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Third Point Increases Sony Ownership

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Sony Store
courtesy of Sony Corp.
As a means to pressure Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) to spin out its entertainment division, Third Point, which is controlled by activist investor David Loeb, said it has upped its ownership in the Japanese company to 6%.

According to The Guardian:

New York-based hedge fund Third Point said it has raised its stake in Sony and urged the Japanese company to create an independent board to run a partially spun-off entertainment arm with Sony’s chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, as its chairman.

Third Point, a $13bn (£8.3bn) hedge fund founded by billionaire investor Daniel Loeb, last month proposed that the struggling electronics maker conduct an initial public offering for its profitable music and movie business. It said such a move could boost Sony’s share price by as much as 60%.

In a second letter to Hirai on Tuesday, in which he again offered to put a Third Point representative on Sony’s board, Loeb added to his proposal by suggesting that Sony adopt “a semi-independent governance structure”. Loeb argues that the electronics maker has failed to find the synergies that the shift into entertainment had promised when it bought Columbia Pictures 24 years ago.

CNNMoney posted the entire text of the letter.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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