Is The Wall Street Journal once again looking to dominate the M&A scoop game? The paper Monday morning scored two deal coups: Its front page carried the news of PepsiCo Inc.'s (NYSE:PEP) $6 billion bid for its largest bottlers, while its Marketplace front correctly predicted that GlaxoSmithKline plc (NYSE:GSK) would announce a deal Monday morning to buy Stiefel Laboratories Inc. for about $3 billion. These two scoops come on the heels of the paper's exclusive last week on Express Scripts Inc.'s (NASDAQ:ESRX) agreement to buy WellPoint Inc.'s (NYSE:WLP) NetRx unit for $4.68 billion.
While the WellPoint story appeared to be handed to the WSJ ahead of its release to the rest of the media, Monday's Glaxo story had a more tentative flavor. It was sourced to "people familiar with the matter" and while it informed that the deal "is expected to be announced as soon as Monday," it cautioned "there is still a chance it could fall apart." As for the PepsiCo story, the beverage giant officially announced its offers for its bottlers at 12:03 a.m. Monday morning, which makes the fact that it appeared on page one of Monday's WSJ a bit curious. Either the WSJ has extremely late deadlines or the paper was given a heads up on the news.
Meanwhile, the biggest deal news of the day was nowhere to be found in Monday's WSJ (or The New York Times or the Financial Times, for that matter). Oracle Corp.'s (NASDAQ:ORCL) deal to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) for $7.4 billion was not leaked to the press nor was it sniffed out by any reporters -- an interesting miss given how often Oracle was mentioned as a possible acquirer of Sun after IBM Corp.'s (NYSE:IBM) talks with Sun collapsed. - Yvette Kantrow
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Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.
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