AOL this week cut a deal to pay $850 million to buy social network Bebo which has 40 million members worldwide, and is one of the leading social networks in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the US. The deal will be paid in cash. Bebo has about 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, Texas.
Charter Communications, last week put on sale $500 million of loan notes,
due 2014 and says it will use the proceeds to repay outstanding debt balances. It also said it would borrow up to $275 million more under existing credit facilities. Most of the US cable operators have extensive debt, in some cases as high as their annual revenues, and as the current debt crunch gets worse, they will all be looking very carefully at their debt terms.
Electronic Arts will go ahead and turn its battle to buy Take-Two Interactive Software into a hostile one, and plans to approach the company’s shareholders directly. This follows the rejection of bid offering $26 a share last month. In response Take-Two’s board recommended shareholders take no action while it considers the position.
Microsoft said this week it would acquire Rapt, a provider of advertising yield management systems for digital media publishers. These systems are a way of controlling the total advertising spend across multiple media and vehicles, and allows buyers to set a pricing policy at the beginning of a campaign and stick at a planned average spend. The system will be merged into the Atlas Publisher Suite, acquired when Microsoft’s bought aQuantive last May.
Switzerland based Kudelski Group has bought Paris, France based smart card provider EDSI, which specializes in Pay TV and banking applications. The company was established in 1990 and currently employs about 30 people. No terms were announced.
Bertelsmann results out this week show earnings before tax at €1,811 million, a little below, but within reach of last year’s the record figure of €1,867 million. Due to the disposal of the Group’s music publishing operations and the weakness of the US dollar, revenues declined 2.8% to €18.8 billion. The private company reported net income at €405 million compared to €2.5 billion in the previous year due to non-recurring charges incurred in asset sales. RTL Group, which owns more TV channels than any other company in Europe was the strongest business, while magazine publisher, Gruner and Jahr reported lower revenues and profits.
Toshiba will have to take a charge of around $493 million (50 billion yen),
according to the Nikkei business paper, to shut down its HD-DVD
operations. With prior reported losses that means the entire affair will have cost around $1 billion (100 billion yen). Toshiba said it will still have an operating profit of 250 billion yen in the current fiscal year; only about 40 billion yen short of its original forecast.