daveswb said:
Is there are Rumor that he wants to buy it? I use to work for Rupert. Seems like a weird move for him.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=mvl
The current worth of Marvel I belive is about 377 Mill. Thats assets minus liabilities
But I think that's just current earnings I belive the perfered stock total is somowhere near 1.1 billion in worth.
I don't see why it'd be odd for him to buy it. NewsCorp is a media conglomerate, Marvel is a media company, it seems to make sense to me. True, he hasn't bought anything like this before, but who really expected them to buy Myspace either?
And Marvel would be sold based on it's worth (assets minus liabilites) because that doesn't present an accurate picture of what it does. That's really nothing more than number based on one snapshot in time. The number they'd be more likely to look at would be Shareholders Equity (that's who they'd be buying from more or less), Net Sales, and Cash Flow.
Marvel's Net Sales last year (the most recent numbers available) were about $390 million, Cash Flow was about $290 million from operations and investing, and Shareholder's Equity clocked in at about $360 million.
I don't think it unreasonable for Marvel to be valued at $800 million plus, if it were to be sold.
I think a major factor though would be the large amount of debt ($525 million) Marvel recently took on to start financing and producing it's own movies. It's going to look like a massive sum on the balance sheets but the question would whether the buyer would look at it as debt, or investment. Because until the first Marvel produced movie debuts (which won't be for a couple years), people won't know whether they'll easily pay off this debt through box office successes, or if it's going to drag them down through box office bombs.
Marvel's in a really tricky place right now. If they succeed, they're going to succeed big but if they fail, they're going to fail big.
