David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…You totally see that here. I’ve been shocked with Kroger-owned QFC here in Seattle is in the last couple of years really stepped up their game to the point where I can get enough really healthy stuff there where I’d actually, you know, I can totally see why the same-store sales will be declining for Whole Foods. Yup. So the stock has been under a lot of pressure for the last couple of years and actually there was an activist hedge fund, Jana Partners that I believe ended up getting board seats and has been kind of really pushing the company to take a corporate action, meaning sell itself. This is totally interesting. So last fall, Amazon was – at least this was I think a Bloomberg story – that it was reported that Amazon was considering buying Whole Foods but then Jana stepped in as an activist investor and that calmed down for a little while. And there’s been other talks recently, we’ll get into the Albertsons stuff, that Albertsons was considering a takeover bid more recently, but on this Jana Partners thing, Jana acquires I think it was 8.3% of Whole Foods last fall and then is able to flip it for the premium that they got to Amazon today. And Amazon was interested before Jana stepped in. So I’d love to know that story of, you know, how did Jana manage to make that happen when Amazon knew the price was only going to go up when that happened.…

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