Keep pulling the thread on Mason Morfit & Rob Hale.
ValueAct invested $60 million in Martha Stewart's company, purchasing the only shares she had ever sold, shortly before she was investigated for insider trading.
ValueAct founder Jeff Hubbin became chairman of the board at Martha Stewart's company during her imprisonment, giving the firm a high-profile governance role.
ValueAct's "Shadow P&L" analysis of Microsoft revealed that the company's hardware initiatives were losing between $4 billion and $6 billion annually.
Following ValueAct's engagement, Microsoft reallocated capital from money-losing hardware initiatives to strategically important areas like Office 365 and Azure.
Japan is the second-largest market globally for high-quality companies, with 250 firms having over a $1 billion market cap and gross margins exceeding 40%, compared to about 1,000 in the United States.
ValueAct has invested over $7 billion in Japan since 2017 across 12 publicly disclosed investments.
During the dot-com bubble, many healthcare services companies that had been converted from non-profits to public companies ultimately collapsed.
ValueAct's founding strategy was to occupy a "white space" in public markets by adopting an owner's mentality and engaging with management, similar to venture or private equity investors.
The wave of corporate scandals in 2002, including at Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia, and subsequent regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, created a favorable environment for ValueAct's engagement-focused investment strategy.
Over its 25-year history, ValueAct has made over 100 investments and held over 50 board seats.
ValueAct's investment thesis focuses on high-quality companies suffering from "diseases of abundance," where strong cash flow enables poor decision-making and a lack of strategic focus.
ValueAct invested in Microsoft in 2013 when the stock was trading at approximately 8 times earnings.