Word: warner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...night we met, Forbes came to the back of his chartered Gulf Stream turboprop and asked me, of all people, the inside story on the AOL-Time Warner merger. When I told him I had hoped to ask his take on the whole mess, along with his advice on what to do with the stock, he said sell. "Nobody ever lost money taking a profit," he said. Two days after I didn't take his advice, God punished me. The stock had dropped 25 points...
Just what exactly was transformed? America Online, the newbie-friendly smiley face of the Web that just three years ago was an operational mess, had engineered the largest merger in American corporate history. Time Warner, the immense media conglomerate that had sprung from the loins of the magazine you are now reading--having failed to beat the Internet upstarts with its own efforts--had decided to surrender to them for the best price it could get, about $162 billion in AOL stock. The companies valued the combination at $350 billion...
...Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin and AOL boss Steve Case, the common experience of groping through a rapidly mutating economy made this deal in some ways inevitable. In AOL, Case had built a brand, a customer base and (by Internet standards) healthy profits. But he faced a future that may see Internet access become a commodity, and he lacked access to the leading source of broadband--the fat, fast pipes of cable television that could carry vast amounts of Internet content. And Case didn't have much in the way of content either. Time Warner's cable-television system...
...year in which Net stocks soared, and there was little excitement about the plans being developed in its recently hatched digital division, despite projected outlays this year of $500 million. "We had a big uphill job as a corporation" to catch up with the established Internet players, notes Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner. Levin was even contemplating "an internal takeover" of CNN to make it the company's digital division, separate from the rest of the Turner networks...
Levin reasoned that Time Warner without an Internet connection was still valuable, but its value to an Internet buyer was greater. So he arrived at 1.5 AOL shares to be exchanged for each TWX share. In real money, that was 70% more than Time Warner's $65 price the Friday before the deal was announced, but it would still give AOL shareholders 55% of the company. Conversely, Time Warner was providing 80% of the cash flow. Says Levin: "If some people think that AOL has been sold at too much of a discount or Time Warner has been sold...