Company News in Brief

I&J owner AVI hungry for acquisitions, but top-notch prizes remain elusiveConsumer goods group AVI says it always has lines out for new acquisitions, but the high-quality brands it is seeking are hard to come by.These tend to be held either by other South Africa Inc. stocks already, or by multinationals, who typically did not want to sell, said AVI, which owns brands such as Five Roses, Bakers, and House of Coffees.Asked specifically by Nedbank senior research analyst Shaun Chauke what kind of business the group could look to add as part of an acquisition that it did not already have in its portfolio, CEO Simon Crutchley said it would be a "business with a very strong portfolio of brands," as it would have to be able to deal with SA's volatility, inflation, and competitive environment.He added: "It's strong retailers [SA's retailers] have their own countervailing place in the equation. It's impossible to do that unless you have a brand you know that you can use and leverage. There are brands like that, and it would be wrong to say that we haven't tried, you know, to acquire brands like that. They're hard to come by, both in SA and internationally.Crutchley added that it was easy to forget that AVI fundamentally competed against multinationals, but that he was also "envious" of some of the brands held by SA Inc. companies."-FIN24 Saudi group to reopen talks with Barloworld's shareholdersSaudi Arabia's Zahid Group will start fresh negotiations with the shareholders of South Africa's Barloworld, after an initial acquisition offer was rejected.The consortium led by Zahid will seek to buy as many shares as possible so that its stake exceeds 50% in the distributor of Caterpillar's equipment in Africa, Zahid's head of investments, Augostino Sfeir, said in an interview. Zahid, which owns 19% of Barloworld, failed to get shareholder approval to acquire all the shares in the South African company, triggering a standby offer."We are moving forward with the transaction even if we do not take the company private, we think a majority shareholding will allow us to implement more efficient processes in the business," said Sfeir. "The standby offer has now opened, and we would like to conclude it within 30 trading days."Zahid expects at least another 32% support from shareholders in line with a vote at a previous extraordinary general meeting, he said.Zahid's Gulf Falcon and Entsha, an entity linked to Barloworld Chief Executive Officer Dominic Sewela, announced the initial offer in December. At the time, the bid was a 30% premium to the day's closing price. The offer price will remain at R120 a share that values the company at $1.25 billion, said Sfeir.-BLOOMBERG NEWS Twitter outage blamed on cyberattackElon Musk blamed widespread disruptions on his social media platform X on a “massive cyberattack,” which he claimed was orchestrated by a “large, coordinated group” or country.Tens of thousands of users globally reported intermittent outages on X on Monday, according to the monitoring website Downdetector.New posts were failing to load for users in countries including the US, UK, France and India at various points throughout the day. The service disruptions lasted a few minutes each.Musk later acknowledged that the platform had experienced a site-wide disruption. “We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” he wrote in a post on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.In an interview on Fox Business, he said the cyberattack was intended to take down X “with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.”Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian “hacktivist” group, took credit for the attack via its Telegram page, but has not provided proof that it was behind the disruptions.-BLOOMBERG

Company News in Brief

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