead Johnson may be an exception. The baby formula maker should make a tasty target. But the technicalities of Mead’s on-going split-off from Bristol-Myers mean it may make sense to delay any auction.
It's paying rival AMD $1.25bn and agreeing to soften some of its aggressive marketing ways. Abusive practices or not, the winner-take-all nature of tech generates monopolies that regulators and smaller rivals find difficult to tame.
HP’s $2.7bn purchase of 3Com puts it squarely into Cisco’s realm. But Cisco’s already gunning after HP in servers. As Oracle-Sun, Dell-Perot and other deals suggest the traditional frontiers in technology no longer apply. The battlefield is wide open.
The US carrier’s customers are melting away. Yet it has scrimped on capex to double down on wireless broadband. Putting another $1bn into cash-burning group Clearwire, while a rival technology is catching up, amounts to a binary bet for shareholders.
Pfizer awarded CFO Frank D’Amelio a $1.2m bonus for his role in buying rival Wyeth. Executives may need incentives to sell – it often means they’ll lose their job. Paying for purchases, on the other hand, encourages empire building.
The US healthcare conglomerate will slash up to 8,000 jobs. Unfortunately, the benefits are likely to be as fleeting as the cuts accompanying giant pharma mergers. That's because it's increasingly tough finding new drugs to replace lost revenue as sales of old products run down.
The troubled US business lender fought hard, including bending over backwards to dissident Carl Icahn, to have its pre-packaged filing accepted by creditors. But the harder task still remains: convincing the world it has a reason to exist beyond Chapter 11.
The US drugs maker is offering its stockholders the chance to swap at a discount into shares of its publicly traded subsidiary Mead Johnson. That would improve Bristol’s earnings per share - which should come in handy with as much as 30% of its sales at risk as patents expire.
The US video game giant’s lack of hits has led to a string of disappointing seasons. Worse, technological shift could cannibalise revenues. There's always next year for new games, but figuring out distribution may take longer.
The Obama administration’s relatively vigorous approach to competition policy is welcome in Brussels. But mutual cooing has turned into squawks now that the European Commission has raised objections over the merger of two US firms. Shared views are one thing, turf is another.
The Federal Trade Commission fancies the drugs group as an antitrust target. Investors, meanwhile, gave its stock a beating after the company lost contracts worth billions in the latest quarter. The market is helping overworked officials by putting CVS Caremark on the back foot.
The US networking giant sold more gear than expected and cut costs during its latest quarter. It also upped the amount of cash it promises to return to shareholders by $10bn. But Cisco’s long-term strategic challenges remain to be tackled.
The tech giant has spent $22bn on deals since 2002 and repurchased $60bn of stock over the decade. The return to investors: zero. Now Cisco also looks unwieldy with its 59 standing committees. Cisco should admit its strategy isn’t working.
Creditors have until midnight on Thursday to vote on the US small-business lender's proposals for a debt restructuring or a pre-packaged bankruptcy. But CIT has little value as an ongoing business. Creditors would probably do better if it just sells off or winds down its assets.