The Murdochs just couldn’t afford Rightmove | Nils Pratley

The Murdochs just couldn’t afford Rightmove | Nils Pratley

News Corp dressed up its retreat as ‘financial discipline’, another way of saying it couldn’t afford what it wanted

It’s not quite the 2005 Ashes, but well played, the board of Rightmove. REA Group, the would-be bidder majority-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, is slinking back to Melbourne with its tail between its legs. A retreat wasn’t the way to bet on day one, but humiliation for the Murdoch vision of creating a multi-hemisphere property portal can be explained easily: REA never offered a decent price. Rightmove was within its rights to say no four times, even to £6.2bn.

That is the context in which to view REA’s sour grumbles about a lack of “meaningful” engagement from the target’s board. What the Australian group ignores is that a defending company is not obliged to open its books to a possible future competitor unless the offer is in whiz-bang territory.

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