Investment News: Sky’s Shares Surge after Comcast Winning

INVESTMENT NEWS – On Monday, the shares of Sky surged 9% following Comcast’s winning on the auction with its bet, outwitting the competition against Twenty-First Century Fox.

Comcast, a US cable-TV giant, made a $40 billion offer in a rare weekend auction that ended the competition against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and Walt Disney Co.

Despite this, concerns regarding the paid premium on Comcast was manifested on the New York stock market where it made more than 6% loss.

MoffettNathanson analysts downgraded Comcast from “buy” to “neutral” and Oppenheimer downgraded from “outperform” to “perform”.

Meanwhile, Fox shares increased 0.6 and Disney made a gain of 1.7%.

Both Comcast and Fox/Disney expressed interest in controlling Sky to expand their reach in Europe where pay-TV is rising. Also, these companies wanted to gain the 23 million customers of Sky. Gaining access to this could strengthen their defense against streaming services from Netflix and Amazon.

During the third and final round of the auction, Comcast bid 17.28 pounds while Fox made a bid of only 15.67 pounds. Sky shares reached 1721.5 on Monday.

The NBC network and Universal Pictures owner instantly received the backing of independent directors from Sky.

Comcast is paying more than double of Sky’s shares.

“[It was an] incredible outcome. Not only the absolute number but also the gap between both offers, which could lead to Fox/Disney selling their stake (or part of it at the very least), thereby de-risking the Comcast offer which is conditional to the more than 50 percent acceptance condition,”  one senior analyst at London-based hedge fund firm said.

Meanwhile, MoffettNathanson feared that Sky would be an albatross to Comcast.

“Comcast would like to have investors view Sky as a platform-agnostic collection of proprietary programming agreements that can serve as a springboard to create a global OTT (over-the-top) provider, and, to be fair, the company does indeed have many proprietary programming agreements. But it seems as though they would like investors to forget that it is also a satellite TV provider, and satellite video distribution is increasingly becoming obsolete,” it said.

Investment News: Instagram co-founders step down

On Monday, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger stepped down as the chief executive officer and chief technical officer respectively of the photo-sharing app owned by Facebook.

The decision of the two co-founders came after the resignation of Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp which is also owned by Facebook.

In a blog post on Monday, Systrom explained that he and Krieger planned to take time off and explore their curiosity and creativity again.