Strong rumour in the US from several sources is that Sony are close to completing the acquisition of Thomson’s Convergent Media Systems [1] group.
We have followed the Thomson disposals story closely, especially since it was announced that Goldman Sachs had been appointed to shop various Thomson business divisions around [2].
Back in April when we asked if PRN was worthless [3] we wrote “Goldman Sachs has already shopped PRN around the logical possible buyers; NBC Universal, Fox, ABC Disney etc. … and is now attempting to sell a combined Convergent and PRN”
The ‘combination’ idea was a good one, for the seller at least! A profitable company with a good reputation doing well strapped to a (at the time) company struggling with losing its biggest customer Walmart (and retrospectively as we saw, PRN was indeed suing said business [4] and washing its dirty linen in public). That hardly helps when you are trying to sell and so we are pleased that in the end they looked to divest the businesses separately.
Convergent Media is a good business and very well thought of (unlike many other large integrators in the US we could mention) and although Sony at first might seem a strange bedfellow this has to be a good deal for Thomson (gets much needed cash), Convergent (gets a stronger, nicer parent) and Sony (err, it gets Convergent).
If the rumour is true then the lawyers are currently dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and we should see an announcement in the next couple of weeks.