TechCabal Daily - Hostile takeover? Canal+ now owns 12% of MultiChoice

On October 6, 2020, the TC Daily opened with the question: why is Canal+ buying a stake in MultiChoice?

It was worth asking after Vivendi, the entity that owns Groupe Canal bought 6.5% of MultiChoice’s ordinary shares. But October is not where the story really starts.

Vivendi has been buying MultiChoice shares since April and they only had to disclose their position after they had bought more than 5% of MultiChoice ordinary shares.

Vivendi has now bought more shares in MultiChoice, disclosing that it now owns 12% of MultiChoice ordinary shares in issue.

The question: is Vivendi considering a takeover of MultiChoice? It’s not a far fetched conclusion, given that Vivendi has been expanding its African footprint in the last few years. Its acquisition of ROK Studios in 2019 showed that the company’s ambitions stretch beyond French speaking Africa.

What’s worth knowing here? In 2018, Vivendi made several bids to buy a controlling interest in MultiChoice. The bids were said to be in the region of $1 billion, were rejected by MultiChoice.

A takeover could still be on the cards:
Vivendi has a reputation for hostile takeovers, often buying minority stakes in the company first, before making takeover bids. It could very well be the play here.

Multichoice’S largest shareholders: Prudential Portfolio Managers (9%), Allan Gray (10.1%), Vivendi (12%) and Public Investment Corp (13.4%)

Go Deeper: Is Canal+ attempting a takeover of Multichoice?

Leaving Nigeria is an idea that’s so popular, there’s a term for it- Japa.

Two years ago, according to a Pew Research Center study, about 45% of Nigerians had plans to leave the country within the next five years, more people than in all other surveyed countries.

Thankfully, there are resources and companies that make it easier than ever to leave Nigeria for greener pastures.

What you don’t see every day is a startup that’s helping Africans in the diaspora move back home. Yet that’s what Movemeback, a startup founded in 2014 by Oyin Selebo and Charles Sekwaloe does.

So Kay spoke to the startup and whipped up this super interesting article that challenges everything you know.

Read it here.

Cameroon’s phone tax lasted a total of two weeks, but it’s worth considering the timeline of such a poorly thought out law.

The start of the story is Cameroon’s declining customs revenue and an ambitious plan to raise that revenue by 2500% in one year.

When you set unrealistic goals like that, what’s likely to follow are poorly thought out policies.

That’s the background against which Cameroon introduced a phone tax that asked phone dealers to pay 33% of the value of phones and tablets as clearance fees.

But the law went further, allowing phone dealers to be able to pass that cost down to the end users.

What did Cameroonians say? Not good

I wrote all about it here.