Alstom are reviewing the official GE offer. The GE announcement came this morning: GE offers $13.5 billion enterprise value to acquire Alstom Thermal, Renewables, and Grid businesses. What you have to remember again is that GE have 57 billion Dollars of their cash reserves abroad, in other words outside of the US. So even if they were successful for this bid of the power portion of the French company (that would be earnings accretive immediately), the same headache of repatriation of cash would remain. And surprisingly this would be the biggest ever, by one of the oldest and most trusted companies, General Electric.
According to this Bloomberg article, titled GE Poised to Tap $57 Billion Overseas Cash in Alstom Deal, 75 billion Dollars in US deals abroad so far this year have been done. Obviously the Pfizer one would more than double that, around 100 billion more for AstraZeneca. Just wow. Again, as we said yesterday, we do have vested interests in some of these businesses, but this indicates that there is heightened excitement and the more deals get done, the more people will pay up for undervalued (I suppose not so much after that) assets globally. Fear of missing out is not just something that happens in/on social media, but in the business world too. We expect the trend to continue and that certainly is good news for those holding quality companies.