- Murmurs about a Sainsbury’s takeover are enough to send its shares soaring 13 per cent
- PayPal is allowing UK users to buy bitcoin. But apparently it doesn’t allow you to use it for speculative trading
Sainsbury has reportedly been added to private equity shopping trolley
Hungry for deals, private equity is going supermarket shopping.
Shares in Sainsbury’s (SBRY) - highlighted in our recent cover feature What private equity wants as a possible takeover candidate - soared 13 per cent this morning to a seven-year high, on the back of reports that the UK’s second-largest supermarket chain is next in line for a takeover. According to The Sunday Times, "private equity giants" are considering bids of more than £7bn for the company, which is currently valued at less than £6.9bn.
This comes just days after smaller rival Wm Morrison (MRW) recommended a £7bn offer from US buyout firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice to its shareholders, heating up what has rapidly become the most high-profile bidding war in private equity’s raid on the UK markets.
Details from The Sunday Times report are vague: American firm Apollo Global Management (US:APO) is said to be running the rule over Sainsbury’s. But investors’ eager response reflects the fact that after years of underperformance and disappointing market growth, the supermarket looks like a prime takeover target.
Read more:
How to trade the supermarket buyout sweep
Should investors pin their hopes on Sainsbury’s overhaul plan?
Why are private equity firms swooping on the UK stock market?
PayPal’s cryptic dive into crypto
Bitcoin: genuine currency or speculative investment? PayPal (US:PYPL) does not appear to have the answer.
The payments company announced today that Brits will soon be able to use its app to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, making it the latest established financial company to expand further into digital assets.
The move will be hailed by some as another validation of bitcoin’s potential as a competitor to traditional currencies. PayPal CEO Dan Schulman himself just told the Financial Times that bitcoin’s volatile price is the “least interesting thing” about crypto, adding it is “inevitable” that central banks will start producing digital currencies.
But the company’s expansion into cryptocurrency trading, which it already offers in the US, is also helping Schulman achieve his other ambition of turning PayPal into a “super app” that customers check every day: its users who hold cryptocurrencies tend to log in twice as often as they did before. Apparently those crypto investors still do not trust bitcoin as a long-term store of value, whatever Schulman’s predictions for the future.
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