Chapter 153: Chapter 153 Are You Serious?
In late March, DS Capital finally reached an agreement with O2 on the acquisition. In the end, their DS Industrial Investment Fund will acquire O2 in full for 5.5 billion pounds in cash.
In fact, O2 is just their brand name at this time, and the full name of the company is still BT Cellnet. However, after being acquired by DS Capital, the company will be renamed O2 Telecom and will cooperate with Digital UK to promote low-priced home broadband packages and IPTV related businesses in the UK.
In this acquisition, DS Capital invested 500 million pounds and raised 2.5 billion pounds from Barclays Bank and Goldman Sachs respectively. The interest rate of this financing was as high as 12%!
That is to say, every year they will pay up to 600 million pounds in interest for the total 5 billion pounds of financing!
This seems like a huge burden, but if we understand that two years later, Barron spent a total of 5.5 billion pounds plus 1.2 billion pounds in interest, a total of 6.7 billion pounds, to buy O2, which Telefonica spent 17.7 billion pounds to acquire in the original time and space, then it is simply a huge profit...
After DS Capital completed its acquisition of O2 and made O2 Telecom its wholly-owned subsidiary, the news caused a sensation throughout Britain.
After all, despite facing competition from Vodafone, Orange and other companies, O2 is still at the forefront of mobile communications business in the UK. It is surprising that such a company was acquired by a previously unknown company.
However, after learning that this acquisition was made using financial leverage, many reports believed that such a high amount of financing was bound to drag down O2 and were not optimistic about its future development.
DS Capital did not respond to this. After all, since the initial acquisition of Independent Press, Barron's acquisition actions have never been favored by others.
But it turned out that the results he obtained were all successful.
After completing the acquisition of O2, DS Industrial Investment Fund once again acquired 8.5 million common shares issued by Sinclair Group at a price of US$24, accounting for 9% of its current total share capital. For this, it will pay a total of 136 million pounds to Sinclair Group.
This transaction was part of the in-depth cooperation plan that SEM Group had previously carried out with Sinclair Group.
Prior to this, Sinclair Group had invested and held 10% of the shares of SEM Group. Now, after DS Industrial Investment Fund received the additional 9% shares from Sinclair Group, the two parties hold equal shares, which is also the basis for their closer cooperation.
Currently, Sinclair Group has introduced SEM Group's variety show "The traitors" to the North American TV market, and will soon shoot the American version of the reality show "The traitors" at Chatsworth House in May; and after SDTV finishes broadcasting the first season of "Downton Abbey", it will also introduce this acclaimed British drama to North America.
Similarly, much of the content currently broadcast by the SDTV channel is introduced from the Sinclair Group, which enriches SDTV's broadcast content - Summit Media even has plans to add another TV channel, SDTV Channel 2, starting in the second half of this year.
…
"Your Highness, we have rented an office building in Cambridge and are planning to move the Woaw website to an off-campus location. We will also hire about five full-time employees, plus part-time employees from the school, and we will be able to handle the current work."
Reporting to Barron was Khalid Revere, the former technical director of the Independent Newspaper website. It was he who first introduced Dave Baburin to Barron to help him establish the Woaw website.
Originally, Barron was planning to appoint Davo to be the CEO of Woaw, but now it seems that Davo is more obsessed with technology and has little interest in the daily operations of the website.
Therefore, Barron finally decided to transfer Khalid Revere from Independent Newspapers to Woaw to serve as its CEO; while Dawo served as CTO (Chief Technology Officer).
Now that the Woaw website is open for registration to universities and high schools in the UK, the number of registered users has exceeded 1 million. Therefore, it has been decided to move it out of Cambridge University and begin formal commercial operations.
Don't think that 1 million registered users are not a lot. It seems that many websites later had hundreds of millions of users, but you should know that at that time, the number of global users of blog sites was only more than 1 million.
At the current stage, Woaw pays more attention to the quality of users and the good atmosphere of the website, so it is still screening user registrations.
Otherwise, if registration were fully open, the number of users on the Woaw website would probably increase explosively immediately, because the number of users logging in to the website as visitors has exceeded 10 million.
At this time when Woaw has no strong competitors, Baron still hopes that the website can train the team and build a good foundation through controllable development.
Barron invested another £1 million into the Woaw site to upgrade equipment and run its day-to-day operations.
With Khalid, the CEO who has performed well in the independent newspaper industry, in control, he is relatively confident about the development of the Woaw website.
…
"I didn't know you were interested in fashion, Mr. Boot."
"It's an art, isn't it? Actually it's mainly because Chris always likes to participate in such activities."
Hearing her husband's words, the Viscountess, who was sitting next to Viscount Bute, curled her lips slightly.
Now Barron and the Butts are sitting in the audience below the catwalk, with models walking down the runway like butterflies in front of them - this is this year's non-traditional London Fashion Week.
Different from the London Fashion Week in September, the non-traditional fashion week is specially held for the new generation of British designers to showcase their unique designs.
However, Barron had no interest in those clothes that he thought were quite strange.
"Congratulations, Your Highness, you have successfully taken over O2, which will increase your influence to a higher level."
It seemed that Viscount Bute was indeed not focusing on the catwalk in front of him. He said to Barron,
"Argent Real Estate Group has also contacted several interested investors. Perhaps there will be a result for this round of financing soon."
"Do you remember I said that we can actually afford the funds for this round of financing, Mr. Boot?"
Hearing Barron's words, Viscount Bute was slightly surprised:
"Are you serious? That would cost at least 100 million pounds..."
"I'm not kidding, Mr. Bute. In fact, Argent Real Estate Group can now terminate its contact with other investors. My DS Capital can provide the group with 200 million pounds of funds, just as you said last time, 20% of the shares."
At this time, Viscount Bute found that he could no longer see through the young duke. Initially, he thought that if Barron wanted to swallow a company of the size of O2 in one bite, he would probably get a toothache. Even if he managed to swallow it, he would inevitably suffer from indigestion - after all, with his assets, it would be an absolute disaster for him to have to bear such a high level of financing.
For this reason, Argent Real Estate Group did not consider Barron at all when raising funds.
But now…
How much money does he have? Is there anything he doesn't know?
But no matter what, Viscount Bute will not easily agree to let Barron get so many shares. If he is responsible for all the financing this time, then the proportion of Argent Real Estate Group shares controlled by Barron will be as high as 36%, which is enough to threaten the Bute family after the shares are diluted.
"I have also said, Your Highness, that our Butt family will also assume the obligations of a major shareholder and will take out a portion of the funds to participate in the financing this time..."
"I have no objection to this, Mr. Booth. How much money are you prepared to invest?"
Viscount Bute had already made some calculations for this. After pretending to consider it, he said,
"We can come up with 50 million pounds..."
In this way, after the original controlled shares are diluted, with the addition of this 5% of shares, the Butt family can still ensure that the shares they control can be close to 50%, which is relatively safe.
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