Livening up

If you are based in the UK and into deals, there are couple of interesting jackanories floating around the inter web this afternoon.

First off, the venerable Wall Street Journal is reporting that Anglo American is open to offers. Here is a link to the Journal's piece: http://online.wsj.com/articles/anglo-american-ceo-says-open-to-takeover-offers-1409664798

It's pretty rare for a chief executive of a FTSE 100 company to go 'on the record' and say "if somebody sees value, then there's a conversation to be had". I'm not quite sure how to read into Mark Cutifani's comments.

Having worked as an M&A reporter for a national newspaper for the last eight years, I know that sometimes these quotes accidentally slip out thanks to some clever questioning from a reporter while at other times the quote was pre-planned by the CEO and his army of media advisers.

You can normally tell whether it is the former or the latter by the response of the media team to other media outlets following the release of the original article. If Cutifani is genuinely "open" to offers, then I guess the obvious buyer is Glencore as Xstrata tried to buy the company in 2009 - although at a much higher price.

The other interesting tale knocking about is Softbank's so-called interest in Vodafone. This story appears to have been stirred up by Japan's Nikkei newspaper, which quotes a Softbank source as saying "I wouldn't be surprised if our CEO acquired Vodafone, since we are no strangers to each other". Here is a link to the Nikkei piece: http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Next-SoftBank-takeover-target-s-name-might-start-with-V

Elsewhere, readers might want to keep an eye on a US stock called Fire Eye Inc. I have no idea what the story is but there has been a bit of speculation doing the rounds in European markets over the last month and the shares up sharply up today.