After Monday afternoon's discussion, Amy Paschall began reaching out to the heads of the three established public television networks, which was of course a smokescreen, and Simon's real goals have remained the same.
Facing the acquisition intention of Daenerys Entertainment, the three major TV networks have given a very positive response.
Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric Group, the parent company of NBC, quickly called Simon directly after Amy contacted him. However, Jack Welch said on the phone that GE did not want to completely Giving up the media business, but hoping to sell half of the shares to Daenerys Entertainment, which obviously cannot meet Simon's requirements.
Larry Tisch, the actual controller of CBS, wanted to talk to Simon in person. Simon was less interested in CBS than NBC. The two parties only had two phone calls. Larry Tisch made an offer during the second call. , which is equivalent to a premium of 50% of CBS’s current market value, completely treating Simon like a fat sheep.
Not only that, rumors quickly spread that Daenerys Entertainment was interested in acquiring CBS, causing CBS' stock price to rise significantly. Simon was happy to see such confusing remarks, but his opinion of Larry Tisch dropped to freezing point.
It is a violation of rules to quietly release the news before the merger agreement is reached.
The ultimate goal still falls on ABC.
At Melisandre's party after the Oscars at the end of March, Simon had a contact with Warren Buffett, the major shareholder of Metropolis ABC Group. Buffett was not resistant to selling ABC, but the veteran investor obviously had cash and stocks. They were quite entangled in their trading models, and even tried to come up with a debt-for-equity swap plan that was completely unacceptable to Simon.
In the past month or so, driven by the overall bull market trend in the U.S. stock market, Metropolis ABC Group's share price has reached a market value of nearly US$17 billion. Similarly, affected by the good news about the opening of Universal Studios Osaka, the market value of Daenerys Entertainment Group also exceeded US$140 billion.
The stock prices of both parties have reached their respective new highs, and in the eyes of the capital market, they are both somewhat artificially high.
With Buffett's cautious investment style, coupled with the upcoming passage of the capital gains tax reform bill, it is increasingly likely that the veteran investor will directly choose to cash out all of Metropolis ABC.
The all-cash acquisition will not dilute the Westeros family’s holdings in Daenerys Entertainment, which is also the outcome Simon hopes to see most.
Daenerys Entertainment Group has more than US$7 billion in cash reserves, and its current overall liabilities are only US$7.3 billion. Compared with the market value, the debt ratio is only 5%. Even if it acquires Metropolitan ABC Group in all cash, additional bond financing will It will probably only increase Daenerys Entertainment's debt ratio to about 15%.
For most companies, a debt scale of 15% can only be described as conservative and is completely within the controllable risk range.
Now, the biggest problem between the two parties is actually negotiating a reasonable price.
Simon is very rich, but he will never be taken advantage of.
Since it is a good-faith acquisition, the premium Simon can accept is about 30%. If a lion like Larry Tisch opens his mouth, Simon is willing to talk more with GE. In addition to being unwilling to let go completely, Jack Welch's The sincerity of cooperation is still very strong.
While busy, the summer season of 1995 officially started.
On Friday, May 12th, this summer's first blockbuster movie "Red Tide" was released, starring Jerry Bruckheimer, Tony Scott, Denzel Washington and other well-known Hollywood filmmakers. This submarine war film cost US$53 million, and the producer Disney prepared 2,383 opening screens for the film.
From this point of view, confidence is obviously insufficient.
Also released at the same time was New World Pictures' film adaptation of a biographical novel, "Diaries from the Edge," starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio and the still young Mark Waugh. Starring Erberg, it tells a story about a fallen youth about skipping classes, taking drugs, basketball, and drug addiction.
This low-budget youth film, which cost US$7 million to produce, is similar to Gus Van Sant's "The Cowherd" a few years ago, which had both box office and word-of-mouth success. There are many rebellious young people in the film who would love to see it. It features handsome men and beautiful women and passionate spending. Although the film received a bad reputation from critics during the test screening stage, New World Pictures still provided 516 opening screens in an attempt to make a splash in this upcoming summer season.
Speaking of which, after completing the promotion of "Fringe Diary", DiCaprio has joined the cast of the modern version of "Romeo and Juliet".
This is also a New World Pictures project.
Australian director Baz Luhrmann rose to prominence in Hollywood three years ago with "So You Think You Can Dance". Subsequently, this director who obviously likes to work slowly and meticulously prepared for this new film for three years, during which time he also traveled to I have been involved in the creation of stage plays for a period of time, and recently I finally started filming my new film.
It was with the box office success of this modern version of "Romeo and Juliet" that the former Leonardo DiCaprio was promoted to a popular niche, and then got the role of "Titanic".
Simon has no intention of changing that.
While the summer season is opening, two dark horse films in the first half of the year, "The Man Is From Earth" and "Twisted Planet 3," are still staying in North American theaters.
In the box office week that just passed from May 5 to May 11, "The Man from Earth", which was released in its 11th week, collected another US$2.53 million at the box office in a single week, and the cumulative box office has reached US$229.31 million. The film is expected to be released in "Jurassic Park 2" was completely canceled before it was released on June 2. The total box office in North America is about 235 million US dollars.
235 million U.S. dollars, slightly lower than the earlier expected 250 million U.S. dollars. Looking closely at the reason, it is because "Tokyo 3" was too strong, which squeezed out the roughly 15 million U.S. dollars in the box office potential of "The Man from Earth".
"Tokyo 3", which opened on April 7, is in its fifth week of release. Its box office dropped 23% compared to last week, and it continued to earn US$14.69 million, bringing the cumulative box office to US$143.45 million. There are still three weeks until "Jurassic Park 2" is released on June 2. According to the steady decline trend of about 20% for "Jurassic Park 2" for several consecutive weeks, the film's local box office is still very hopeful of exceeding 200 million US dollars. big.
Simon was in San Francisco on May 12th.
With the completion of the employee stock ownership plan, everything is ready for Eagleret's IPO, and the prospectus can be submitted to the SEC at any time, so Simon no longer needs to pay too much attention.
This time it was mainly about Tinker Bayer.
The electronic product company founded by Simon, supported by Girl C, has been developing rapidly in recent years, taking advantage of the Internet.
In the past year of 1994, Tinker Bayer's shipments of only its flagship digital camera products reached 7.16 million units, a high growth of 159% compared to 1993, including portable flash drives iDisk and other other products. , the annual revenue reached 2.19 billion US dollars, and the net profit was 270 million US dollars.
Unknowingly, this new-concept technology company, which was humble when it was founded, has grown into an electronic products giant that cannot be underestimated in the industry.
Among the series of products released on April 8, after careful preliminary market research, the latest model iCam-50, the Tinker Bayer team finally gave up the toothpaste-squeezing strategy of continuing to maintain 300,000 pixels, and upgraded to 500,000 pixels. . However, the originally planned capacity of 150M to store 3,000 photos was reduced to 120M to store 1,000 photos.
Because according to the survey data, many potential users feel that the 3,000 photo capacity is a bit exaggerated and cannot be used up at all. 1000 pictures not only show the product advantages of the latest micro hard drive version iCam-50, but also do not make users feel that the performance is excessive, which is just right.
Increasing the sensor resolution and reducing the storage capacity also balance the various costs of the new iCam-50 to the greatest extent.
Moreover, iCam-50 still maintains a retail price of $499, which is very attractive to users of the old version of iCam. As a transitional floppy disk version, iCam-40s still uses a 300,000-pixel sensor, and Tinker Bayer has also lowered the price to $449.
As another flagship product, iPlayer-10 chooses to use a 500M capacity micro hard drive, which is also the most expensive core component of this digital music player product.
According to the MP3 audio format introduced by Yigrit, iPlayer-10 is enough to store 100 to 150 songs, with a content duration of 500 minutes, equivalent to 8 hours. Although this will inevitably come at the expense of sound quality, in fact, many facts have proven that most ordinary users do not have high requirements for player sound quality.
The biggest limitation in the promotion of iPlayer digital music player is actually the content.
The Broadcast website, which was laid out by the Westeros system several years in advance, successfully solved this problem.
At the same time as iPlayer-10 was released, Daenerys Entertainment provided 300,000 genuine music for the Broadcast website, including popular records by groups such as Backstreet Boys and Guns N’ Roses in recent years, as well as Simon’s releases over the years. All singles. Although compared to the scale of music copyrights in the entire European and American music circles, 300,000 genuine music is still pitiful, and it is not all Daenerys Records owns. However, the Broadcast website’s audiobooks, talk shows, educational courses and other genuine film review resources largely make up for the lack of music resources.
Not only that, the difficulty of cracking iPlayer is actually very low.
This actually means that users can easily obtain various pirated music from Internet platforms.
Western people have a very widespread habit of paying for genuine resources. As long as they have something to sell, many people are actually willing to spend money to buy genuine resources.
Of course, if genuine resources cannot be found, then it is a pity.
As soon as iPlayer was released, the industry quickly noticed this problem, and some record manufacturers even threatened to initiate lawsuits.
Simon's attitude towards this was just to stop him.
With the previous case of Sony winning the video recorder lawsuit, it is actually very difficult to win this type of lawsuit.
Simon's personal attitude is not to condone piracy for the promotion of iPlayer. He hopes that through the rapid popularity of this product, he will force major record manufacturers to agree to sell their own music on the Broadcast website.
The Internet is a pretty wild open platform.
If you don't want this area to be overgrown with weeds, the best way is to carefully cultivate a variety of useful crops.
That's the truth.
The press conference will be held on April 8th, and sales will officially begin on April 15th. As of May 11th, it will be exactly four weeks, excluding edge products such as iCam-40s and iDisk-20 used for transition. Tinker Bayer’s main product this year is Two products, the micro hard disk version of the iCam-50 digital camera and the state-of-the-art digital music player iPlayer-10, have been extremely popular in the market.
Because the early production capacity is still climbing, especially for iPlayer-10, out of caution, the Tinco Bayer team did not prepare too much stock, so they chose to open another one at the Amazon online mall flagship store that has officially settled in. Hunger Marketing', it must be said that this simple and crude marketing model is still very effective. Coupled with the follow-up reports of many media, it has increasingly created a hot market situation for the two new products.
The result of being too popular and frequently out of stock in the market has even led to frequent robberies targeting two electronic products across North America recently.
The same price of US$499 is actually mainly targeted at the middle class with relatively well-off family conditions. After all, only these families have supporting personal computers and Internet access. iCam is highly dependent on PCs. Before the emergence of iPlayer, it was There are no frequent robberies.
However, the iPlayer-10 is lighter than Sony's portable Walkman but can hold hundreds of songs at once. Moreover, even if there is no Internet connection at home, you can easily download all the songs you can in Internet cafes all over North America. Imaginary music and such an artifact are simply a dream for many music lovers.
You know, during the New York blackout in 1977, many audio equipment stores were looted the most, and they largely contributed to the rise of hip-hop music.
All right.
Yes, most of the robbers were black.
Same thing this time.
For the iPlayer released by Tinker Bayer, not only can you snatch it for your own use, but due to the shortage of supply, the black market purchase price is also considerable, which has resulted in frequent robberies targeting this product. As a fellow sufferer, iCam They were also implicated because they were all products of the same company. I heard they were very powerful, so it was definitely a good idea to snatch them.
There was even a murder case in the Chicago area because of this. A couple was listening to music on the iPlayer-10 and taking photos with the latest iCam-50 on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was probably too conspicuous. Even in the daytime when people were walking around, they still encountered He was robbed by two black youths. The boy in the couple was stabbed with a sharp knife because of resistance and died of excessive blood loss.
Two young black men were arrested and charged with murder.
However, the two poor men had no choice but to be thrown into jail. The boy's parents were so depressed that they even filed a lawsuit against Tinco Bayer Company, believing that Tinco Bayer's products indirectly caused this unfortunate incident. It’s a $100 million claim.
There are many such unreasonable lawsuits in the United States.
While Tinker Bayer actively responded to the lawsuit, it had to remind users through some media to keep a low profile as much as possible when using the 'i' series products, and it became the focus of discussion for a while.
These episodes did not affect the sales of the two new products at all.
In the first week of sales, only in the North American market, including pre-orders, iCam-50 achieved weekly sales of 320,000 units. In other markets such as Japan, the United Kingdom, and Australia, which were simultaneously launched, the sales volume also reached 130,000 units. In the first week worldwide, The total number exceeds 450,000 units.
This is despite the fact that some important markets such as France and Germany failed to open sales at the same time.
iPlayer-10 is temporarily limited to the North American market.
Also in just the first week, the first batch of 100,000 iPlayer-10 units were sold out. Starting from the second week, Tinker Bayer launched 200,000 units of iPlayer-10 on the market every week, and demand still exceeded supply.
As of May 11, in four weeks, the total global sales of iCam-50 have reached 1.53 million units. The surrounding shipments of iPlayer-10 players neatly reached 700,000 units.
Even though the sales volume of iPlayer-10 is less than half of that of iCam-50, many people can see that this digital music player product is obviously more promising than the iCam series in terms of popularity and potential market capacity.
Not only has iPlayer-10 caused frequent robberies across North America, but in the second-hand market, the price of most resold iPlayer-10s is even higher than the official list price. Some people even listed them on eBay, an auction platform supported by the Westeros system. The number of cases that were successfully sold at a price of US$1,200 has more than doubled compared to the list price of US$499.
Hence the emergence of scalpers.
Speaking of which, because of Westerners' widespread demand for music, the market capacity of digital music players is indeed much larger than that of digital cameras. With Apple's closed attitude, annual sales of the iPod exceeded 50 million units at its peak. At that time, the smartphone era had arrived, and it had actually missed the golden period of digital music player promotion.
Now that the Internet has emerged and smart devices have not yet become popular, it is the best time to promote digital music players.