Carol Loomis Quotes

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

Some managements do not even think of buybacks as an option. The idea of shrinking their equity base repels them. Their inclination instead is to get bigger, and this often leads them to pay rich prices for acquisitions that never earn their keep.

Had a nice conversation with Tim Cook today. Discussed my opinion that a larger buyback should be done now. We plan to speak again shortly.

I've never opened a glass of champagne on any acquisition. Bankers do that.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

I don't like stock buybacks. I think if a company has the money to buy their stock back, then they should take that and increase the dividends. Send it back to the stockholder. Let them invest their money again from the dividends.

When investors, particularly investment bankers, talk about splitting up companies, there's a lot of discussion about multiple expansion, and the reality is multiple expansion is an outcome, not a strategy.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

The deal machinations many companies put themselves through, while certainly a bonanza for investment bankers, can confound the typical investor.

Yahoo would benefit from going private or becoming part of a larger corporation.

United spent $1.2 billion repurchasing shares in 2015 and plans to spend $1.5 billion on share repurchases in the first quarter of 2016. We have a lot of positive momentum, but this is just the beginning.

If a company's stock is undervalued - as many managers believe theirs is - a repurchase may offer the best payoff of all.

I don't think LVMH will want to significantly change the strategy of Loro Piana, and I don't think that they would have bought it otherwise.

The historical evidence shows that shareholders usually greatly benefit from mergers.

Our first use of cash is invested organically, secondly returning values our shareholders - roughly 100 percent free cash flow. And then thirdly, mergers, acquisitions, partnerships that complement our organic strategy. We are going to continue down that path.

I'm sitting with six and a half billion dollars we're going to use to close the Mars-Wrigley deal on October 6. I've got to hand over that six and a half billion on October 6. Now, I have to be very careful about who I leave it in between now and then, because they're expecting that he show up.

I was vehemently against acquisitions. Now let's buy everything in sight. Well, that's a slight exaggeration. We are a little more strategic than that. But everything was on sale.

Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share.

Do I have a problem with Larry Ellison buying Sun? No, that's part of the capitalist system. As soon as we go public we're for sale, that's part of the deal. And do I have a problem with him exercising his intellectual property rights? No, I don't have a problem with that. Would it be how we necessarily ran and operated? Obviously not.

M&A is always an opportunistic tool to grow a company.

The acquisition of Symphony Teleca... gives us immediate scale in software services. With the addition of cloud, mobility, and analytics competencies, we will accelerate solutions for the connected car and for a broader set of industries and markets.

Whether you stay private or go public, after all is said and done, a CEO's job is to create lasting shareholder value.

I look at Boston-based companies all the time... There's certainly great companies in Boston. If the deal makes sense on the merit of the deal itself, we'll go and do the deal.

The reason we didn't acquire WCW is an incoming, rotating door, new head of Turner at that time, took prime time television literally out of the deal that we had already negotiated. Once that happened, there was no way to make any sense of it. It was really just a video library and some ring mats.