Month / July 2017

by Frank Maduri

NBA Expansion Update: Commissioner Silver Puts Seattle On The Short List

The undeterred vision for those in Seattle that have pushed relentlessly for years for an NBA basketball franchise to return to the Emerald City received a huge boost last week. The NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, gave an interview when he was asked about the expansion of the league in the future.

The response to the question, I am paraphrasing here, that the expansion of the NBA due to the huge growth in revenue and popularity of the sport is inevitable. He added that when the league begins to the expansion process that Seattle is on the short list of cities that they will consider.

This should come as no surprise to many basketball fans because the Sonics had a deep history and still have a loyal fan base that long for a return of the franchise to the city. The NBA would be wise to expand to Seattle because the most difficult component for a new expansion team in a new market is to establish loyal fans.

The expansion to Seattle would put a franchise in a market that has very good demographics for television/new media, has a reputation for supporting their teams, and has the nostalgia factor from the first version of the Sonics.

The second most difficult task for a newly minted expansion team is to move merchandise and corporate sponsorships. The placement of an NBA expansion team in Seattle would clearly be a positive for the league because Seattle retained the rights to the name and colors of the Sonics and will sell a ton of merchandise based on the previous support those products enjoyed. The corporate business community will embrace the return of the wildly popular Sonics to the region.

The community and the government are supportive to bringing basketball back to Seattle. The NBA left because the arena was seen to be outdated and a new arena has remained the biggest hurdle to the city gaining a team to return. That hurdle, at times seemingly insurmountable due to a variety of factors, is moving closer to being cleared.

Seattle recently announced that they have reached agreement with a developer to begin a privately financed renovation of the old Key Arena at Seattle Center. The developer will keep the historic roof of the arena and other architectural elements that the public wanted to remain intact.

The renovation project will completely renovate the interior of the building by constructing a new concourse and other elements underground below street level. It will then reconstruct the entire interior of the existing facility as well. The newly renovated arena would be designed to meet all the specifications for the NBA as well as the National Hockey League (NHL) in the hopes of gaining an expansion hockey team for Seattle.

The city is about to enter negotiations on the actual MOU of the development project, so the city council retained the services of a firm that specializes in negotiating terms of these types of development and construction projects for major entertainment and sports venues.

It should come as no surprise that the NBA is interested in a return to Seattle because that city has a captive audience of fans that are nostalgic for the return of the Sonics. The NBA will gain new fans with younger people who have parents who told them about the Sonics, and they can attend games together as a family.

The NBA has a know entity in the Sonics and that is the key to both sides eventually getting this done. The arena renovation will be the last component in what has been a long saga, and then the path should be cleared for Seattle to finally get their basketball team back again.

by Frank Maduri

The New Hierarchy of The New York Knicks

Many people have asked me over the past week or so what my thoughts are regarding the new regime in the Knicks front office. The team announced changes to their basketball operations leadership following the debacle that was the three-year run of Phil Jackson steering the ship.

My answer has been very honest: I really do not know, it is a mixture of emotions. I do not know much about Steve Mills, I know he is loyal to owner James Dolan and that he has been in the front office for a long time, both before Phil Jackson, and now in the “post-Phil era”.

It is my opinion that Mills overpaid to get Tim Hardaway Jr. back in an offer sheet to pry him from Atlanta. The Knicks paid him about four times more money than the next closest offer, this after initially drafting Hardaway Jr., then trading him away, only to pay him $71 million to come back. That is a player acquisition that is just so typical of the Knicks, what a total mess.

The appointment of Steve Perry as the new General Manager is a move I do find positive, if they give him some authority to make certain personnel related decisions. Perry is smart, politically savvy, and well respected around the NBA. He did great work in a short time with the Sacramento Kings, and the move to bring him in from California made a great deal of sense to me and others within the media that cover the team.

Mills and Perry in their introductory press conference towed the new company line that they want to rebuild the team around a young core, they want to reshape the team into a more athletic club. That sounds nice, but it disregards the fact that they have half the salary cap for the entire roster tied up in three veteran players: Carmelo Anthony, Courtney Lee, and Joakim Noah.
Then, they committed huge dollars to Hardaway Jr. and he is essentially the same type of player as Courtney Lee. I am not sure if they could trade Lee without taking back a “bad contract” in return. The issue with Noah is that he is coming off major offseason surgeries and has a prohibitive contract that Phil Jackson doled out to him. The move to trade Noah would be “selling low” because of the injuries, so the Knicks will most likely have to hold on to him for the time being.

Then, there is the Carmelo Anthony saga, with a contract that pays out a ton of money to a player that Jackson tried to make completely miserable. The Knicks had been attempting to move him to either Houston or Cleveland, according to reputable reports, and then paused that process when they named Perry to the GM post.

The Knicks new regime was said to have been looking to mend the relationship with Anthony to bring him back into the fold. Several sources around the league state that Anthony is done with the dysfunction of the Knicks and wants to be traded to Houston to play with Chris Paul and James Harden.

However, trading Carmelo will be complicated because he has a no trade clause (which he has lifted to move to either Houston or Cleveland) that the Knicks front office has reportedly asked him to expand that list so they have more viable options to trade him. He also has a 15% “trade kicker” in his contract that will increase his salary cap hit to the team that obtains him, and the right amount of money has to be sent back in order to meet the regulations of the NBA for trading players.

All of this when taken together means that the Knicks need a fourth team to be involved in a multi-layered deal that ultimately would get Anthony to Houston, would provide the Knicks with cap relief, and also would provide the other two teams in the deal some other assets or cap space to make the deal worthwhile for them. It seems unlikely that will happen at this point because the Rockets will probably wait until closer to training camp to leverage the Knicks into a deal that is better for Houston’s interests.

The Knicks have some talent on the roster and they do need to start the rebuild because they have been spinning their wheels for the past four or five years. The fan base is getting restless, and rightfully so, but as I wrote in the past, the Knicks will continue to sell tickets because tourists want to see games at the Garden. The Knicks will continue to be a money machine because of the allure of playing in New York, which makes the impetus for actually rebuilding the roster a difficult thing for their front office to actually accomplish.

The new hierarchy of the Knicks brings me mixed emotions, I am not sure how much Mills will interfere with Perry trying to make bold moves to revamp the roster. I am not sure how involved James Dolan will be, and if Perry will have his hands tied in trying to improve the team. I guess only time will tell, they have a great deal of work ahead of them.

In the meantime, Knicks fans will wait and see if this new front office will be able to make the moves necessary or if it will be business as usual in the Garden.

by Frank Maduri

Mergers & Acquisitions Roundup

The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in this quarter was slow compared to the two most recent quarters in the financial world. The total amount of the deals was reportedly higher in dollar volume than the prior quarter, but the overall M&A picture is overshadowed by the unknown impact of new antitrust policies coming from Washington.

Those policies remain unrevealed to the public by the White House, and has placed most of the potential M&A activity on hold until further details emerge. However, amid all those changes some pending deals made progress and others fell apart. The past few months were still busy when it came to consolidations and other types of acquisitions.

Amazon Enters The Grocery Aisle

Amazon made a bold move into the retail grocery channel by acquiring Whole Foods in an all cash deal in June. The deal will give Amazon a foothold into an industry they have been trying to tap into for a long time without having to spend major capital on leasing or building store locations, training management and staff, as well as developing a distribution network specifically for those stores.

The addition of Whole Foods is going to make Amazon an even greater threat to the other players in the fresh grocery business segment. Amazon plans on keeping Whole Foods operational strategies mostly intact with retaining their business headquarters in Austin and keeping the brick and mortar store experience largely the same.

Walgreens Proposed Merger With Rite Aid Shelved

In the opposite direction, the M&A area was dealt a blow when Walgreens and Rite Aid announced that their long-pursued foray into merging together was being abandoned completely.

This proposed marriage of two of the largest retail pharmacy chains in the U.S. was riddled with issues from the outset. The regulatory boards involved have consistently been concerned with the fact that Walgreens and Rite Aid both had to divest a certain number of stores to meet antitrust requirements. This was further complicated because the industry contains a lack of suitable buyers for those locations.

Walgreens/ Rite Aid identified Fred’s, a largely Southeastern U.S. based chain of both pharmacies and discount type dollar stores, as the partner to absorb the locations that they both would have to sell off in order to meet approval on the merger. The regulators were not sure that Fred’s could double in size basically overnight and survive, especially expanding into the Northeast and other areas where they had no previous presence.

The sheer potential size of a combined Walgreens and Rite Aid ultimately doomed this proposed M&A transaction. Walgreens now has to determine another consolidation strategy in order to compete with CVS Caremark. Rite Aid, while pretty healthy overall with their business, has to be concerned about the tough competition from CVS and Walgreens in the Northeast. They also have to be concerned that another company is going to try to obtain them and absorb them in the short term.

The Big Get Bigger

In perhaps the most under the radar move of the year, AT&T is poised to become even bigger than they are currently with a proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. This is not just the cable television unit of Time Warner, this is the entire company.

This merger is expected, according to analysts close to the deal, to close and meet all final approval metrics within the next 60 days. This is a controversial merger in the eyes of many in the general public who have justifiable concerns about a multimedia conglomerate with that much influence.

AT&T and DirecTV are the same company, and they will now have control over broadcast channels such as TBS, TNT, CNN, and HLN. This represents a monopoly which can exert pressure upon advertisers and control the message in the media in a way that could be very dangerous.

Some consumers will feel that this is a conflict of interest with AT&T controlling a major satellite television platform as well as a full stable of broadcast channels.

New Rules Coming Soon

The White House will announce some sort of new rules for M&A activity that could make it potentially easier to consummate some of these mega deals. The Dow – DuPont merger looks like it is going to meet regulatory approval regardless of these future changes to the antitrust regulatory requirements.

The rules could allow for less oversight of potential monopolistic deals and could lead to a road where all the consumer is left with are very small “mom & pop” type stores or a store owned by some giant conglomerate with nothing in between.

The Dow-DuPont merger would be one of the largest in history and would be a very complex deal that would eventually create a corporate structure with separate divisions running as autonomous companies based on their shared specialty.

The analysts expect that the Dow-DuPont approval coupled with the regulatory changes could create conditions where M&A activity will ramp up significantly.

The “Q” Gobbles Up HSN

Liberty Interactive/QVC announced on Thursday that they have purchased the remaining stake in HSN (Home Shopping Network) to complete the acquisition of the network. QVC, or “the Q” as it is known in shopping circles, now has control of their top competitor, HSN, and the company is touting the cost savings from the shared core synergies for both networks.

It stands to reason that the systems for ordering and shipping will be upgraded to a unified platform. The knock on HSN is that the ordering process could be more cumbersome and the return process more complicated than that of the processes used by QVC. An improvement to any of those processes at HSN would be a real win for the consumer. This deal is also an indication of how robust the online competition from Amazon and other sites have been to the sales for twenty-four-hour home shopping networks.

Those networks, QVC and HSN respectively, were the advent of online shopping. They provided the first convenience factor of shopping from home, before the genesis of eBay, Amazon, and Craig’s List. Some feel that this merger could be seen as a monopoly, but the reality is that it is a necessary move for the survival of home shopping networks amid intense marketplace competition.

Berkshire Bets Big On Electricity

Berkshire Hathaway and their high-profile owner, Warren Buffet, announced on Friday that they have purchased Oncor, a Texas based power grid leader, for $9 billion in cash.

The acquisition is one of the largest that Berkshire Hathaway has ever undertaken. They are intrigued by the steady demand for electricity and the continued importance of electricity infrastructure in the future.

This move also pulls Oncor out of bankruptcy and into a stable of other companies and brands owned by Berkshire which could provide opportunities for strategic partnerships in energy delivery in the future.

Europe Cracks Down

The news on Thursday that the E.U. has reviewed the M&A activity of certain major players and decided to take punitive steps came as a surprise to some, and as no surprise to others within the business world.

The E.U. is investigating whether GE mislead their regulatory compliance process when the consumer products giant purchased a wind farming operation. The line of defense for GE, according to their spokespeople, is that the company did nothing to intentionally misguide the process. The E.U. law is written in a way that GE should they be found guilty of any wrongdoing would have to pay a fine in excess of one billion dollars.

The E.U. is also investigating Merck (the German company not the American pharmaceutical titan) for a similar matter in a completed merger where the valuations might have been altered to mislead the regulatory powers involved. They also face a hefty fine and the potential for an increased level of scrutiny whenever they decide to consolidate in the future.

The E.U. is also investigating electronics giant, Canon, for some alleged deceptive practices during their purchase of Toshiba’s medical imaging business unit. It would not reverse the acquisition, but it would be a significant fine if guilt is established. The reputation and corporate image of Canon could also take a hit in this situation as well.

The M&A activity has been largely put on hold in recent months. However, some of the largest merger activity could become reality in the next few months. These transactions will have an undeniable impact on the average consumer and will have influence over entire industry segments moving forward. It is important to understand how they can impact you and your family from the way it can impact costs of goods and services. The future will bring more of the same, so stay prepared.

by Frank Maduri

DuPont &Tainted Water Allegations In Wilmington

The reports of the tainted water supply from a chemical plant in Wilmington, North Carolina are both alarming and shocking in nature. The Cape Fear water supply is infected with large levels of a chemical agent called GenX.

This chemical has been linked to numerous health conditions which have been exhibited in residents living in that area which utilize the Cape Fear water supply. The incidents have been staggering, and the report from CBS News states that evidence exists that could indicate that the chemical has been present in the water supply for decades.

The chemical plant is operated by Chemours, which is a spinoff company of the agricultural chemical giant, DuPont. The company formed and split off Chemours as part of the steps taken for regulatory approval of DuPont to merge with another goliath in the industry, Dow Chemical.

This particular chemical, GenX, is a replacement component used in the process of making Teflon. It is has been linked to potential cancer causing effects and is present in the drinking water supply of Cape Fear River which serves tens of thousands of people. The substance has been in the water supply for 37 years because there is no standard for measuring or testing for that chemical.

GenX is a processing aide and replaced a substance called P.F.O.A. which had a long history of safety issues itself. The process of making Teflon received largely unnoticed media coverage as the company moved forward with production utilizing GenX in the formulation.

DuPont insisted to the public that the substitute was safe, yet had issued over fifteen documents behind closed doors that cited concerns over health and safety of the chemical. The “to make matters worse” segment of this article is that Chemours, according to local news reports, will not commit to stopping the release of further GenX into the river.

The municipal government response is almost tragic in that they will not state that GenX is safe to consume but they will not state that it is unsafe either. The recent fallout legally from the horrendous water crisis in Flint should give these local officials pause when dealing with these issues. The official response from the municipal level is that they are deferring to the county for further direction.

The local area residents, most of them at least, are understandably very upset. The fact that toxic material has been in the water for decades and undisclosed is yet another example of corporate distrust in the American public perception. The reports I saw referenced some other area residents with the opinion that the river is contaminated from all sorts of chemicals and that should be common knowledge for a local person.

The news will have little to no impact on the proposed merger between Dow and DuPont because Chemours was spun off and is technically a separate entity at this point from DuPont. The DuPont merger with Dow would initially create one huge company that then will be split in legal terms into five smaller companies, or units.

It may not damage the chances for the merger to be approved, but this situation in North Carolina still connects DuPont to a tainted water supply, which is damaging in the court of public opinion. That can be a force that should not be underestimated.

The recent developments out of Flint, Michigan which were referred to earlier in this piece also could play a role in the way that the situation in North Carolina gets handled from both a government and a media coverage standpoint. The disaster in Flint has gripped the nation and the consensus opinion drawn from that tragedy of contaminated water and government cover-ups is: this can never happen again. The situation with Chemours and the Cape Fear River can get some significant backlash because of the timing of the whole situation.

The direction of the situation could evolve into a similar one to Flint, where an investigation into who knew about the effects of GenX and when did they know become significant findings. It could also become a scenario that proves difficult to build a case because so many people can claim ignorance on the effects of the chemical.

This tragic situation is evolving and will continue to do so in the coming weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, there will be more questions raised than there are answers available. The lives of residents and the quality of life of families from all backgrounds and demographics will hang in the balance. This will all come together around another American corporation trying to defend itself from what it knew a long time ago: that putting these chemicals into the river would have consequences.

It is inconceivable that we could have another situation like Flint in our future, but it appears that at the very least this Cape Fear River debacle is on the surface a very significant public health threat, and what lies beneath that surface is what we are all bracing for in the near future.