Appaloosa (David Tepper) discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: New I position, Closed out XOP BA COOP
Highlights from 2019 Q4 filing as compared to Q3 2019:
- New positions in: I (~2.89 mln shares)
- Increased positions in: ET (to ~11.23 mln shares from ~5.86 mln shares), MU (to ~8.1 mln from ~6 mln), BABA (to ~2.4 mln from ~1.3 mln), UNH (to ~0.3 mln from ~0.25 mln), ADBE (to ~0.24 mln from ~0.21 mln) AMZN (to ~0.29 mln from ~0.27 mln),
- Maintained positions in: AMLP (~6.55 mln shares), FB (~2.83 mln shares), AGN (~1.3 mln shares), TMUS (~0.7 mln shares), CRM (~0.5 mln shares), GOOG (~0.44 mln shares), AVGO (~0.28 mln shares)
- Closed positions in: XOP (from ~1.1 mln shares), COOP (from ~0.65 mln), BA (from ~0.03 mln)
- Decreased positions in: CZR (to ~10.05 mln shares from ~11.2 mln shares), PCG (to ~17.4 mln from ~18.11 mln), CWEN (to ~0.44 mln from ~0.6 mln), CWENA (to ~0.14 mln from ~0.17 mln)
Carl Icahn discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: Lowered FCX OXY holdings
Highlights from 2019 Q4 filing as compared to Q3 2019:
- Increased positions in: IEP (to ~197.05 mln shares from ~190.85 mln shares), HTZ (to ~43.93 mln from ~41.9 mln)
- Maintained positions in: CZR (~114.25 mln shares), CVI (~71.2 mln shares), HPQ (~62.9 mln shares), CLDR (~54.8 mln shares), NWL (~41.12 mln shares), HLF (~35.23 mln shares), XRX (~23.46 mln shares), LNG (~19.59 mln shares), NAV (~16.73 mln shares)
- Decreased positions in: FCX (to ~26.77 mln shares from ~34.18 mln shares), OXY (to ~22.57 mln from ~26.33 mln)
Soros Fund (George Soros) discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: New ATVI BRBR CPB positions
Highlights from 2019 Q4 filing as compared to Q3 2019:
- New positions in: ATVI (~0.76 mln shares), BRBR (~0.3 mln), CPB (~0.3 mln), CVE (~0.3 mln), PE (~0.3 mln), BMY.RT (~0.3 mln), TIF (~0.24 mln), ADNT (~0.23 mln), AVTR (~0.22 mln), WMGI (~0.21 mln)
- Increased positions in: DNR (to ~5.75 mln shares from ~4 mln shares), NLOK (to ~3.29 mln from ~1.95 mln), VST (to ~1.78 mln from ~0.69 mln), ADM (to ~1 mln from ~0.35 mln), AGNC (to ~1.39 mln from ~1.18 mln), AMTD (to ~0.23 mln from ~0.02 mln), BGCP (to ~3.76 mln from ~3.57 mln) KDP (to ~1.1 mln from ~0.96 mln), BP (to ~0.4 mln from ~0.27 mln), AIG (to ~0.17 mln from ~0.07 mln)
- Maintained positions in: GRFS (~2.08 mln shares), DHI (~1.35 mln shares), ENR (~0.71 mln shares), C (~0.32 mln shares), JPM (~0.21 mln shares), GOOGL (~0.07 mln shares)
- Closed positions in: FTCH (from ~1.31 mln shares), EBAY (from ~1.19 mln), NRZ (from ~0.26 mln), FLMN (from ~0.96 mln), XLF (from ~0.92 mln), OTC:HOSS (from ~0.5 mln), CY (from ~0.38 mln), KBH (from ~0.16 mln), D (from ~0.15 mln), V (from ~0.03 mln)
- Decreased positions in: VICI (to ~7.07 mln shares from ~18.54 mln shares), CZR (to ~1.56 mln from ~12.84 mln), LBRDK (to ~5.68 mln from ~7.04 mln), PTON (to ~0.28 mln from ~1.58 mln), ETFC (to ~0.01 mln from ~0.61 mln), NLY (to ~2.96 mln from ~3.52 mln), I (to ~0.07 mln from ~0.55 mln), VNOM (to ~0.2 mln from ~0.65 mln), SYF (to ~0.43 mln from ~0.69 mln), COG (to ~0.75 mln from ~1 mln)
Google in talks with French publishers about paying for news
Le Monde and Le Figaro are among the groups involved in early discussions
Google is talking to some of France’s biggest news publishers about making direct payments for content, a potentially significant shift by the search platform towards a model used by Facebook in the US.
Exploratory discussions with media groups including Le Monde and Le Figaro have touched on developing new products that would include financial deals to license news. Google has also talked to some US media groups about the plans, according to people familiar with the matter.
“We want to help people find quality journalism — it’s important to informed democracy and helps support a sustainable news industry,” said Richard Gingras, vice-president for news at Google, who said the group was “talking with partners and looking at more ways to expand our ongoing work with publishers”.
While the discussions are at an early stage and several models are being considered, there are echoes with Facebook’s recent shift in approach. In October the social media platform launched a news tab feature in the US following multimillion-dollar deals with outlets including BuzzFeed, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
After years of lambasting big internet platforms for failing to pay for content, Robert Thompson, the chief executive of News Corp, described Facebook’s move as a “powerful precedent that will echo around editorial newsrooms”.
France is a test ground for Google’s change of approach because of the fierce political reaction to its response to the EU’s new copyright directive, which the country is the first member state to implement.
To the anger of French ministers who denounced the approach as against “the spirit and letter” of the law, Google said it would only show headlines to news stories in France, sidestepping the need to reach licensing deals to pay for snippets of journalism. In the past the group has warned that aggressive application of the copyright directive could force it to withdraw its news service from Europe altogether.
Google insists it will, on principle, refuse to “pay for links”. But it has privately acknowledged to French publishers that it wants to extend its support for journalism, potentially through new products that would give some brands greater prominence and reach as well as direct income.
Such deals would mark a significant departure for the search platform, which has provided financial backing to journalism through its Google News initiative but largely avoided direct content deals.
One template could be the model the US group has used for news briefings on its voice platform, Google Assistant, in which it makes substantial payments to audio news providers for their material to be used.
Any new Google products as a result of the discussions are likely to be narrowly focused, either by type of publisher or form of content, said Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of Oxford university’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “Given that there are many publishers competing for attention . . . it seems most likely that any licensing deals will be for a small subset of truly premium publishers,” he said.
Overtures to individual publishers will nevertheless be highly contentious in France, where the biggest news organisations have tried to maintain a common front in support of the copyright directive. Google’s first suggestions were received coolly by some publishing executives, according to one person familiar with the discussions.
Angela Mills Wade, of the European Publishers Council, noted the advantages to news groups of enforcing the “publishers’ right” in the new copyright law.
“It gives publishers control over how their content is re-used, who can use it and under what terms and conditions,” she said. “It strengthens the publishers’ negotiating power to find solutions that should be a win-win for publishers, large distributors of content like Google and Facebook, and consumers.”
CORONAVIRUS VICTIM ATTENDED CONFERENCE IN LONDON WITH 250 PEOPLE - TELEGRAPH
The fine art of getting Japan’s proud old men to sell up
One M&A firm seems to have the knack for making stepping back sound like a wonderful thing
If you’ve ever wondered what the world’s most difficult cold call might be, Suguru Miyake claims to have the answer.
Forget classic tough nuts like life insurance or a change of gas supplier: there is nothing more daunting, he says, than phoning a grumpy, old Japanese boss out of the blue and convincing him to sell his company.
And yet, according to the president of Japan’s largest independent M&A firm, the hit-rate from such calls — made by an elite salesforce — just keeps rising. Japan is on track to end the current financial year in March with a record volume of domestic M&A dealmaking behind it. And as the next starts, there is the prospect that one of the country’s great business taboos — the shame of the company sale — could soon evaporate.
Four years ago, Nihon M&A’s business as a matchmaker of buyers and sellers in Japan’s hinterland of small and medium-sized firms was already humming. The company completed 420 deals in fiscal 2016, having done only 256 two years earlier. That surge, Mr Miyake said at the time, pointed to the enticing opportunities being created by Japan’s succession crisis — the vast number of companies where the founder is reaching old age but lacks an heir with either the capacity or will to take over.
Four years later, the situation has shifted significantly and by the end of March, Nihon should having executed almost 800 deals in sectors as diverse as construction, confectionery and wedding planning.
The driving force is yet more demographic pressure: since 2016, the largest ever generation of Japanese (born between 1947-1950), which also produced more company founders than any other, has started getting weary.
Japan has recently recalculated the implications.
Of the 2.45m companies that will have an owner aged over 70 by 2025, the government estimates about half will have no successor. And these, says Mr Miyake, are the people his salesforce spend their days trying to schmooze into the biggest decision of their lives.
The difficulty in this cold call is multi-layered. Not only are callers battling the predictable (often deeply irascible) resistance to a stranger’s intrusion, but the “product” being sold — the whole concept of selling a business — takes a surprising amount of explaining. And worse, says Mr Miyake, the concept itself is almost offensive to that generation. The sales team are pushing against a psychological revulsion towards the idea of M&A and the feeling that the act of selling your business is to flee, surrender and generally fail. The Nihon M&A pitch, in other words, effectively asks proud old men to consider capitulating to capitulation, while making that sound like a wonderful thing.
And yet it is working. It certainly helps, says Mr Miyake, that the government has formally said that consolidation in the SME sector is likely to be the best solution to the succession crisis. That official sanction removes some of the shame and can even, with the right sales intonation, make selling up sound like an act of national service.
But the greater boon is even simpler: with Nihon M&A completing deals at an average rate of about two a day (and its rivals approaching a similar clip) a consensus is building around the idea that selling a company is a sensible thing to do. The world may very soon have to look elsewhere to find its most difficult cold call.
Hearing Beyond Meat target raised pre-market to $117 at Bernstein
Bernstein raises their BYND tgt to $117 from $106. Analyst Alexia Howard added, "We previously estimated that Beyond Meat could generate $168m sales from a McDonald's partnership in the U.S. through a top-down approach. By taking a bottom-up approach, we assume 45-55 patties/store/day at $1.0-1.1 per patty, which is higher than the ~28 Impossible Whoppers sold at Burger King per store per day given MCD's greater scale and substantially higher sales velocity. On this basis, we estimate that BYND could generate $227-306m incremental sales from a potential MCD rollout in the U.S."
Jana Partners (Barry Rosenstein) discloses updated portfolio positions in 13F filing: New WMGI positions, Cut AXTA BLMN ELY ZBH holdings
Highlights from 2019 Q4 filing as compared to Q3 2019:
- New positions in: WMGI (~0.65 mln shares)
- Increased positions in: SPY (to ~0.36 mln shares from ~0.22 mln shares)
- Maintained positions in: CAG (~14.96 mln shares), HDS (~2 mln)
- Closed positions in: INST (from ~0.33 mln shares)
- Decreased positions in: AXTA (to ~1.59 mln shares from ~4 mln shares), BLMN (to ~6.4 mln from ~7.82 mln), ELY (to ~7.86 mln from ~8.67 mln), ZBH (to ~0.35 mln from ~0.8 mln), JACK (to ~0.67 mln from ~0.79 mln