Shares of Paramount Global (PARA, PARAA) are rallying on revived merger talks with Skydance. According to reports, Skydance has reached a preliminary agreement to buy Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, the controlling shareholder of Paramount. If that deal goes through, Skydance would then begin the merger process with Paramount Global. Bloomberg Intelligence senior media analyst Geetha Ranganathan joins Morning Brief to discuss the news and what it means for the media giant’s future.
“With Skydance, what we’ve constantly seen is that they are proposing a deal which basically favors Shari Redstone, who is the controlling shareholder, favors her over everybody else. So it favors her over class A shareholders as well as class B shareholders. And that is something that has the potential for attracting a lot of lawsuits. And that is something that has made Shari Redstone extremely wary, and so it looks like this time around, there is much stronger indemnification language in the agreement that should or could potentially protect her from a lot of the upcoming litigation,” Ranganathan explains.
Paramount has faced a rocky 6 months in its attempts to merge with Skydance, and Ranganathan believes that this deal comes with unique pressure: “The one thing that we have to remember is that the longer and longer this whole process kind of drags out, the less and the less value that the assets will have. And I think Shari Redstone realizes that she’s been publicly negotiating for six months. That’s something that’s highly unusual in the media landscape, in any M&A deal for that matter, so for her to come that far and then just drop everything again, it created huge overhang on the stock. And I think she’s realized that, which is why she’s back at the negotiating table.”
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