Netflix Inc has dropped out of the fight to buy Warner Bros Discovery Inc, clearing the way for rival bidder Paramount Skydance Corp to clinch its US$111 billion deal for the historic Hollywood studio.
The streaming industry leader said that while it believed its deal would have cleared with regulators and created shareholder value, it did not want to keep bidding.
“We’ve always been disciplined and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive,” Netflix said in a statement on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters
Instead, it would keep investing in its business, including about US$20 billion this year on films, TV shows and other entertainment offerings, it said.
Netflix inked an US$82.7 billion deal, including assumed debt, to acquire the studio and streaming businesses of Warner Bros in December last year, but repeated counteroffers from Paramount for the entire company kept the auction open.
Late on Thursday, Warner Bros deemed Paramount’s latest US$31-a-share bid the superior offer.
“Once our board votes to adopt the Paramount merger agreement, it will create tremendous value for our shareholders,” Warner Bros chief executive officer David Zaslav said in a statement. “We are excited about the potential of a combined Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros Discovery and can’t wait to get started working together telling the stories that move the world.”
Netflix’s decision not to raise its offer “has paved the way for shareholders to receive meaningfully more cash and a truly viable path to government approvals,” Ancora Holdings Group, an activist investor in Warner Bros, said in a separate statement. “This is a win-win for shareholders and the industry.”
The takeover fight has been contentious, in Hollywood and in Washington. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and Paramount CEO David Ellison traveled to the US capital this week to meet with lawmakers.
Sarandos spent about an hour on Thursday with officials in the administration of US President Donald Trump.
Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday as a guest of US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina.
Graham was also seen at the White House on Thursday.
Paramount would face ongoing scrutiny for its deal. The US Senate Judiciary Committee had scheduled a hearing for March 4 to once again examine the Warner Bros sale following a hearing earlier this month.
US Senator Cory Booker once again extended an invitation for Ellison to attend.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren also weighed in on the Paramount deal.
“A Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros merger is an antitrust disaster threatening higher prices and fewer choices for American families,” Warren said in a statement. “A handful of Trump-aligned billionaires are trying to seize control of what you watch and charge you whatever price they want.”
South Korea’s equity benchmark yesterday crossed a new milestone just a month after surpassing the once-unthinkable 5,000 mark as surging global memory demand powers the country’s biggest chipmakers. The KOSPI advanced as much as 2.6 percent to a record 6,123, with Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc each gaining more than 2 percent. With the benchmark now up 45 percent this year, South Korea’s stock market capitalization has also moved past France’s, following last month’s overtaking of Germany’s. Long overlooked by foreign funds, despite being undervalued, South Korean stocks have now emerged as clear winners in the global market. The so-called “artificial intelligence
CONFUSION: Taiwan, Japan and other big exporters are cautiously monitoring the situation, while analysts said more Trump responses ate likely after his loss in court US trading partners in Asia started weighing fresh uncertainties yesterday after President Donald Trump vowed to impose a new tariff on imports, hours after the Supreme Court struck down many of the sweeping levies he used to launch a global trade war. The court’s ruling invalidated a number of tariffs that the Trump administration had imposed on Asian export powerhouses from China and South Korea to Japan and Taiwan, the world’s largest chip maker and a key player in tech supply chains. Within hours, Trump said he would impose a new 10 percent duty on US imports from all countries starting on
Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek’s (深度求索) latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia Corp’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior official of US President Donald Trump’s administration said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of US export controls. The US believes DeepSeek will remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips, the official said, adding that the Blackwells are likely clustered at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. The person declined to say how the US government received
Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had plowed more than US$180 billion into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” Gardiner
RSS