MGM Resorts International is putting the Bellagio into a joint venture controlled by a Blackstone Group Inc real-estate investment trust. MGM is to hold a 5% stake in the venture and $4.2 billion cash and will continue to operate the hotel and casino, which it will rent from the venture for $245 million a year. The transaction values Bellagio at $4.25 billion, the company said. [WSJ]
MGM said it is separately selling another Strip casino, Circus Circus, to an associate of Phil Ruffin, who owns Treasure Island in Las Vegas, for $825 million.
Capital needed for expansion in Japan
Japan’s move last year to legalize gambling opened the way for global casino operators to pursue licenses there.
MGM Resorts has adopted what it calls its “Osaka-first” strategy, pouring its efforts into securing a license in that city.
Asset light
MGM could also look to wring some value from its 50 percent interest in mixed-use complex CityCenter, as well its 68 percent stake in MGM Growth Properties (NYSE:MGP). [casino.org]
The company stated its intention to reduce domestic net debt/EBITDA (on a restricted group basis) to about 1.0x – Moody’s
(Before AOL was part of Oath, a Verizon subsidiary, AOL owned Crunchbase. Later, after Verizon bought AOL, but before it combined the Internet brand with Yahoo to form Oath, Crunchbase was spun out as its own entity.)
(Further disclosure: Verizon is the former employer of our editor in chief, who worked for TechCrunch, then owned by AOL, before and after Verizon bought the smaller firm.)
Investors in Crunchbase also include:
Emergence Capital Partners
Salesforce Ventures
Mayfield Fund
etc.
The company raised $18 million of Series B venture funding from lead investor Mayfield on April 6, 2017, putting the company’s pre-money valuation at $52 million.
PitchBook
Acquired by Morningstar (NASDAQ: MORN) for $225 million on December 1, 2016. Deal announced in October.
Morningstar was an early investor in PitchBook and owned approximately 20 percent of the company before acquisition.
At that time, PitchBook had $31.1 million in revenue for the trailing 12 months ended June 30, 2016. The company has more than 300 employees located in Seattle, New York, and London.
CB Insights
Raised $10 million of Series A venture funding from Pilot Growth Equity on November 9, 2015, putting the company’s pre-money valuation at $40 million.
After WeWork’s unsuccessful IPO, several long-term apartment rentals startups in China are preparing to list on Nasdaq. Q&K (青客公寓) will likely be the first, planning to raise $100 million, according to the SEC filing.
Firms like Q&K will lease apartments from individual landlords, renovate the space with uniform styles, and then sublease fully-furnished rooms to tenants, who are mainly young urbanites looking for affordable housing. Q&K reported a net revenue of USD 129.6 million in the fiscal year 2018, up 70.3% year-on-year. Net losses however doubled to USD 72.8 million in the same period. [kr-asia]
I do believe they are similar to WeWork in many aspects.
Q&K is more like a test for investors’ current appetite (especially needed after WeWork), with two other bigger players waiting in line. Not surprisingly, those are backed by Alibaba and Tencent respectively.
Ant Financial-backed Danke (蛋壳公寓) and Tencent-backed Ziroom (自如) both are also looking for an IPO to raise $500 million – $1 billion.
Dining & Travel is 3.0x points for CSR and a $1.5x value per 100 points -> essentially a 4.5% reward.
Uber Card is 4% on dining and 3% on Travel.
The difference in annual fees are totally different: CSR is $150 ($450 fees minus $300 travel credit) while Uber Card is -$50. (YES, Negative 50 – Uber Card reimburses $50 each year for any subscription e.g. amazon prime while has $0 annul fee).
Assuming a person spends $5,000 per year in travel and dines for $20,000 per year (around $55 per day), then:
CSR will earn 1.5% premium on travel, so $75 more benefits than Uber Card.
And 0.5% premium on dining, so $100 more benefits than Uber Card.
Uber Card wins as the effective saving in annual fee is $200 while the incremental benefit CSR brings is only $175 with our assumptions.
5G is the buzzword that nearly every industry is talking about. Higher download speed, AR/VR, autonomous driving, industrial IoT – 5G is the future, powering the global economy over $12 trillion by 2035, according to an IHS study.
5G physics
Source: SlideplaySource: androidauthority.com
With 5G, we are marching into new radio frequencies, subdivided into Sub-6 (<6 GHz) and mmWave (a wavelength range of 10 mm at 30 GHz decreasing to 1 mm at 300 GHz).
4G radio waves ranging from 700 MHz to about 2.5 GHz range from roughly 40 to 12 cm in length. In contrast, a 5G NR wave at 28 GHz are just 1 cm long. And that’s the lowest end of the mmWave frequencies; 60 GHz signals are just 5 mm in length. [edn.com]
mmWave…
doesn’t penetrate walls!
This is perhaps the most common issue cited with upcoming 5G networks and it’s true to some extent. Most building materials, such as cement and brick, attenuate and reflect very high-frequency signals with a big enough loss you’re unlikely to receive a very useful signal moving from inside to outside. Even the air produces signal loss, which limits frequencies above 28GHz to about a kilometer anyway. Wood and glass attenuate high-frequency signals to a smaller degree, so you’ll likely still be able to use 5G mmWave next to a window. [androidauthority]
AT&T has introduced its 5G+ service in December 2018 with 12 cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, N.C., Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Fla., Louisville, Ky., Oklahoma City, New Orleans, Raleigh, N.C., San Antonio and Waco, Texas.
ForwardX is a startup making the world’s first smart luggage that can follow the owner – like autonomous driving.
Besides its 2C products, it is also making smart warehouse robotics.
V-AMR | Source: forwardx.com
Funding
Seed: December 2016, $1 million
Series A: May 2018. $10 million, led by CDH and Eastern Bell Capital
Series B: March 2019, RMB 100 million, led by RiverHill Fund
Market Sizing
To B: warehouse robotics, global market size $6-10 billion
To C: global luggage market $18 billion
In 2018, the total global revenue of Samsonite amounted to $3.8 billion while Tumi sales is 760 million (20% of global revenue)
Backgrounds of VC Investors
Eastern Bell Capital, Series A lead
Focus
Logistics
Supply Chain
Retail and Branding
Data & AI
Chairman of IC: Zhiming Mei, co-founder and CEO of GLP, one of the largest logistics real estate companies
GLP was spun out of the former Asian business of the world’s biggest industrial real estate operator Prologis, with GIC as the largest shareholder (36.8%), shortly after 2008 financial crisis
GLP owns and manages logistics facilities such as warehouses, controlling 55 per cent share of China’s industry of modern logistics facilities
Largest customers: Amazon, Best Logistics, JD.com
GLP was taken private in 2017 for $11.6 billion, led by Vanke (21.4%), HOPU (21.3%), Hillhouse (21.2%), Management (21.2%), Bank of China Investment (21.2%)
GLP delisted in 2018
In the interim, the company entered the European market with its US$2.8-billion deal to acquire the Gazeley platform from Brookfield.
GLP had entered the US market via another entity-level transaction in 2015, acquiring the IndCor business from the Blackstone Group for US$8.1 billion.The investment is in 117 million square feet of logistics space across 36 US markets that is 90 percent leased.The deal sees GLP commit 55 percent of the equity of the investment initially, funded via a combination of cash and a short-term credit facility, with GIC accounting for the other 45 percent.
In Jan 2018, GLP said it had received approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission to issue up to US$1.8 billion of Belt & Road bonds on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. The bonds are used to finance projects related to the One Belt One Road initiative that seeks to connect Asia and Europe over land and sea. Proceeds will be used to repay existing debt related to the financing of GLP’s Gazeley acquisition.
In June 2018, it was reported that Blackstone Group LP is buying U.S. industrial warehouse properties from Singapore-based logistics provider GLP for $18.7 billion.
Blackstone said the overall transaction totaled 179 million square feet of urban logistics assets, nearly doubling the size of its U.S. industrial footprint.
RiverHill Fund, Series B lead
One line is probably enough – Founded by Simon Xie, co-founder of Alibaba.
It is easy to see the 2B potential of ForwardX – be ready for its mass robotics in 3-5 years.
The previous post discussed around how WeChat has made life in China different in terms of eating in restaurants, buying bubble teas and more.
WeChat has also become the primary working station and personal cloud for many people.
One background – email is not that popular or useful in China. Many corporates give employees email accounts, but unlike in the US, email is just not a pervasive thing in China.
In the US, people use Gmail or Outlook and the cloud services provided by Google or Microsoft. In China, the equivalent of cloud storage is not Baidu Cloud, which provides the first 15GB free, but WeChat. People just send files as attachments in emails. And if he/she needs to CC other people, just send it in a group chat. It is a very smooth experience of sending files and discussing in a certain group of people.
The only inefficient part is probably editing files. But it is very common to use WeChat on PC so that files could be downloaded and edited. For most people, WeChat works perfect well to organize work. And it’s free.
So yes, it is just like Slack.
Meanwhile, however, files are not actually stored in or accessed through the cloud. They are local and taking up storage space in phones. So for Tencent, it is not managing an ever-expanding cloud usage and needs to think about charing fees; and for users, there is no limit in storage and they can use it as free forever, as long as they enough room in phone storages. I think it is very common for a person’s WeChat to take over 10G space in the phone.
In addition, it is more efficient to search through the files as they are grouped by groups. You go into a group chat’s history to find files, instead of searching the entire gmail for them.
On a side note, WeChat history has been very useful as a poof for nearly everything. A screenshot of chat history could be as powerful as a signed contract (not legally; but one can post it in moments or Weibo, and it seems more personal or embarrassing; so to avoid this, one usually takes a yes in WeChat seriously)
The (generic drug) industry began to consolidate during the 1960s and 1970s, and Teva emerged as the largest and most dynamic firm in the sector, thanks primarily to Eli Hurvitz, who served as CEO from 1976 to 2002 and as chairman from 2002 to 2010.
Opportunity knocked on Teva’s door when the U.S. Congress passed the Hatch-Waxman Act in 1984. The legislation created incentives for generic drug companies to challenge other firms’ patents, even before they expired, with the goal of reducing the cost of drugs in the U.S. Hurvitz positioned Teva to use Hatch-Waxman as its springboard to becoming a major player in the generics sector.
“Teva succeeded in its strategy,” says Steven Tepper, an Israeli analyst who has been following Teva for many years. “It not only worked really hard at getting its production costs down, it also developed considerable expertise in the legal aspects of the generic drugs business — how to be the first to file for generic versions of patented drugs [the law awarded a period of exclusivity to the first generic version, during which time profit margins would be higher], and how to manage the testing and licensing process. Later, Teva became adept at acquiring other companies and integrating them into the group.”
The strategy worked so well that today, Teva is the largest generic drug company in the world. Achieving this designation was a conscious decision on the part of Teva’s leadership: It was achieved via a series of large acquisitions over a five-year period, beginning with IVAX, an American rival bought for US$7.4 billion in January 2006; Barr (also in the U.S.) for US$7.46 billion in December 2008; German company Ratiopharm in March 2010 for US$5 billion, and Cephalon in May 2011 for US$6.8 billion.
“Levin was instrumental in bringing Michael Hayden to Teva as head of R&D, and together they formulated a corporate strategy for Teva that distinguished it from its competitors and also explains why Teva had to acquire either Mylan or Allergan,”
“Levin and Hayden sought to marry Teva’s proven capabilities in the efficient production of generic drugs with the company’s in-house R&D capabilities, themselves enhanced by a series of acquisitions. The goal is to turn generic drugs into specialty products, for instance by giving them a special formulation or method of application — something that doesn’t change the essence of the drug, but de-commoditizes it and allows for a higher price, higher margins and hence greater profitability.”
– Steven Tepper, pharma and biomed analyst at Migdal Capital Markets and regarded as a top Israeli analyst in this sector
The number of ‘ethical’ or proprietary drugs coming off patents in the next few years is going to be much smaller than has been the case over the past decade or so
The drug producers are facing a rapid process of concentration among their main buyers — especially in the critical U.S. market, where there are now three dominant companies. This, in turn, is forcing the manufacturers to consolidate their ranks, so as to better match the greater bargaining clout of their customers. The entire pharma industry is caught up in a whirlwind of enormous deals. Data from Thomson Reuters shows that as of July 23 — prior to Teva’s Allergan acquisition — M&A deals in the health care industry so far this year totaled almost $400 billion and were up some 80% over the equivalent period of 2014
With Copaxone’s patents going to expire, Teva needs to find supports to drive the growth or to make-up the hole – manage the “patent cliff” and the stock price
There were three acquisition targets: Sandoz (Novartis), Mylan and Actavis (Allergan).
April 8, 2015: Mylan offers to buy Perrigo for about $29 billion in cash and stock in a move that some analysts suggested was an effort to help fend off a $40 billion acquisition by larger rival Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries
April 24, 2015: Mylan goes hostile with a sweetened bid of $60 plus 2.2 Mylan shares, valuing Perrigo at $31 billion; Perrigo rejects offer
July 23, 2015: Dutch foundation linked to Mylan adopts poison pill in efforts to block takeover by Teva, citing potential job losses
July 27, 2015: Teva drops its hostile pursuit of Mylan, decides to buy Allergan Plc’s generic business in a deal worth $40.5 billion
Aug. 13, 2015: Mylan lowers the percentage of Perrigo shares it needs to control the company to just over 50 percent from its original plan of 80 percent
Sept. 14, 2015: Mylan launches a tender offer in a move to lure Perrigo investors to support its take-over efforts
Sept. 17, 2015: Perrigo recommends shareholders to reject Mylan’s tender offer, which was set to expire on Nov. 13, saying it substantially undervalued the company
Oct. 22, 2015: Perrigo announces its plans to lay off 6 percent of its global workforce and buy back shares worth $2 billion
Nov. 13, 2015: Mylan fails $26 billion bid in tender offer as it was unable to secure at least half of Perrigo’s shares
Teva said its offer should be more attractive to Mylan shareholders than the proposed purchase of Perrigo, representing a 48 percent premium to the company’s share price before speculation of a deal surfaced on March 10. When Teva made the proposal, Mylan shares were up 8.9 percent at $74.12 in afternoon Nasdaq trading, while Teva rose 2.0 percent to $64.55 on the New York Stock Exchange. Perrigo fell 2.2 percent to $193.79. (Reuters)
