• UK BANKS FINANCE GETTY SALE! – Getty Images' board has recommended to shareholders a $2.4 billion buy-out offer. This is the sale to private equity the corporation had been seeking. Getty is as good as sold! The private equity firm Hellman & Friedman will take Getty out of public ownership by offering shareholders a 55% premium on the pre-sale share price. The bid is enabled by financial backing from Barclays Capital, GE Commercial Finance and RBS Greenwich Capital. [expand story >>>]
Getty is striving with the challenge of adapting. Its business model has been disrupted by the digital and Internet revolutions. Its share price has been taking a hammering on the public market. Public investors have seen the problems in the corporation's traditional business only too clearly, and the promise of its emerging microstock endeavour dimly if at all. The Getty board bet private equity would be less blinkered, and they bet right. There had been some speculation that, given the current US credit squeeze, private investors might find it hard to get finance for the buy-out. But investment banks with origins in the UK, in a syndicate led by Barclays Capital, sallied in and won the deal.
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photoweek/2008/01/getty-is-for-sale [add comment]
Labels: getty images, stock photography
2 Comments:
I'd be more interested in hearing what it means for me than how it was financed.
That's one of the first questions PDN asked in an interview with Getty Images CEO Jonathon Klein: What's the impact going to be on Getty employees and contributing photographers?
Apparently, as far as Klein is concerned, it's business as usual for contributors and employees. Getty will continue on its course, with the only difference being that its shares are no longer publicly traded. Management stays the same.
The new owners aren't saying they have any different agenda.
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