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business newsReal-Time Views on BP, Ford, Toyota, Diageo, and an Open Letter to Comcast
Comcast is reportedly offering $30 billion for General Electric's NBC Universal division. Another way to add value? Synergy.
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Comcast (CMCSA) is reportedly offering $30 billion for General Electric’s (GE) NBC Universal division. As I’m humbly sure you’re aware, I was once a “contributor” to the NBC family and I reportedly left over alleged disputes with current management (or my personal lunacy, but, for our purposes, we’ll go with the alleged disputes). If we give credence to the reported allegations related to my departure, the dispute could be assumed to come down to a disagreement over the value I added to the network. All management disputes ultimately come down to arguments over the value an employee is adding.
The past is the past. Disagreements are often forgotten with the passage of time. More specifically, both alleged and real disputes are forgotten at an institutional level when entirely new management is brought in as part of a change in ownership. No rancor here, simply a fact of life in buyouts and mergers. If Comcast didn’t think it could make changes that would increase the value of NBC to something over $30 billion, the deal wouldn’t make any sense. QED Comcast will be bringing in new people if and when it closes the deal to buy NBC.
How should Comcast add value? Synergy, my friends. Synergy is one of those terms made unnecessarily complicated so universities can sell you business degrees. All synergy means is using the sum of the parts in a manner that enhances the value of the whole entity. As a non-business example, a good marriage has synergy because each spouse compliments the talents and appeal of their partner. As a business example -- and this is the part where Comcast executives should start paying attention -- NBC would be more valuable if the company took advantage of owning both CNBC and NBC by bringing a globally beloved television personality back to interpret precisely what the news featured on, say, the Today Show, means for viewers’ portfolios on an ongoing basis!
Everything has a stock angle. Seriously. It’s literally impossible to avoid taking in information potentially related to your financial condition every second of every day. Every American human is able to gather investment information every second of every single day. If you intentionally avoided any form of commercial stimulus by having an irresponsible doctor place you in a coma, you’d still be a vegetative font of investing information. Who made the drugs the doctor used? How about the injection equipment? If I flipped you over and examined your bum for bedsores, it would tell me something about your health care, the sheet manufacturer, the swabs used to wipe irritants from your motionless skin, and, really, anything related to your care. To be even more creepy, when you woke up, I’d ask you what you dreamt about to consider buying or selling related shares.
Hypothetical talk is cheap, Comcast. I’m saying I can add value to your monopolistic (in an admirable way) new entity. Let’s prove it. This morning I ignored my newspaper and watched a half an hour of the Today Show with the specific goal of interpreting every single segment from an investing perspective. Because I’m just that good and I can prove it, oh mighty Comcast executives. In fact, I already proved it right this morning and even supported my real-time conclusions with related evidence and historical lessons.
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