Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

I hate to admit it, but I’m feeling a little foolish right now. Last week, I raised the question of whether or not Dish was researching a hostile takeover of TiVo? In my article, I concluded that they might try, but that they’d never be able to afford the $7.5 billion poison pill that came with it.

Since then, I’ve spent more time researching the pill and realize that I made a terrible mistake. Not only is there an antidote, but Dish may already have it.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this pill, but could never figure a way around it. It wasn’t until I asked myself a simple question, that the solution became so obvious. What would Charlie do?

Love him or hate him Dish CEO Charlie Ergen has a special kind of brilliance. His reputation as a fearsome litigator is legendary and more than once he has demonstrated his mastery for the fine art of negotiation. Over the years, his decisions have created huge growth for Dish (albeit at great risks.) Unfortunately, his penchant for the legal system may have finally caught up with him and now he finds himself struggling in quicksand with the prospect of having to buy rope from TiVo.

To get a better picture of his frame of mind, I turned to his own testimony from last February. (Via Mainer’s Law Library)

Q: Is the following an accurate statement, that Echostar would lose $90 million per month if it had to comply full with the terms of the injunction, assuming it’s properlty interpreted as requiring you to disable DVR functionality in the specified product lines?
Ergen: There would have been a time fame that, that would have been an accurate statement. Today that,
Q: Ninety –-
Ergen: Today it would be more than that. Today would be more than $90 million dollars
Q: And how much would it be a month today?
Ergen: Would be probably several hundred — It would be over several hundred million dollars, I don’t know exactly, I don’t have the figures in front of me, but it would be more today.
Q: Several hundred million dollars a month?
Ergen: It may be as much as several hundred million dollars a month.

I don’t know about you, but if I spent the last 30 years of my life building a business and all of a sudden was faced with the prospect of losing several hundred million dollars a month, it’s a good bet that I’d be willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that this doesn’t happen. I don’t care how big you are, after a few months, hundreds of millions turns into billions and after billions in losses vultures have a tendency to sweep in and pick off your carcass.

Even before we see how this plays out, S&P is already circling. From their June 10th assessment of Dish’s credit rating.

“With nearly $1.2 billion in cash and marketable securities and very moderate leverage for the current ‘BB-’ rating, Dish could easily fund the $103 million of new judgments and penalties without a ratings impact, it said. However, the longer term effect on the company’s credit profile would depend on the strategic path Dish takes to resolve the DVR issues, S&P said. If Dish were to enter into a licensing arrangement with TiVo, which S&P said was the most likely scenario, there would be no effect on Dish’s BB- corporate credit rating” [Note: Bold added by me]

If Mr. Ergen believes his own testimony, then his only frame of mind has to be one of desperation. He is left with only two solutions.

He can try and negotiate a settlement with an empty gun or he can go for an all-in bluff and try to buy TiVo in a dangerous gamble.

Now I don’t know whether or not TiVo has actually refused to settle with Dish, but if they really are serious about enforcing their right to NOT license their technology, then Charlie really only has one option. In my opinion, I see TiVo digging further into the trenches. Take a look at Tom Roger’s comments from the Q3 2009 conference call as a good example,

“We will pursue with great aggressiveness the resolution of these issues in a way that hopefully will lead to the imposition of the injunction but I just wanted to make clear that the right to appeal is not one without the ability of the court to handle this situation and bring it to ultimate resolution.”

Or if you want to get a closer glimpse into how TiVo feels about the injunction, take a look at TiVo’s most recent argument for why Dish doesn’t deserve a stay of execution,

“The right to exclude conferred by TiVo’s patent is empty if it can never be enforced. Since this Court entered its previous stay, TiVo has lost 25% of its DVR subscribers, while EchoStar’s have nearly doubled. Ex. 1 (Brunelle Decl. Ex. A). That harm can never be fully redressed through damages. Entry of yet another stay will undermine respect for district court process and severely prejudice TiVo.”

further in their response,

“EchoStar is a large, aggressive competitor, more than willing to pay damages (and face contempt charges) so long as it can continue to do as it likes Granting a stay here will distort the patent system by encouraging other infringers to make minor changes to their adjudicated products and then seek further stays in order to keep operating even after they are held in contempt. With deep-pocketed infringers, endless cycles of purported change and ensuing litigation will reduce the right to exclude to little more than a compulsory license—and one enforceable only through rounds of litigation that not only drain a patentee’s resources but allow rapidly-evolving modern markets to be shaped by infringing competition in ways that go far beyond monetary harm.” [Note: Bold added by me]

The more that I look at things from Charlie’s perspective, the more it becomes clear that he doesn’t have a choice in this scenario. He must buy TiVo. The future of his business would depend upon it.

This leaves just two questions, how much can he spend and how does he do it? If Dish currently has $1.2 billion in cash and short term securities, it would give them enough firepower to easily get 50% at recent market prices, but it wouldn’t be enough to pay for the poison pill.

Dish could probably raise another $2.5 billion before their debt would start to get too expensive, so for the sake of argument, let’s say that their budget is around $3.5 billion. When you consider TiVo’s tax losses, their cash on hand, and what Dish actually owes them in licensing fees (plus punitive damages ), they’d probably really only end up paying $2.5 billion to make this acquisition happen.

So if Charlie came to me and said, Davis here’s a pile of money I want you to engineer a hostile takeover, here’s how I’d do it

Since making a tender offer would trigger the pill, my only option would be to try and acquire more than 50% of TiVo’s stock on the open market before anyone found out about it. One problem I would face with this strategy is that as soon as I purchased more than 5%, I’d have a mere ten days to complete my acquisition before I’d be forced to tell the world about it (11 or 12 days if the deadline falls on a weekend).

Since this would make this strategy very dangerous, I’d want to wait as long as I could before trying to pounce. Once the judgment was final though, I’d move as quickly as I could to mask the accumulation with publicity from the verdict.

On day 2, I’d continue to buy heavy shares to try and simulate the appearance of quick profit taking. By the time day 3 rolled around, I’d slow things down so the market wouldn’t catch on to the significance of what was happening. Days 4 – 9, I’d continue to add, but in a very controlled and deliberate manner. It wouldn’t be until day 10 that I’d go bonkers and buy anything on the market because at that point every share I purchased would be one that I didn’t have to pay an extra $60 for.

Where my math was flawed when I was originally calculated the cost of TiVo’s poison, was that I didn’t consider the shares Dish wouldn’t have to pay a $60 dividend on (their own.) If they could accumulate 50% of the company for $1 billion, then they’d owe $3.5 billion to the remaining TiVo shareholders. If they grabbed 60% for a billion, they’d only be on the hook for another $3 billion in poison. If they could actually buy 70% of TiVo’s shares, they’d get away with a $3.2 billion total acquisition (the equivalent of $28 per share even after paying $71 to the shareholders who hold out.)

A price that seems reasonable given the gravity of their situation.

The danger in using this strategy is that just like a snake, Echostar would be most vulnerable when it was feeding. If the market (or TiVo) somehow got wind of this it could very well threaten Charlie’s ownership stake in Dish.

You see, TiVo has a provision in their pill that says if someone triggers the pill, but then can’t pay for it, they have to pay in stock worth .50 cents on the dollar. Based on Dish Network and TiVo’s current market caps, this would mean that if TiVo managed to choke Dish on an acquisition, they’d end up owning roughly 65% of Dish’s stock.

While there is no way for me to know whether or not Echostar really is in the process of a hostile takeover, there is evidence to suggest that this scenario is possible.

I don’t want to read too much into technical indicators, but if you look at TiVo’s money flow index, you’ll see that it spiked from a score of 50 to 90 following TiVo’s latest win. In 2006, TiVo’s money index hit 80 following the initial verdict, but it was already at 80 going into it. The money flow index measures the eagerness of buyers for a particular security. It looks at the high mid and low points that a stock trades at and takes into account the volume that buyers and sellers are trading at. Anything over 80 is usually considered over bought, but it would be impossible for anyone to achieve a hostile takeover without tripping this index off the charts. To put the significance of this score in perspective, you have to go back to the wild days of 2001 to find a time where TiVo’s money index was at a higher level.

The day after TiVo’s most recent court victory, their stock traded a record 38 million shares. They very next day TiVo saw 12.5 million shares change hands. To the man on the street, this may not mean anything, but for a stock that normally sees 1.5 million shares of action, this is extremely significant. Two days alone represented nearly 50% of TiVo’s total shares outstanding. The mainstream media never picked up on this story, but Bloomberg’s reporters knew enough to be incredulous when they found out how much volume TiVo was seeing post judgement.

Some will dismiss this spike in volume as speculators and day trading following a well publicized judgment, but I’m concerned that something much more sinister is happening. While TiVo did see 30 million shares trade hands following their 2006 verdict, the situation leading up to that spike in volume was very different. In the week prior to their 2006 verdict, they averaged 6 million shares per day as speculators clearly bet on the result of the trial. After the victory, there was heavy volume, but there was also heavy volatility as people cashed in their winning tickets. Over the course of two days, TiVo shareholders watched their shares jump from $8.05 to $9.80 and back down to $8.20 a share. Over the course of 8 days, investors traded an average of 6.6 million shares a day.

This time around has been very different. TiVo’s stock has been steadily increasing and continues to set higher highs and higher lows in most of their trading sessions. In the five days prior to their latest court win, TiVo averaged 2 million shares per day, but in the 8 trading days that have followed, they’ve averaged almost 10 million shares a day. To get a sense of the difference in volume between now and 2006, see the following graph.

We don’t know whether or not it was Dish or market forces that caused 50% of TiVo’s stock to trade on June 3rd and 4th, but we do know that these transactions took place. If Dish was in fact the buyer, I would guess that over the last 8 trading days, Dish probably has picked up a 45% stake in TiVo for about a half a billion. If this is the case, it would mean that they are still on the hook for another $4 billion.

Even if they were to pay $20 per share for the remaining 25%, they could easily hit a 70% target, assuming that they were willing to spend the half a billion that would be left in their bank account.

How could TiVo defend against this? They would need to poison the snake with more venom. Currently, they are authorized to conduct a secondary offering for up to 170 million additional shares. I wouldn’t recommend trying to go to market with all of those, but for every dollar TiVo raises, it would cost Dish $7 to make an acquisition.

If TiVo was to do a 10 – 30 million share offering in a secondary, it would add $700 million to $2.1 billion more to the cost of an acquisition. If they actually managed to catch Charlie while he’s feeding, they’d seize control over Dish Networks.

While this conspiracy theory is based on speculation and is admitedly a long shot, it’s possible that this could be going on. If TiVo sees the type of crazy volume it would take for Dish to get to the final 70%, I would hope that TiVo management would be cunning enough to contact their bankers and get those extra shares out into the market.

Either way though, it won’t take long to find out whether I’m looking like a goat or a genius on this one. If Echostar really is in the midst of a hostile takeover, we’ll find out today (June 15th), after the market closes. If we don’t see a 13-D filing, you can chalk this one up to crazy Uncle Freeberg chasing aliens again, but if by some wild chance I’m actually right, then David will have figured out a way to slay Goliath with little more than their wits and a pebble aimed squarely at Dish’s forehead.

Update – A hostile takeover may have been possible when I published my post this morning, but as of today’s filing deadline, Dish hasn’t disclosed a position in TiVo. This would make a takeover at this point highly unlikely unless we see volume spike again. I’d still like to see TiVo issue a few more shares to beef up the pill, but for now they should be out of the woods. Sorry for getting everybody excited, but it looks like I’m going to end up looking like a goat on this one. At least it was fun to think about the what if’s of trying to break the pill. Since I was wrong about the filing, I probably should go back and reconsider the health benefits of the tin-foil suit . . .

Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Davis
Filed under: Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, TV, TiVo