Former Warner Music chairman Edgar Bronfman, Jr. has raised his bid for Paramount Global, promising $6 billion to buy out National Amusement’s stake in the company — and, more crucially, some non-voting Paramount shareholders, should they take advantage of the offer.
The bid comes about two days after Bronfman submitted a $3.4 billion offer to acquire National Amusement’s share of Paramount, which would give him and his financial backers control of the entertainment company.
The new offer includes a $1.7 billion payment to Paramount’s non-voting shareholders if they wanted to cash out their stake in the company, which values the per-share price at around $16. Paramount’s stock price was around $4.85 as of Wednesday afternoon.
The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on the new offer made by Bronfman. It comes on the last day of a 45-day “go shop” period by which Paramount’s board was allowed to entertain offers from companies after production firm Skydance Media submitted an $8 billion bid to buy National Amusements out and merge its operations with Paramount.
Skydance’s offer allows it to buy more shares of non-voting stock from Paramount investors, though it values the stock at $15 per share, the Journal reported.
It was not clear if Paramount’s board was seriously entertaining Bronfman’s offer, or if they will move forward with the Skydance deal. Skydance has already announced its intention to appoint certain executives to Paramount if their deal closes, with those executives holding conference calls with investors and reporters to outline some of their post-merger plans, including a reorganization of Paramount’s businesses.
In addition to Paramount’s namesake film and TV production studio, the company owns the CBS broadcast networks, numerous cable channels — Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, VH1 and Logo among them — and at least two streaming platforms, Paramount Plus and Pluto TV. The company also has various international broadcast and streaming products: It owns Channel 5 in the United Kingdom and Network 10 in Australia.
