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Archive for the ‘Investments’ Category

Microsoft-Yahoo merger under review

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, internet, Investments, Market research, Microsoft, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Although a few days old, I found this article for todays post. It´s old news that Yahoo and Microsoft is partnering up – but what just hit me is that the forced antitrust review needed for the advertising deal might just be the precursor for a forthcoming merger.

Here is a Associated Press piece by way of The Eagle.

“WASHINGTON — Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. hope that by joining forces, they can tilt the balance of power in Internet search away from Google Inc. First, however, Yahoo and Microsoft have to convince regulators that their plan won’t hurt online advertisers and consumers.

As the U.S. Justice Department reviews the proposed partnership, approval figures hinge on this question: Will the online ad market be healthier if Google’s dominance is challenged by a single, more muscular rival instead of two scrawnier foes?

The first step toward getting an answer came this month when Microsoft and Yahoo filed paperwork with federal regulators to comply with the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, an antitrust law governing mergers and alliances between competitors. The Justice Department has until early September to approve the agreement or — as is likely in this case — request additional information.

European regulators are also expected to review the deal. Microsoft and Yahoo are bracing for the probes to extend into early next year, and the outcome is far from certain.

Just nine months ago, Google abandoned its own proposed partnership with Yahoo to avoid a showdown with the government, which had concluded that Google was already too powerful in the lucrative market for selling ads alongside search results.

Google had hoped to extend its reach even further by selling ads next to some of Yahoo’s search results, and in the process, keep Yahoo out of Microsoft’s clutches. Microsoft aggressively lobbied against the partnership.

With the Google-Yahoo inquiry behind them, U.S. antitrust regulators are likely to enter this examination with a clearer definition of the Internet search landscape and a better understanding of how it affects the steadily growing online advertising market.”

Read the full article here.

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Is the U.S. Market Again Ripe for IPOs?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an intresting article from Money morning.

“Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (NYSE: GS) initial public offerings (IPO) guru Tom Tuft has joined Bruce Wasserstein’s Lazard Ltd. (NYSE: LAZ) as chairman of Global Capital Markets Advisory and vice-chairman of its U.S. investment banking, in what could be a sign that the market for IPOs is thawing.

Tuft, a 33-year Goldman vet who co-founded its equity capital markets business in 1985 and became its chairman in 2004, was involved in several high-profile IPOs, including those of The Estee Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL) and RJR Nabisco Inc. He also advised Lazard on its own IPO in 2005.

A slowdown in mergers and acquisitions has prompted Lazard to expand its equity capital markets and restructuring operations, working on nine of the top 10 bankruptcies this year, Bloomberg News reported. Capital raised by IPOs in the first half of this year was $11.4 billion, down 85% from the same period last year according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“There is demand for companies to come public,” David Menlow, president of IPOFinancial.com told Bloomberg. “The fact that we haven’t seen that many is not an indication that companies are not out there ready to come public.”

The article continues.

The “Silicon Valley Six”

“An informal poll of venture capitalists and others conducted by Reuters yielded six successful companies with revenue of $100 million or more in Silicon Valley that are ripe for acquisition or an IPO, excluding social networking sensations Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. The news service dubbed the companies the “Silicon Valley Six,” which were chosen out of 34 citied in sectors ranging from alternative energy to video games.

The top four companies found were social network LinkedIn Corp., solar panel maker Solyndra Inc., smart grid company Silver Spring Networks and Zynga Inc., which develops games that run on social networks like Facebook or New Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace.

The other two are Guidewire, which develops software for property and casualty companies, and LiveOps, which operates call centers from contractors that work from their homes.

“They are exciting because they…demonstrate what is possible with venture capital,” Sharon Wienbar, managing director of Scale Venture Partners told Reuters. “These are companies that have proven a new, attractive business model that works big in spaces.”

Venture capitalists’ rule of thumb for declaring a company ripe for an IPO is that a company must have  $100 million in sales and have a capitalization of about $1 billion in order to have enough money to meet the reporting structures of the Sarbanes-Oxley act.

“The market is in the early stages of being back,” LiveOps Chief Executive Officer Maynard Webb said. “The market is ripe and open today for great companies.”

While not mentioned in Reuters’ “Silicon Valley Six,” one private company that’s making waves in Silicon Valley is PopCap Games Inc., which publishes and develops easy-to-play, accessible “casual” video games.”

Read the full article here.

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Successful “Date Certain M&A” of Business Unit and its Assets and Intellectual Property

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , on August 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Steven R. Gerbsman, Principal of Gerbsman Partners, Kenneth Hardesty, Merle McCreery and Dennis Sholl, members of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital, announced today their success in maximizing stakeholder value for a venture capital backed online marketing solutions company, specializing in lead generation and customer acquisition.

Gerbsman Partners provided Crisis Management leadership, facilitated the sale of the business unit, associated Intellectual Property and assets and recovered receivables. Due to market conditions, the senior lender and the board of directors made the strategic decision to maximize the value of the business unit and Intellectual Property.

Gerbsman Partners provided leadership to the company with

  • Crisis Management and technology expertise in developing the strategic action plans for maximizing value of the business unit, Intellectual Property and assets;
  • Proven domain expertise in maximizing the value of the business unit and Intellectual Property through a targeted and proprietary “Date Certain M&A Process”;
  • The ability to “Manage the Process” among potential Acquirers, Lawyers, Creditors Management and Advisors;
  • The proven ability to “Drive” toward successful closure for all parties at interest.

About Gerbsman Partners

Gerbsman Partners focuses on maximizing enterprise value for stakeholders and shareholders in under-performing, under-capitalized and under-valued companies and their Intellectual Property. Since 2001, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in maximizing value for 56 Technology, Life Science and Medical Device companies and their Intellectual Property and has restructured/terminated over $770 million of real estate executory contracts and equipment lease/sub-debt obligations. Since inception in 1980, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in over $2.2 billion of financings, restructurings and M&A transactions.

Gerbsman Partners has offices and strategic alliances in Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Alexandria, VA, San Francisco, Europe and Israel.

For additional information please visit www.gerbsmanpartners.com

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Funds, REITs Eye IPOs for Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Housing market, Investments, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from Globest.com in regards to possible IPO opportunities.

“LOS ANGELES-Earlier this summer, locally based Colony Financial Inc. filed a registration statement for a $500 million IPO. This organization, experts tell GlobeSt.com, is one of many REITs and opportunity funds that will tap the public markets for liquidity to buy distressed and other assets during the next 12 to 18 months.

Ernst & Young’s Howard Roth with the company’s New York City office points out the market hasn’t seen a flood of fund and REIT public offerings. Nor has Craig Silvers, who is president of Bricks & Mortar Capital, which operates on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles. But both agree that it’s coming.

“Right now, we’re seeing a raft of registrations for mortgage REITs,” Roth says. “During the past six weeks, we’ve seen close to 25 registrations. This is clearly a trend right now. And it’s clearly an avenue that sponsors believe they can take advantage of.”

“Registrations, of course, don’t necessarily mean automatic initial public offerings. Silvers points out that the opportunity funds are definitely being formed to buy distressed assets. Whether they go public or not is a different matter. But it’s becoming a viable alternative.”

In the real estate market earlier this year, a lot of private companies got into trouble,” Silvers says. “The private ones had to liquidate their assets and declare bankruptcy because they couldn’t raise private capital.” However, funds and REITs going public “can tap the public markets for cash whenever an acquisition opportunity comes up,” Silvers remarks.

Roth points out that the benefits of going public include better access to capital and stronger discipline when it comes to accounting, operations and management. Then there is the transparency issue in that investors would know what they’re getting into when they put their money in the stock.”

Read the full article here.

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U.S. Recession Worst Since Great Depression, Revised Data Show

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a goo Bloomberg article.

“Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) — The first 12 months of the U.S. recession saw the economy shrink more than twice as much as previously estimated, reflecting even bigger declines in consumer spending and housing, revised figures showed.

The world’s largest economy contracted 1.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the last three months of 2008, compared with the 0.8 percent drop previously on the books, the Commerce Department said yesterday in Washington. Gross domestic product has shrunk 3.9 percent in the past year, the report said, indicating the worst slump since the Great Depression.

Updated statistics also showed that Americans earned more over the last 10 years and socked away a larger share of that cash in savings. The report signals the process of repairing tattered balance sheets following the biggest drop in household wealth on record may be further along than anticipated.

“The current downturn beginning in 2008 is more pronounced,” Steven Landefeld, director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, said in a press briefing this week. The revisions were in line with past experience in which initial figures tended to underestimate the severity of contractions during their early stages, he said.

Consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy, decreased 1.8 percent in last year’s fourth quarter from the same period in 2007, exceeding the prior estimate of a 1.5 percent drop. Purchases also began sinking sooner than previously projected, registering their first decline at the start of 2008 rather than in the second half.

Treasuries, Stocks

Treasuries gained after the GDP report, while stocks closed little changed. Benchmark 10-year note yields dropped to 3.48 percent by the close in New York, from 3.61 percent late the day before. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Stock Index closed at 987.48.

Residential construction fell 21 percent during the period, almost 2 percentage points more than previously reported, aggravating what was already the worst slump since the Great Depression.

The Commerce Department also reported yesterday that the economy contracted at a 1 percent annual rate from April through June after shrinking at a 6.4 percent pace in the first quarter, the most since 1982. The decline in the first three months of the year was previously reported as 5.5 percent.

Recession’s Start

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the arbiter of U.S. business cycles, last year determined the recession started in December 2007. The private group is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Yesterday’s updates are part of comprehensive revisions that take place about every five years and are more extensive than the changes announced at this time each year. Figures as far back as 1929 can be revised.

Over the most recent period, the third quarter of 2008 underwent one of the biggest changes, going from a 0.5 percent decrease in GDP to a 2.7 percent drop. The new reading better illustrates the effect the September collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had on the economy and credit markets.”

Read the full article here.

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