Disney just raised the stakes in the fight for 21st Century Fox. The company sweetened its offer Wednesday — $71.3 billion for Fox’s movie studio, along with Fox’s regional sports networks and cable channels like FX and National Geographic.
That’s more than the $65 billion Comcast offered a week ago. Disney had initially bid $52.4 billion for Fox in December.
21st Century Fox is the next big prize as the media industry consolidates to survive against competitors such as Netflix and Facebook. Last week, a judge signed off on AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN.
That court decision paved the way for Comcast’s attempt to swipe Fox from Disney. Like AT&T, Comcast is a content distributor that wants to buy a content creator. AT&T’s win was seen by some as a green light for a Comcast-Fox partnership. Disney CEO Bob Iger thinks otherwise. During a call with investors Wednesday, he pointed out that Disney has already been working with regulators for months.
“We believe that we have a much better opportunity — both in terms of approval, and the timing of that approval — than Comcast does in this case,” he said.
Iger added that Comcast may still have significant regulatory hurdles. The company isn’t just a cable provider, he said, but a broadband provider, too. That kind of ownership wasn’t addressed in the AT&T case.
“It’s just simply an apples-to-oranges comparison,” Iger said.
Disney’s new offer is essentially the same as the first — just with a higher valuation for the Fox assets. But it comes with one key change designed to stave off Comcast’s all-cash offer: a provision that allows Fox shareholders to decide whether to accept their payment in cash or stock.
