HardAssetsInvestor

Written by HardAssetsInvestor.com  |

March 29, 2007

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The battle between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) over the rights to buy the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) continues.

The battle between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) over the rights to buy the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) continues.

The story, in case you haven’t been following, has all the drama of a Mexican soap. CME has been courting the CBOT for some time, and the two agreed to merge late last year. As March approached, all that remained was for CBOT shareholder to vote on the deal – a move largely seen as a technicality. But ICE had different ideas and submitted an unsolicited counter bid on March 15. The ICE bid came in at $9.9 billion, far over the $8.8 billion offered by the CME, and ground the two-Chicago merger process to a halt. (That premium has since shrunk, as ICE’s share price has traded down.)

Many expected the CME to increase its offer in response to ICE’s efforts, but the CME has stood firm, insisting that it’s deal is simply superior. Last Wednesday, CME CEO Craig Donohue compared ICE’s offer to “a minnow swallowing a whale,” and said that the promised synergies and cost savings were unrealistic. Despite the fact that ICE offered more money than CME, Donohue told analysts that the deal was “significantly inferior,” offering a “weaker currency” and poorer growth potential going forward.

ICE, for its part, told reporters it was “better at integrating acquisitions” than the CME, and that its offer was substantially superior to the CME proposal.

The CBOT’s board will review both proposals.

If the Atlanta-based ICE can pull off the deal, it would be quite a coup. The upstart electronic exchange recently completed the acquisition of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) --- a move that has already paid dividends, as the ICE has expanded significantly into the market for “softs” commodities, pushing the exchange to record profits.

But there are all sorts of cultural and economic issues at stake here that might derail ICE’s efforts. For one, there’s that old Chicago pride: some CBOT members have expressed concern about East Coast interests moving into the Chicago market.

Far more important, however, are the issues surrounding electronic vs. floor-based trading. The CBOT is firmly a floor-based exchange, and whatever happens, the acquiring company is going to move some of the trading volume onto electronic markets. ICE’s heritage is in electronic trading, while the CME comes from a floor-based background. Some CBOE members have expressed concerns that ICE would move quickly to shutter the floor.

Beyond that, the CME has tried to cast doubt on ICE’s ability to handle the transaction, noting, for instance, that it would have to scale up its clearing capacity (acquired in the NYMEX transaction) some 30 times in order to handle the increased flow. According to recent reports, CBOT members prefer the CME deal, and would accept the bid “in an instant” if the CME would just offer a bit more money.