Time quickly came to August 5, which was also the day Baidu was listed on NASDAQ.
Prior to this, after converting the convertible preferred shares it held, DS Capital held 5 million shares of Baidu and Rich23 Capital held 745,000 shares of Baidu.
At the last moment before its listing, Baidu raised its stock issue price from the original range of US$17-19 to US$27 per share.
Rich23 Capital participated in the subscription, spending US$27 million and subscribing to 1 million new shares.
At 10:00 am on August 5, 2005, New York time, Baidu's IPO participants, led by Baidu CEO Li, entered the office of Goldman Sachs Group, waiting to witness the historic moment of Baidu's first IPO transaction. At around 11:35, the first transaction was completed, and the stock price rose to $72, a 200% increase. All the staff applauded!
Baidu created history for Nasdaq, and Wall Street began to boil!
It can be said that Baidu's first day of listing this time was a record-breaking one.
Their stock's IPO price was $27, and the opening price was $66, $39 higher than the IPO price!
On that day, Baidu's stock price reached a high of $151.21 and finally closed at $122.54, up 354% from the issue price. This figure is the largest first-day increase for a newly listed company in the U.S. stock market this century.
Based on this issue price, Baidu's current market value is close to US$4 billion.
The 5 million shares of Baidu held by DS Capital are worth more than US$600 million - they only invested US$15 million at the beginning, a 40-fold increase!
The total 1.745 million shares of Baidu held by Rich23 Capital are worth US$214 million.
Although many media analysts believe that Baidu's current high stock price is a bubble - because Baidu's current market value has reached 279 times its 2004 revenue (US$14.2 million), while Google's market value is only 26 times its 2004 revenue (US$3.2 billion) - Baron knows that Baidu's stock price still has considerable room for growth in the future, so they will continue to hold on to the Baidu shares they currently hold.
Yes, Google's market value exceeded $80 billion in June and is currently over $83 billion.
At this time, the 20 million Google shares held by DS Capital were worth more than US$6 billion, and the 10 million Google shares held by Rich23 Capital were worth more than US$3 billion.
It can be said that they both made huge profits from this investment.
Previously, when DS Capital acquired the Gucci Group, it used the shares of many companies it held as collateral to obtain a loan, including Google shares.
And at Google's current share price, they can still borrow more money if they want...
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A few days after Baidu's successful listing, United Energy Group also completed its acquisition of Unocal.
However, while acquiring Unocal, they also made progress in negotiations with National Grid of Britain on the acquisition of their natural gas business.
The board of National Grid has essentially given the green light to a £5bn bid from United Energy for its gas network business.
However, further negotiations are still needed on the acquisition method.
Shares of United Energy Group rose more than 10% again after completing its acquisition of Unocal Corp.
National Grid of the United Kingdom believes that the share price of United Energy Group is too high at this time. They find it difficult to accept the current price in the form of a stock acquisition. Previously, United Energy Group proposed to make this acquisition in the form of cash and stock. When the negotiations first started, the share price of United Energy Group was still around 12.5 pounds, but now, their share price has risen to more than 14 pounds.
Therefore, the National Grid of the United Kingdom is more inclined to have United Energy Group make this acquisition entirely in cash.
You should know that for the acquisition of Unocal that it just completed, United Energy Group will pay $12.6 billion in cash. The 5 billion pounds they raised in previous financing were all used to pay for this acquisition. In addition, they also need to raise funds from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.
The $5 billion needed to acquire the gas business of National Grid in the UK...
Well, United Energy Group has already reached an agreement with Chevron to sell Unocal's oil and gas resources in the United States for $4 billion.
In addition, they were also secretly contacting CNOOC, which had failed in its acquisition of Unocal, and were preparing to sell them an oil and gas block in Asia.
I believe CNOOC will be very interested in this because compared with other oil and gas resources, the oil and gas resources in Asia are closer to China, and it is also more convenient for CNOOC to transport them back to the country after extraction, thus filling their energy demand gap.
To be honest, Barron would be happy with a full cash acquisition, but the key is to solve the funding issue.
After selling a certain amount of oil and gas resources to CNOOC, it is expected that together with the purchase funds from Chevron, they will be able to solve the funding problem of more than 3.5 billion pounds.
The remaining £1.5 billion of funds will be relatively easy to raise.
Not to mention continuing to issue bonds, even if the current United Energy Group borrows from banks, it will be able to completely solve these funding gap problems.
After completing the acquisition of the natural gas business of the British National Grid and merging it with the current natural gas pipeline network of the former Northern Gas Company, United Energy Group's natural gas pipeline business will be able to account for more than 30% of the British market and become one of the largest natural gas pipeline networks in the UK.
But the market share of the natural gas pipeline network in the UK is almost at this level. If they continue to make acquisitions and expand United Energy Group's share of the natural gas pipeline network business, I am afraid that the British market regulator will no longer let go of their antitrust investigation.
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In Barron's previous life, News Corporation would have completed the acquisition of MySpace in July.
However, after Barron talked with Ivanta last time, and after IC Capital communicated with the founding team of MySpace, they rejected News Corporation's acquisition price of US$650 million and claimed that they would not consider any price below US$700 million.
In this way, after the matter was dragged on until August, News Corporation finally made up its mind and accepted the price offered by MySpace. They agreed to acquire MySpace for US$700 million!
IC Capital holds 49% of MySpace, so at this price, they will receive nearly $350 million...