Gabelli On Why He's Watching Protective Life, Interpublic Group, Hillshire Brands

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Mario Gabelli, Gamco Investors chairman & CEO, shares his thoughts on how to play the social media, e-commerce, and natural gas space.

Gabelli eyes takeover targets

Mario Gabelli, Gamco Investors chairman & CEO, explains why he is watching shares of Protective Life, Interpublic Group, and Hillshire Brands.

Transcript

what did you bring us today? i didn’t bring you love without coming on merger monday. you talked about one day. go the distance with me. joe, for a lot of reasons. protective life. you own it? no. it’s not an area in which we have a competency. in that framework what we are looking at is there are companies that you step pack and say, okay, advertising. i was at a road show in the ’60s. we had been following ad agencies. what happens had they can’t get together? will maurice come in and say, look, i have to do a deal. the obvious company is interpublic. michael roth, getting out of the legacy issues of practices, accounting and so on. and bright fundamentals. if you have good fundamentals but the possibility of a merger. so you like that one? i think the public has 420 million shares of stocks. they close friday. yeah. i think it’s okay. who has the deal? i can’t answer that. it’s like hillshire. you own hillshire, right? i did something even better than that. we had sarah lee. it split into three parts. barnes split the company. we made money with one that was taken over. hillshire was one for five. so there’s 120 million shares of hillshire. conley, ceo, has done a pretty good job of growing the dynamics. within that framework, the fund mentals were good. he announces a deal with a company, pf. you know, you wonder why. it was kind of a deal that didn’t make economic sense. pinnacle. pf, pinnacle foods. and now you get a share of the company for pinnacle. that’s $43. 14 times ebitda. it doesn’t make sense. so you track these companies on a spin-off. james beam. wait a second. you liked hillshire when it was spun off. it could become tyson or pilgrim’s pride. feed prices are going down. chicken is becoming a protein source. you have a very positive cycle. how smart are the guys at