Skift Take
We're going to miss the drama Anbang brought to what we all assumed would be your standard merger/acquisition between Starwood and Marriott. Instead, what we got was a story the likes of which the travel industry has rarely seen before.
On March 31, the final chapter of a nearly month-long saga seemed to have been written. China's Anbang Insurance Group, who had for so long desired Starwood Hotels & Resorts, abruptly withdrew itself from contention in its long pursuit of the American hotel company.
Citing "various market considerations," Anbang and its consortium partners, J.C. Flowers & Co. and Primavera Capital Ltd., departed as quickly as they had entered into the fray of a bidding war for Starwood on March 10.
Thanks to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings made public on Dec. 22 and March 25, we know that Anbang had its eye on Starwood as far back as May of last year, and that it made several attempts to buy the company since then, with offers ranging from nearly $15 billion to $13 billion, all in cash, over the course of this past year.
The problem with most of those offers, however, was that Anbang had failed to provide enough financing details for the majority of them. That, however, was not the case when Anbang and its investor group wooed Starwood with an all-cash $13.2 billion proposal, valued at $78 per share. That deal was fully financed, binding, and accepted by Starwood's board on March 18.
Three days later, on March 21, Marriott countered back with a new proposal originally valued at $13.8 billion, and Starwood agreed to it. This new offer from Marriott would offer Starwood shareholders 0.8 shares of Marriott common stock and $21 per share of Starwood stock — and it represented a 15.4 percent premium over Marriott's original offer from November.
Even so, most analysts felt that while Marriott's offer was a solid one, Anbang and its consortium had the upper hand — and the cold hard cash — necessary to ultimately win Starwood over. As predicted, the Anbang consortium did, in fact, make another offer to Starwood on the afternoon of March 26. This time around, the offer that was never finalized topped out at $82.75 per share, or approximately $13.8 billion in cash. By all accounts, it seemed like Anbang had put in the final death knell on Marriott's dreams of becoming the world's largest hotel co
