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Business News Digital
Major Pandora shareholder expresses concern over streaming service’s “costly and uncertain business plan”
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 19 May 2016
Pandora’s largest shareholder Corvex Management has written to the digital music firm’s chairman Jim Feuille expressing dismay that the streaming service hasn’t been sold already. Won’t at least one deluded fucker bid to buy this nonsense?
“We have become increasingly concerned that the company may be pursuing a costly and uncertain business plan, without a thorough evaluation of all shareholder value-maximising alternatives”, says the hedge fund’s Managing Partner Keith Meister in the letter, also filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We urge the company to immediately engage an independent investment bank with a fresh perspective and without any prior history of advising the company to advise on a value maximisation process – including the execution of a sales process – and to evaluate the results against other options including the risk-adjusted value of continuing to operate on a standalone basis”.
Meister adds that Corvex was “surprised” at the recent return of Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren to the CEO role, adding that “Mr Westergren’s public statements after his appointment as CEO appear to indicate a ‘business as usual’ approach at best, while at worst they suggest an unwillingness to consider a sale regardless of the price offered to shareholders or the cost and uncertainty inherent in a standalone business plan”.
The hedge fund has decided to air these views publicly, he added, because of a “growing concern that management and the board of directors no longer appear willing to consider all paths to maximise shareholder value”.
Corvex currently owns almost 10% of Pandora’s shares. Read the letter in full here.
