Time Warner To Be Split Into Four Parts?

Shakrai writes "CNN Money is running a story titled Icahn eyes Time Warner break-up. Carl Icahn is a fairly well known investor who is pushing to break the Time Warner empire into at least four different business units. While his motivation seems to stem from business interests -- he thinks it will work out better for Time Warner in the long run -- I thought it raised an interesting point of discussion. Will the vertically integrated media empires that control content creation, content distribution, internet access and the news media become the Ma Bells of the 21st century? What can be done to protect consumers without stifling the technological innovation that we all know is so important?"

Comments

Weird

[FST]

Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street. So why are so many companies now rushing to get unhitched? Also, is this outbreak of corporate divorces good for shareholders, or should I sell my stocks now?

What will happen to the Netscape Divison ?

[axonis]

I guess if AOL is going to be set free, and probably aquired, Netscape will also suffer its final fait too... i can imagine that it will evntually get killed off , marking the end of a once great Internet company.

Splitting the company up will only help innovation

[hellfire]

The larger a company is, the less it competes on quality and innovation, and the more it competes on price and muscle. Smaller companies are more agile and can change more quickly.

My personal opinion is that Icahn is pushing this for simply financial reasons. Quite simply, Time Warner has money making divisions, and others are dead weight that should jettisoned. By splitting them up, an investor ends up with some kind of stock split amongst the resulting companies. They then sell off the loser stocks and put that money back into the good portions. This would be a great way to kill off AOL once and for all. AOL is the only division I know of that's dead weight, but there could be others. I'm really just guessing here. MY point is that Icahn is doing this for money reasons. It's the only reason why he would, and neither the article nor the submitter make any mention of this, which is extremely short sighted.

However, regardless of the financial motivations, I completely support a break up of any company as large as this, purely because it benefits consumers with competition. Also, while a merger usually ends up in "eliminating redunancies" in jobs, a break up will usually put those "redundancies" back and open up at least a few new jobs to fill.

No brainer really... get the sledgehammers out and start breaking!

Not so weird

[canuck57]

Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street.

Not really so weird. Boards and execs have little to do but cook up a buy, merger or divestiture. It is self justification for their existance. But what a waste of money.

The truth is the rich at the top want to keep one part of the company and cash out another and now realize the merger was stupid. My guess is AOL has been loosing too many customers under the new management and instead of dealing with the synergy and management issues they are going to cut AOL back out on their own.

It is too bad short term greed and short sightedness were not the only traights you need on a good board of directors, if so America would be rich.

Very bad analogy: TW is not a utility

[postbigbang]

There is no dependent public service on Time Warner. All they things they do, especially in media, can't be considered in the same way that the monopoly of AT&T and their FCC and PUC/state-governed telephony was.

These two aren't equal; they aren't congruent, they aren't even parallel.

Time Warner's broadband properties are not a utility, like water, sewer, electricity, or natural gas-- things you can't live without. They don't have the same history, the same economics, the same monopoly control, the same easement and right-of-way capital assets, and so on.

Therefore, garbage-in, garbage-out. The comparison is null, and it is, unfortunately moot.