Cramer Continues His Campaign for XM/Sirius Merger (XMSR, SIRI)
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On last nights episode of Mad Money, Jim Cramer gave viewers of his show several additional reasons why he believes Congress needs go through with the approval of a merger between XM (Nasdaq: XMSR) and Sirius (Nasdaq: SIRI). Cramer told his audience that they should contact their local members of Congress and demand that the merger be approved.
Following Representative Gene Green's (a known opponent to the merger) visit to Mad Money last Friday, Cramer decided to once again put his foot down in regards to the XM/Sirius deal getting done by refuting several points that Green made to Cramer.
First, one of Green's major concerns was that an XM/Sirius combination would raise subscription prices, consequently hurting customers. Responding to this comment, Cramer reiterated his belief that a combined XM/Sirius would offer "a la carte pricing for as little as $6.99/month", meaning consumers would actually being paying less for more options.
Going on, Cramer next turned to Rep. Green's statement that the recently blocked merger between DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) and Echostar (Nasdaq: SATS) appears very similar to the possible XM/Sirius merger. Jim quickly debunked this theory by pointing out that "TV is not the same as radio" in that, while satellite TV often only competes with one cable provider, satellite radio will always compete with standard FM/AM, or terrestrial radio as "there isn't a place where customers can only get satellite radio."
Lastly, Cramer disagreed with Rep. Green believing that individually, XM and Sirius will do fine without a merger. Cramer went against this claim by admitting that he is concerned with XM's balance sheet and believes that satellite radio customers would get a monopoly anyways if XM continues to have problems.
Today, shares of Sirius are up about $0.08, or 2.9%, to $2.88, while XM shares have moved up about $0.26, or 2.3%, to $11.56.
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Merge or no Merge
Make a decision, yes or no. Then an appropriate course can be set. Maybe some sort of appeal or the companies can just move forward separately. I cant figure out why SIRI stock is so low when they consistently outperform expectations.
his pocket / my pocket
If the merger puts "half a billion dollars into (Howard Stern's) pocket", it will also be putting some into mine. I don't pretend to know what Howard's stock options/portfolio situation is, but I do know that when the merger happens it will benefit everyone involved with sat. radio. The only one's hurt by this merger will be sat. radio's competition (terrestrial radio, ipod, downloadable entertainment, etc.) The merger will benefit consumers and hurt competition, period.
Corruption
Everyone knows that to oppose this merger each politician that does is smoking some NAB. When your justifications are just simple lies, enough is enough. Remember the corruption and who was "bought" and vote them out. Kohl, Green, etc.
Approve The Merger Already
Howard Stern is a minor part of all the entertainment talent that is available on Sirius. Anyone with more than a double digit IQ understands that. This merger is being held up simply because boring am/fm knows satellite will continue to offer even more superior programming choices to the public if it is allowed. They simply can't compete. Period.
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No merger...
McT on Apr 16, 2008 11:01 AMOr merge the businesses but force XM to surrender its bandwidth in an auction. The thing is, they don't need it, they just want to hold it to block competition, which is why they were forbidden to merge in the first place. Would they still want to merge if another company could get into the satellite radio business? If we were going to offer a monopoly on satellite radio to a company we could have gotten a lot more money for the license.