Shari Redstone Sees Scale in Potential Viacom-CBS Merger
November 10 2016 - 9:20PM
Dow Jones News
Shari Redstone, an emerging media mogul in her own right, said
she didn't support the decision to separate Viacom Inc. and CBS
Corp. a decade ago and believes that reuniting the media companies
controlled by her family could give them crucial scale in the
marketplace.
Ms. Redstone—the vice chairman of CBS and Viacom and president
of National Amusements Inc., the family holding company that
controls an 80% voting stake in both companies—made a rare public
appearance at the New York Times's DealBook Conference on Thursday.
On stage, she made her first public comments about the logic of a
potential tie-up since National Amusements sent a letter to the
boards of both companies in September asking them to weigh a
potential merger.
"Scale is going to matter," Ms. Redstone said. "Scale matters
because it is going to give us leverage."
She also stressed that, if the special committees of both
companies determined that a merger wasn't in their best interests,
both companies could stand on their own. But she admitted she
hadn't supported the original decision by her father, Sumner
Redstone, now 93, to separate them in 2006.
"I actually was never a great proponent of the split," she
said.
Ms. Redstone said she has to stay out of the current merger
consideration process for legal reasons.
She said she believes AT&T Inc.'s recently announced $85
billion acquisition of Time Warner Inc. "makes sense" because, to
borrow her father's famous catch phrase, "at the end of the day, it
proves that content is still king."
Asked by host Andrew Ross Sorkin about years of market
speculation that a union of CBS and Time Warner would yield great
synergies, she said, "I'm supportive of anything…that would allow
us to expand our great portfolio of great content."
When asked about 67-year-old CBS CEO Leslie Moonves's recent
joke that he was "too old and too rich" to take the job atop a
merged CBS-Viacom, Ms. Redstone had a ready quip of her own.
"Having grown up in the family I grew up in, one is never too
old," she said.
Write to Keach Hagey at keach.hagey@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 10, 2016 22:05 ET (03:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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