Investment firm Pershing Square Tontine Holdings pulled out of its plans to buy 10% of Universal Music Group last month, but said at the time that it would be passing the deal on to another part of its corporate group. Now that deal has been done. Well, partly.
Pershing Square Holdings and some of its affiliate companies have acquired what it described as an “initial stake” in UMG. They have paid around $21.78 per share for a 7.1% stake in the major label group: a $2.8bn cash investment that values UMG at… well, that’s a little complicated.
“The total cash consideration of $2.8 billion represents an equity value for UMG of €33 billion,” was the relevant line in Pershing Square’s announcement. But UMG’s parent company Vivendi described it as “a price of USD 2.8 billion based on an enterprise value of €35 billion for 100% of UMG’s share capital.”
Update: we checked in with Vivendi, and both numbers are correct. The difference between the €33bn of equity value and the €35bn of enterprise value is the corporate debt held by the company.
Both agreed on another aspect of the deal, however: Pershing Square boss Bill Ackman has also secured the right to buy up to 2.9% more of UMG by 9 September “through funds which he manages or in which he holds the majority of economic interest, based on the same valuation” according to Vivendi. Pershing Square confirmed that it “intends to exercise” this right.
With the deal done, attention shifts to Vivendi’s planned spin-off of UMG on the Euronext Amsterdam exchange in September, when we’ll find out what the wider investment world thinks about the value of Universal Music.
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