Blackout boon; deals galore; Clubhouse cracked; and more!
Texas Blackout Boosts Australian Bank by Up to $215 Million [WSJ]
[Macquarie Group] bumped up its guidance Monday for earnings in the year through March to reflect the windfall. It said that net profit after tax would be 5% to 10% higher than in the 2020 fiscal year…. The Australian bank rents access to natural-gas pipelines and electricity networks across the U.S., harnessing that capacity when customers are in urgent need of fuel or power. That was the case last week, when frozen pipelines and the closure of oil-and-gas wells set off a scramble for natural gas among Texas power plants and other consumers.
Starboard SPAC Nears $3.4 Billion Deal for Data-Center Company Cyxtera [WSJ]
Cyxtera’s existing owners, including private-equity firms BC Partners and Medina Capital, plan to roll their equity stakes into the combined company, the people said…. BC Partners and Medina Capital combined CenturyLink Inc.’s portfolio of data centers and associated colocation business and assets from Medina in a roughly $2.8 billion deal that created Cyxtera in 2017. (CenturyLink last year renamed itself Lumen Technologies Inc.)
Ackman details 2020 performance, names female investment team member [Reuters]
Activist hedge fund manager William Ackman, whose bets on companies are closely watched, updated investors on how his flagship fund earned a record 70.2% return in 2020 on Thursday in a socially distanced way by sending out a 57-page presentation…. Several months after announcing plans to hire a woman to his all-male investment team, Ackman said Manning Feng will join Pershing Square later this year. She previously worked as a private equity associate at Warburg Pincus and as analyst at Centerview Partners.
SoftBank’s Other Big E-Commerce Bet Is About to Pay Off [WSJ]
Coupang, a fast-growing Korean e-commerce company founded in 2010, filed this month for an initial public offering in New York that could come as early as March. It is expected to value Coupang at more than $50 billion, the most for a foreign company since Alibaba in 2014—creating another windfall for SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The Japanese company is a 38% owner, a stake it acquired by investing a total of just $2.7 billion since 2015…. While still unprofitable, the company narrowed its losses by about a third last year. Coupang has spent heavily building its own delivery network and fulfillment centers, helping it entice customers with next-day delivery and easy returns.
Restaurant-Software Provider Toast Prepares for IPO [WSJ]
Toast tapped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to underwrite a possible listing later this year, these people said. It could also consider other options including a sale or combination with a blank-check company, some of the people said….
Toast’s business initially took an extreme hit from the pandemic and associated lockdowns…. By midyear, however, Toast’s business started to rebound, with new demand for its software as restaurants transitioned to takeout services and other offerings amid lockdown restrictions.
Clubhouse Chats Are Breached, Raising Concerns Over Security [Bloomberg]
An unidentified user was able to stream Clubhouse audio feeds this weekend from “multiple rooms” into their own third-party website, said Reema Bahnasy, a spokeswoman for Clubhouse. While the company says it’s “permanently banned” that particular user and installed new “safeguards” to prevent a repeat, researchers contend the platform may not be in a position to make such promises.
Users of the invitation-only iOS app should assume all conversations are being recorded, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was first to publicly raise security concerns on Feb. 13, said late Sunday.