Chapter 516 (1/2)

North of New York, on the outskirts of Greenwich.

It's January 7th.

The new year has passed and officially entered 1993.

Just the day before yesterday, Time Warner Group formally confirmed its new management through the provisional general meeting of shareholders. Gerald Levin took the post of new chairman of Time Warner Group after Steve Roth. Two of Steve Roth's legitimate families, Robert Daley and Terry Semel, jointly took the post of CO CEO of Time Warner.

Although the formal management was explicitly confirmed, in fact, the power arrangement after compromise still scattered Time Warner Group.

In name, Gerald Levin can only control the business that belongs to the era company system. The two co CEOs are still firmly in control of Warner Bros. companies.

The Wall Street Journal confirmed in Time Warner's new management that the key to the merger of Time Inc. and Warner Bros. at the beginning was that the management of the two companies vigorously advocated the ”synergy effect” of their enterprises. It claimed that once the merger was completed, Time Warner would greatly improve the competitiveness and overall revenue of the company through business cooperation in film, TV, magazine and other fields.

However, the fact is that for three years since the merger in early 1990, the synergy that shareholders hope to see has not appeared. Time Warner is still in a mess, and even HBO and Warner Bros. have been fighting against each other over the issue of television broadcasting rights of films. This time, the change of management is also in constant turmoil.

Not only that, the whole time warner has not been able to get out of the heavy debt mire because of the original merger.

In a word, in the view of the Wall Street Journal, the original merger was a complete failure, only to meet the personal ambition of Time Warner management to blindly expand the scale of the enterprise.

In the face of criticism from the Wall Street Journal, Time Warner lacks an official receiver. In the past two years, because of excessive expansion, the new line film industry, which has been in trouble, is likely to fail this year.

Influenced by the parallel success of the three brands of danielis entertainment, other Hollywood studios are more or less following suit. Simon can't stop it. However, it's easy for danielis entertainment to crack down on a second-line film company in trouble.

Whether it's the new line or Miramax, or even Orion pictures, which is still struggling to maintain, these companies, with Simon's close attention, basically have no hope of getting the projects that may sell well.

In recent years, silent lambs, crying games, ninja turtles and so on should all belong to these companies, but all of them were successfully intercepted by Simon, and they took advantage of the two major brands of new world film and gaomen film in advance, occupying the partial film field that the mainstream studios would not care about in the past.

The fate of the new line is destined to change, and Simon has solved another company in recent days.

Miramax.

Hollywood's second - and third tier film companies, like Denise's early entertainment development, rely largely on bank loans to maintain operations.

Over the years, the bank that financed Miramax was also well known on Wall Street, Chase Manhattan Bank. In my memory, the bank merged with Morgan bank around 2000.

Of course, it's just Chase Manhattan's film investment department, which specializes in Hollywood.

The Weinstein brothers have run Miramax through many twists and turns over the years and have accumulated about $15 million in debt to Chase Manhattan Bank.

15 million dollars, which is not worth mentioning at all for Denise entertainment, but it is a huge sum of money for small studio style film companies that can only pick up and release some low-cost art films.

Moreover, according to the survey, in addition to Chase Manhattan, the largest creditor, Miramax has other arrears, with accumulated liabilities of $23 million.

Before and after the new year, westero system began to discuss some cooperation projects with several major banks in the United States, mainly about the loan financing needed by the subsidiaries for further development, as well as the further cooperation between Internet payment tools and real banks.

For the major banks in the United States, the subsidiaries of westrow system are undoubtedly the best lending targets, and they naturally strive for them.

Chase Manhattan is one of them.

In order to form more stakeholders as much as possible, westero system also habitually chooses more partners.

During the negotiation between Verizon Telecom and Chase Manhattan on a $300 million loan financing, Simon asked James Leibold, who participated in the negotiation, to put forward a collateral condition to Chase Manhattan: to recover the debt from Miramax in advance.

Hollywood, a small company on the verge of bankruptcy, is nothing to Chase Manhattan.

It's not likely to recover all the debts from this film company in trouble. Chase Manhattan is actually doing debt collection and is ready to bear another bad debt.

In the view of Chase Manhattan, the incidental requirements of westrow system also think that this small company has offended danielis entertainment. The potential cooperation between both sides is far more than a $300 million financing, and pushing the boat with the current. Of course, they are happy to sell a favor.So, on the same day that the Wall Street Journal criticized Time Warner's excessive expansion, a New York based third tier film company formally filed a bankruptcy petition with the Southern District Court of New York.

Although the development of the westero system has been smooth sailing, Simon has always understood that business competition has never been gentle.