So long, PanAmSat (NYSE: PA); we hardly knew you. Having gone public not even six months ago, PanAmSat's run as a publicly traded company appears to be over -- already.
On Monday morning, the company announced that it had agreed to accept a buyout offer from privately held Intelsat. The deal offers PanAmSat shareholders $25 per share in cash, about 26% more than the stock traded for at the end of Friday. All told, Intelsat will be shelling out $3.2 billion in cash and assuming another $3.2 billion of PanAmSat debt.
Assuming that the deal gets the necessary regulatory blessings, it will create the largest satellite company in the world, with more than 53 birds in the air. Even with that size, I would imagine that the deal has a pretty fair chance of being approved, considering that there isn't much overlap between the two businesses.
Where PanAmSat is strongest -- broadcasting TV signals for media companies like Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), and Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) -- Intelsat is relatively weak. Where Intelsat is strongest -- data, telecomm, and network services for the likes of national governments, AT&T (NYSE: T), British Telecom, and Cable andWireless (NYSE: CWP) -- PanAmSat is relatively weak.
Not that it will do PanAmSat shareholders any good, but this is the sort of deal that should make one very strong company out of two strong companies. Satellites, orbital slots, and customer relationships are all valuable, and now they'll be brought under one umbrella and (in theory at least) managed more efficiently.
While there will be a shareholder vote for the deal, approval is all but secured. The private equity groups that owned PanAmSat prior to taking it public still hold more than 50% of the stock and the press release announcing the deal indicated that these shareholders had already agreed to the transaction. Not a bad return for these folks (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Carlyle Group, and Providence Equity Partners), as they will have turned an initial investment of about $550 million into a $2.3 billion stake.
We at The Motley Fool always encourage investors to take their time and really dig into a company prior to investing their hard-earned cash. That's still solid advice, even if those who took a bit too much of their time analyzing PanAmSat missed out. The great thing about Wall Street is there's always another great idea coming along if you just go and look for it.
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Fool contributor Stephen Simpson has no financial interest in any stocks mentioned (that means he's neither long nor short the shares).
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