The US$8.7 billion bid battle for Britain’s fourth-largest supermarket group, Wm Morrison Supermarkets PLC, ratcheted up yesterday when a third private equity group, Apollo Global Management Inc, entered the fray.
US group Apollo, which last year missed out on buying Asda Stores Ltd, the No. 3 grocery player in the UK, said it was in the preliminary stages of evaluating a possible offer for Morrisons, but had not approached its board.
Morrisons on Saturday agreed to a takeover led by Softbank Group Corp-owned Fortress Investment Group LLC that valued the firm at ￡6.3 billion (US$8.7 billion).
Photo: Reuters
The offer from Fortress, along with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Koch Real Estate Investments, exceeded a ￡5.52 billion unsolicited proposal from Clayton, Dubilier & Rice LLC (CD&R), which Morrisons rejected on June 19.
However, it was less than the ￡6.5 billion asked for by top 10 Morrisons investor JO Hambro Capital Management Ltd last week.
Analysts have speculated that other private equity groups and Amazon.com Inc, which has a partnership deal with Morrisons, could create a potential bidding war.
Under British takeover rules CD&R has until Saturday next week to come back with a firm offer.
The Panel on Takeovers and Mergers is yet to announce the deadline by which Apollo must clarify its intentions in relation to Morrisons.
The interest in Morrisons underlines the growing appetite from private funds for British supermarket chains, which are seen as attractive because of their cash generation and freehold assets. The funds believe the stock market is not recognizing the grocers’ value in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last year, Apollo lost out on buying Asda to the Issa brothers and TDR Capital LLP.
Apollo says its private equity business had more than US$89 billion in assets under management by the end of March, in 150 companies such as Watches of Switzerland, telecommunications, media and technology group Endemol Shine, bookmaker Ladbrokes Coral Group PLC and Norwegian Cruise Line.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
RSS