Albert Fried On Apple And Time Warner Talks - Not Probable, But Beneficial

Albert Fried & Company’s Rich Tullo reiterated Time Warner TWX at Overweight with a $90.00 price target. The Reiteration came after Financial Times reported that Apple AAPL and Time Warner held preliminary talks “that did not rise to eh level of the CFO suites” according to the analyst.

The Albert Fried analyst believes these talks can expand to the C-suite as Tullo believed there were “several reasons why Apple’s Eddie Cue and TWX would talk.” Most notable including:

1.) Warner Brothers has an “expansive content library with Global appeal” creating an advantage in development of new programming.”
2.) “Mergers could be driven by anticipated cloud cost savings” as Warner Brothers begins to “extract rent from the Cloud Ecosystem”
3.) Time Warner has valuable content such as Adult Swim, CNN, TBS, and TNT which would be the “core to the offering”

Fried later downplayed his above points saying he “does not see Apple merging with TWX however the talks do support our view that TWX is a strategic value with a catalyst kicker in Warner Brother’s summer movie schedule.”

At the time of writing, Apple was trading down 0.30% and Time Warner up 1.02%.