T.C. | Línea Directa Aseguradora (LDA) will finally be listed on the Spanish stock exchange on 29 April at a price of 1,317 euros per share, which means valuing the company at 1,434 million. Bankinter, the bank that owns the insurer, will hold 17.4% of the company and will give its shareholders one LDA share for each Bankinter share held on 28 April, the last day to take part in the operation.
Alphavalue | The boards of Veolia Environment and Suez have reached an agreement on the companies’ merger. After months of confrontation, Veolia will launch a takeover bid for Suez. In a statement, the two firms said the price of the bid will be 20.5 €/share, valuing Suez at 12.9 billion euros. This is an improvement of 13.9% on the 18 €/share that Veolia had proposed up until now and which was one of the main blocking points for the deal. Suez had set a price of €22/share as a condition.
Lazard’s Capital Markets Advisory Group | Global Actiivity Stable, Bolstered by U.S. Surge: In contrast to late 2020’s emphasis on mega-cap activity in the U.S., three-quarters of all Q1 2021 activity targeted sub-$10bn market cap companies, including Treehouse Foods (JANA), Kohl’s (Ancora, Legion et al.) and eHealth (Starboard and Sachem Head). Prominent activists Icahn, JANA and Starboard were among the quarter’s most prolific activists (launching 2 campaigns each), whi le perennially active Elliott launched only 1 new campaign (versus its average of ~4 campaigns launched per quarter since 2017)
T.C. | Almost half of Spaniards (43%) say they are in poor financial health, compared to 31% before Covid-19. Moreover, the number of respondents who assign a failed grade to their fellow citizens’ financial health, rating it below five out of ten, has almost doubled from 49% to 81%. This makes Spain the country with the worst perception amongst the eight that took part in the survey. It comes below Turkey and a long way behind the Netherlands, the country with the best score in this respect. These are some of the main conclusions drawn from the financial health survey conducted by ING’s TFI Consumer Research in eight European countries.
T.C. | The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK’s competition regulator, has provisionally cleared the merger of O2, Telefónica’s UK mobile subsidiary, and Virgin, the cable group controlled by US-based Liberty Global, into a company – 50% owned by the two partners – valued by the market at around 45 billion euros (more than £38 billion) and which will become, along with BT, the UK market leader. If BT has 46.3 million customers, the new company will have 46.5 million (32.6 million mobile, 5.3 million fixed broadband, 4.9 million fixed voice and 3.7 million pay TV).
According to the document of more than 200 pages in which the reforms and investments of the Plan that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, presented to the Parliament on Wednesday, the three types of contract would be ‘stable’ for all activities, another ‘temporary’ for those that are of this nature and one ‘training’ for insertion, in particular, in the labour market.
Rafael Domenech & Jorge Sicilia (BBVA Research) | The empírical evidence for a large sample of countries at different stages of development since 1960 to the present shows that an increase of 10 percentage points in the ratio of private investment to GDP corresponds to an increase of 3.1 points in the long-term growth rate of per capita income, higher than the elasticity of 2.7 obtained between total investment and growth. The empirical evidence points to private investment being typically allocated more efficiently than public investment, indicating that the best strategy is for public investment to be complementary and incentivize higher private investment.We see this as evidence that the focus of policies oriented to providing fiscal stimulus to incentivize private investment, such as the European Fund NGEU as an adequate strategy to increase per capita income growth in the long term in European economies.
T.C. | Eduardo Abenojar, president of the Restaurant and Nightlife Association of Salou (a small tourist town 100 km from Barcelona, considered the capital of the Costa Dorada) began a hunger strike yesterday at 12.30 pm to ask the Generalitat to reopen his business because “we have neither help nor hope”.
T.C. | According to data from the Sustainability Observatory, Spain reduced its emissions in the carbon market by 21% in 2020 (13% in 2019) in a year marked by the covid19 pandemic, in which the emissions of all the major companies fell, albeit with very notable differences between them: ENDESA decreases by 45%, FCC, EDP or IBERDROLA by around 25%, while the oil companies REPSOL and CEPSA or the gas company NATURGY have presented smaller decreases. The fuel combustion sector has decreased by a historic 26% between 2020 and 2019 while the oil companies, for example, have only decreased by 8%.
CaixaBank Research | New technologies have indeed favoured the growth of Spain’s labour productivity in the past and that they could do so again in this new technological era we are entering. An initial analysis of the relationship between the degree of penetration of new technologies and labour productivity shows that there is a positive correlation between the growth of the two variables in the past 20 years. In addition, this correlation appears to be more pronounced among economic activities in the services sector.