Insights: Mergers & Acquisitions

Mergers & Acquisitions

Trends in Merger Enforcement Under Trump

Compass/Anywhere was cleared by the DOJ after the deal’s second HSR-waiting period expired on January 2. Recent reporting from media outlets including the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg revealed that the DOJ Antitrust Division was preparing to launch a second request investigation, but Trump-aligned lawyer/lobbyist Mike Davis was successful in...

Mergers & Acquisitions

The transaction’s initial 30-day HSR waiting period is scheduled to expire on January 12. We expect that the transaction will clear without a second request. Industry participants (who are not involved in the deal) conveyed that IBM/Red Hat and Confluent compete in the Kafka-based cloud-managed enterprise data streaming market and the...

Mergers & Acquisitions

Abbott/Exact Sciences

The merger agreement does not specify a date by which the companies are obligated to file HSR, but we expect a filing will be made this month. We believe that this transaction will avoid a second request from the FTC. We have not uncovered any evidence of meaningful head-to-head competition between Abbott and Exact in colorectal cancer...

Mergers & Acquisitions

NEC Netcracker/CSG Systems

The transaction’s initial 30-day HSR waiting period is scheduled to expire on January 5. We believe that there is a likelihood of a second request. Feedback from industry participants (who are not involved in the deal) suggests that the merger would combine the two largest providers of bespoke business support systems (BSS) for cable television...

Mergers & Acquisitions

The transaction’s initial 30-day HSR waiting period is scheduled to expire on January 5. We continue to believe that there is a likelihood of a second request given the breadth of highly concentrated product overlap in both handset RFFE modules and Wi-Fi gateway RFFE modules. However, new input from customers of Wi-Fi gateway RFFE modules...

Mergers & Acquisitions

Paramount/Warner Brothers (Updated)

Paramount announced this week that it had commenced an all-cash tender offer to acquire Warner Brothers for $30 per share in cash. As expected, Paramount’s proposed transaction is for the entirety of Warner Brothers, including its cable networks. Sources of financing include Affinity Partners, the private equity firm led by Jared Kushner. In...