Electronic Arts announced Monday that it is extending its tender offer for Take-Two Interactive Software to mid-June, marking its third extension in its hostile buyout attempt of its rival game maker.
Shortly after EA failed to make an attractive-enough offer, Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto IV shattered all-time launch sales records, lending support to Chairman Zelnick's argument that the bid undervalued the company.
(Credit: Rockstar Games)EA, which, to date, has received commitments from Take-Two investors to tender roughly 6.2 million shares, or 8 percent of the company, has extended its deadline to June 16. Previously, the deadline was set for May 16.
Taking a jab at its rival, Take-Two Chairman Strauss Zelnick issued a statement: "This is the same highly conditional proposal that EA offered Take-Two stockholders on March 13, 2008, which our board of directors thoroughly reviewed, and unanimously determined to be inadequate and contrary to the best interests of Take-Two's stockholders."
He further noted that Take-Two, in an effort to maximize shareholder value, has begun exploring strategic alternatives with interested parties, now that its record-breaking launch of Grand Theft Auto IV has wrapped up.
EA, which launched its hostile bid valued at $2 billion for Take-Two in late February, said despite the extension, its current offer remains the same.
"EA's offer price remains unchanged at $25.74 per share, and our offer is still subject to conditions that include regulatory approval. As stated earlier, we retain the right to terminate the offer, if the conditions are not satisfied," Owen Mahoney, senior vice president of EA corporate development, said in a statement.
Take-Two shares traded down 1.14 percent in Monday morning trading to $26.79 a share.
Updated March 13, 12:45 PM PDT, to reflect the announcement by EA.
Electronic Arts has launched a $26-per-share tender offer for all outstanding shares of game publisher Take-Two following the rejection of an unsolicited bid.
The bid for the rival publisher of the Grand Theft Auto game places the value of Take-Two at $2 billion. Announced Thursday, the EA tender offer is set to expire April 11 at midnight Eastern Time, unless extended.
The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on its Web site Wednesday night, citing people familiar with the matter.
In February, EA issued a public statement saying it had made an earlier offer to Take-Two that was rejected and that it was boosting the per-share price it was willing to pay to make the deal worth $2 billion. But Take-Two quickly issued its own announcement, saying it thought EA's offer was too small and that it would prefer to wait to have any negotiations with anyone until after the April 29 release of Grand Theft Auto IV, which is expected to be a hit.
"The Internet has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies. And when you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving," Brin said.
It's the same argument Google used when the Microsoft bid for Yahoo was first unleashed.
In the letter from February 3 titled, "Yahoo and the future of the Internet," David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said that Microsoft's bid "raises troubling questions," pointing to the company's monopolistic past.
"This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation," Drummond said in the letter.
Google's strategy is to plant the seeds of doubt, like Hillary Clinton claiming on a daily basis that her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, isn't experienced enough to hold the nation's highest office. If you keep repeating it, people might believe it. But both Google and Clinton will have a hard time making their charges stick.
In Google's case, having Microsoft with a dominant position in browsers and traditional operating systems and gaining share via Yahoo in search, ads, and unique users who consume its services is unnerving--even for a company that has had a meteoric rise and more than 60 percent of the super-efficient and profitable search ad business.
A Microsoft-Yahoo merger could threaten the openness on which the Internet is based, a Google executive says.
Microsoft's $44.6 billion "hostile" bid "raises troubling questions," writes David Drummond, Google Chief Legal Officer, expresses cynicism in a blog posted on Sunday
"Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies--and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets," he writes. "Could the acquisition of Yahoo allow Microsoft--despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses--to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet?"
Microsoft and Yahoo together have a large share of the e-mail and instant messaging accounts, as well as two of the most popular Web portals. Drummond wonders about the possibility that Microsoft could use its dominance in the PC software market to unfairly limit access to competitors' Web services.
Yahoo said on Saturday that it is evaluating the unsolicited bid.
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