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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

I just commented about this. I get the impression large investors are using other lesser known companies to make acquisitions probably to conceal financial records somehow. It's like a shell corp but one that is legitimate enough to not be called a shell corp outright.

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> I get the impression large investors are using other lesser known companies to make acquisitions probably to conceal financial records somehow. It's like a shell corp but one that is legitimate enough to not be called a shell corp outright.

That's simply not correct.

It's an all stock transaction, so AppLovin can issue stock equal to $17.5B and transfer that to owners of Unity stock in return for their Unity stock. Then the two companies merge and the AppLovin stock owners now own both.

You can read details here:

> in a transaction where each outstanding share of Unity common stock would be exchanged for 1.152 shares of AppLovin Class A voting common stock and 0.314 shares of AppLovin Class C non-voting common stock. Under these terms, current Unity shareholders would receive approximately 55.0% of the outstanding shares of the combined company, with the Class A shares representing approximately 49.0% of the outstanding voting rights of the combined company.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220809005530/en/App...

Do AppLovin stock holders prior to the acquisition see a massive price decrease in their shares?

Seems like they’re basically printing double the existing stock to cover it

No, because the acquisition makes AppLovin more valuable. If merging with Unity makes AppLovin $17.5B more valuable than it was previously, then the existing stock's value doesn't change.

Of course, the market may disagree on the value in either direction.

Mergers are weird.

There's an added complication that some of the stock is class-C non-voting stock (which is less valuable) but they plan to make it voting stock at some stage after the transaction.

Also, Unity stock holders end up holding 55% of the merged company.

And Unity is a loss making company, with only $297.0 Q2 revenue. https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/UNITY-SOFTWARE-IN...

$292.0 million, but yeah.

It would only go in half if they issued double the shares and didn’t get any assets.

In this case, the expectation is that the value of Unity equals roughly the value of the issued shares.

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