At the Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley conference this week, several recognizable media brands are getting dressed up for potential suitors. With the U.S. economy stalling, Hulu and G4 may find new owners before the weekend.
Rupert Murdoch and executives from Hulu’s owners will join Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg among about 300 participants for the weeklong annual conference in Idaho organized by the investment bank.
“I talk to some bankers inside of big media players and they are seeking to refine their models and shed some things that they once thought they needed to own,” said Anthony LeCour, a New York-based media investment banker formerly at LaidLaw & Co. who is now a consultant. “We’ll see a lot of deal-making and it’s not going to be all monster deals. There will be a lot of small, sweet spots.”
Takeovers of technology and media companies globally climbed 38% in the first half to $51.1 billion from the $37 billion announced a year earlier, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. There’s also a boom in internet companies going public, including LinkedIn and Zynga, the largest maker of games on Facebook, with help from by Allen & Co.
Concerns about stock markets and slowing economic growth are taking a toll on deal-making, with takeovers in June tumbling to the lowest level in eight months. Still, media stocks have been holding up. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Media Index has gained 15% in the first half, compared with 5% for the S&P, which is down 1.8% from its April 29 peak this year.
Murdoch, the 80-year-old chairman and CEO of News Corp., is expected at the conference a week after agreeing to sell the MySpace social-networking website to Specific Media for $35 million, a fraction of the $580 million News Corp. paid six years ago. MySpace had lost its early lead in the industry to Zuckerberg’s Facebook.
Among the assets attracting potential suitors are Hulu – the video-streaming service owned by News Corp., Walt Disney Co. and Comcast’s NBC Universal – and G4, a Comcast unit. Top executives from all three media companies are attending the Sun Valley retreat, according to a copy of the private guest list obtained by Bloomberg News.
Hulu has reached out to 10 to 12 potential bidders through its bankers, a person familiar with the process said this month. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have met with Hulu bankers Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim Partners, said the person, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.
Hulu, which scuttled an IPO that had been projected to value the company at $2 billion, is an asset likely to appeal to a large company like Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, according to Shahid Khan, chairman of MediaMorph, a media advisory and venture firm. “There’s a big move towards premium programming, which is what Hulu has,” Khan said. “Google is the best candidate to buy Hulu. They can monetize it a lot better, they have a strong ad team and much better ad technologies. Plus, they have a lot of cash.”
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment. Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and its chairman, Eric Schmidt, are on the list of Sun Valley’s attendees.
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