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News Critique

1. The sources which published the news item.

(a) Saeed Azhar , HSBC, Bank of China, MayBank race for BII stake, Reuters,
http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSSIN20351120080312?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&sp=true, March 12, 2008
(b) Reuters, MayBank Shares Dive After Pricy BII Purchase, CNBC,
http://www.cnbc.com/id/23820932/, March 27, 2008
(c) Kathy Fong, MayBank doesn’t need to raise funds, The Star, http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2008/3/29/business/20791050&sec=business, March 29, 2008

2. A brief summary of the event.

The reason this deal came about was because Temasek Holdings (the Singapore Government’s investment arm that owns and manages its direct investments, both locally and overseas) had to divest its stake in one of the two Indonesian Banks it owns. This was to comply with a new ruling from ‘The Central Bank of Republic of Indonesia’. Although Temasek had until the end of 2010 to comply with Indonesia's new policy on bank ownership, it decided to sell its 42% stake in Indonesia’s sixth-biggest lender, Bank Internasional Indonesia (BII) which was valued at more than USD$800 million.

HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, Bank of China and Malaysia's biggest lender, Malayan Banking Bhd (MBB) emerged as the final bidders but on 26th March 2008 it was unveiled that MBB had won the race to buy the majority stake in BII. MBB offered USD$1.5 billion for a 56% stake in BII (42% from Temasek and 14% from Korea’s Kookmin Bank) while offering USD$1.2 billion for the rest of BII.

3. How does a news item illustrate the topic assigned for your presentation?

The topic is Acquisition and restructuring strategies or Mergers and Acquisitions (M&As). In a nutshell M&As can be defined as one company acquiring another or two or more companies merging to form only one entity. In this day and age, with the competition in the global economy heating up and regulatory constraints relaxing, more and more companies are...