{"id":877492,"date":"2026-04-07T07:45:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T07:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/877492\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T07:45:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T07:45:17","slug":"us-billionaire-plots-48bn-takeover-of-universal-music-group-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/877492\/","title":{"rendered":"US billionaire plots \u00a348bn takeover of Universal Music Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Ackman\u2019s Pershing Square investment vehicle has offered to buy music studios giant Universal Music Group (UMG).<\/p>\n

The US billionaire\u2019s firm has proposed a cash and stock deal to take control of the Dutch-US business, which runs Abbey Road studios and labels including EMI and Island Records.<\/p>\n

Universal is the world\u2019s largest music company and owns extensive music catalogues from artists including The Beatles, Queen, Adele, Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar.<\/p>\n

It is estimated that the deal would value Universal at around 55 billion euros (\u00a348 billion).<\/p>\n

\"Abbey<\/p>\n

Universal Music Group owns Abbey Road Studios (Aaron Chown\/PA)<\/p>\n

(Aaron Chown)<\/p>\n

The studio giant would merge with a newly-formed blank-cheque company set up by Pershing Square as part of the deal.<\/p>\n

Pershing Square, which already owns a stake in Universal, said Universal investors would receive 5.05 US dollars (\u00a33.81) in cash and 0.77 shares in the new company for each Universal share they currently own.<\/p>\n

Mr Ackman, chief executive of Pershing Square, said the group\u2019s share price has \u201clanguished\u201d as he claimed that the proposal could help drive an improvement in performance.<\/p>\n

He said: \u201cSince UMG\u2019s listing, Sir Lucian Grainge and the company\u2019s management have done an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, UMG\u2019s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr Ackman also said the group had partly underperformed in recent years due to \u201cuncertainty\u201d related to the Bollore Group\u2019s 18% stake in the company.<\/p>\n

He also highlighted postponed plans to list the business, which currently has a primary listing in the Netherlands, in the US.<\/p>\n

The group postponed plans for a stock market listing in the US last month in the face of market uncertainty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Ackman\u2019s Pershing Square investment vehicle has offered to buy music studios giant Universal Music Group (UMG). The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":877493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5311],"tags":[117390,3617,248643,8733,49,248642,978,659],"class_list":["post-877492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-abbey-road-studios","tag-bill-ackman","tag-pershing-square","tag-taylor-swift","tag-united-states","tag-universal-music-group","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116362315573196629","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/877493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}