Rebirth of England

Time quickly came to August 5, which was also the day when Baidu was listed on Nasdaq.

Prior to this, after converting the convertible preferred shares held, DS Capital held 5 million shares of Baidu and Rich23 Capital held 745,000 shares of Baidu.

At the last moment before listing, Baidu raised its stock issuance price from the earliest range of US$17-19 to US$27 per share.

Rich23 Capital participated in the subscription and spent US$27 million to subscribe for 1 million new shares.

New York time, at 10:00 a.m. on August 5, 2005, people involved in Baidu's listing, led by Baidu CEO Boss Li, entered the office of Goldman Sachs Group and waited together to witness the historic moment of Baidu's first transaction. At 11 o'clock At about 35 minutes, the first transaction was completed, and the stock price rose to $72, an increase of 200%. Everyone burst into applause!

Baidu made history for Nasdaq, and Wall Street began to boil!

It can be said that Baidu’s first day of listing this time was a record.

The issue price of their shares was $27, and the opening price was $66, which was $39 higher than the issue price!

On this day, Baidu's stock price reached a maximum of 151.21 US dollars, and finally closed at a price of 122.54 US dollars, an increase of 354% from the issue price. This figure was the largest first-day increase for a newly listed company in the American stock market this century.

Based on this issue price, Baidu's current market value is close to US$4 billion.

The 5 million Baidu shares held by DS Capital are worth more than 600 million U.S. dollars—they only invested 15 million U.S. dollars at the beginning, a 40-fold increase!

A total of 1.745 million Baidu shares held by Rich23 Capital is already worth US$214 million.

Although many media analysts believe that Baidu's current high stock price is a bubble - because Baidu's current market value has reached 279 times its 2004 revenue ($14.2 million), while Google's market value is only its 2004 revenue ($3.2 billion) - but Barron knows that there is still considerable room for Baidu's stock price to rise in the future, so the Baidu stocks they currently hold will continue to be retained.

Yes, Google’s market value exceeded US$80 billion in June and is currently at more than US$83 billion.

At this time, the value of the 20 million Google shares held by DS Capital exceeded US$6 billion, and the 10 million Google shares held by Rich23 Capital were valued at more than US$3 billion.

It can be said that they both made huge profits from this investment.

When DS Capital acquired the Gucci Group, it used its shares in many companies as collateral for loans, including shares in Google.

And with Google's current stock price, they can continue to make additional loans if they want...

…

A few days after Baidu's successful listing, United Energy Group also completed its acquisition of Unocal.

However, while acquiring Unocal, they also made progress in negotiations with National Grid Corporation of England regarding the acquisition of their natural gas business.

National Grid's board has largely agreed to a £5bn bid from United Energy Group for its gas network business.

However, further negotiations are still needed on the acquisition method.

After completing the acquisition of Unocal, United Energy Group's share price rose again by more than 10%...

National Grid of England believes that the stock price of United Energy Group is too high at this time. At the current price, it is difficult for them to accept it in the form of stock acquisition - before, United Energy Group proposed to purchase it in the form of cash and stocks. For this acquisition, when negotiations first began, United Energy Group's share price was still around 12.5 pounds, but now, their share price has risen to more than 14 pounds.

Therefore, National Grid of England prefers United Energy Group to make this acquisition entirely in cash.

You know, for the just-completed acquisition of Unocal, United Energy Group will pay US$12.6 billion in cash. The 5 billion pounds they received from previous financing were used to pay for this acquisition. In addition, they need to pay Goldman Sachs Group and JP Morgan Chase came to finance.

The $5 billion required to acquire National Grid’s natural gas business...

Well, United Energy Group has previously reached an agreement with Chevron to sell Unocal's oil and gas resources in the United States for US$4 billion.

In addition, they are also secretly in contact with CNOOC, which failed in the acquisition of Unocal, and are preparing to sell an oil and gas block in Asia to them.

CNOOC must be very interested in this, because compared to other oil and gas resources, oil and gas resources in Asia are closer to China, and it is more convenient for CNOOC to transport them back to China after extraction, thereby filling their energy demand gap.

To be honest, Barron would still be happy to make a completely advanced acquisition, but the key is to solve the funding problem.

Then after selling a certain amount of oil and gas resources to CNOOC, it is expected that they, plus Chevron's purchase funds, will be able to raise more than 3.5 billion pounds of funds.

The remaining 1.5 billion pounds of funds are relatively without much difficulty.

Not to mention continuing to issue bonds, even if the current United Energy Group borrows from banks, it can completely solve the problem of these funding gaps.

After completing the acquisition of the natural gas business of National Grid of England and merging it with the natural gas pipeline network of the original Northern Gas Company, United Energy Group's natural gas pipeline network business will be able to account for more than 30% of the British market. , becoming one of the largest natural gas pipeline networks in the UK.

However, the market share of the natural gas pipeline network in the UK is almost at this level. If it continues to make acquisitions and expand United Energy Group’s share of the natural gas pipeline network business, I am afraid that the market regulators in the UK will not be able to do so. Will let their antitrust investigation go again.

…

Originally, in Barron's previous life, News Corporation would have completed the acquisition of MySpace in July.

However, after the last conversation between Barron and Ivanta, and after IC Capital communicated with the founding team of MySpace, they rejected News Corporation’s acquisition price of US$650 million, and claimed that they would not accept a price below US$700 million. be considered.

In this way, after delaying the matter until August, News Corporation finally made up its mind and accepted the price proposed by MySpace. They agreed to acquire MySpace for US$700 million!

IC Capital holds 49% of MySpace's shares, so at this price, they will receive nearly $350 million in funding...