Status of Media reform, page-34

AFR today
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While Seven is unlikely to inject capital into new media deals, the Stokes family is believed to be open-minded towards capital-light deals such as scrip-for-scrip mergers if there were decent synergies involved.


"The [media ownership] reform is an important reform and enables the industry to effectively collaborate, strengthen and merge to become more efficient and effective at realising value," Ryan Stokes told Chanticleer on Wednesday after signing off on the Coates acquisition. However, he said those deals do not necessarily require incremental capital.

"The key issue with any form of merger will be whether the synergies are real. I'm not sure a lot of the mergers being touted provide real synergies but there are certainly benefits of scale and value that can be created through efficiency and scale. I think everyone is going to get quite excited about what might happen ... a lot more things will be rumoured than actually ever do [happen]. Our focus is how do we drive shareholder value."