Bye Bye to 1.4c, page-35

It's just phone polling to test for consensus. If they have the share register they know how many shares are held by the people they are talking to . From there they can a feel for the weight of the likely buy price needed to win the day. A bit like political polling really where if the current strategy doesn't fly well the pollies shift.

As I see it it's following a pretty similar path to most on market buy offers which are usually a dollar cost averaging approach to control the cost:
Step 1: Chuck in a low ball offer that's a decent premium to recent trading. Shakes the tree of the weakest holders
Step 2: As the lowball offer is running it's course run the numbers on the stronger hands. Hopefully by now you're sitting around 25-30%
Step 3: Launch new offer. Shake the tree again. Collect the weaker of the old holders that were holding on and also pick up a good portion of the speculators that came in on the first offer. (I might be putting some of mine at this point if the offer's significantly above what I paid and maybe hold on to some for a bit
Step 4: Hopefully this stage gets you to 50% and now for the run home. Really test out the strong holders, the majors. Ideally be talking with your hold out major shareholder to find out where he's happy enough to move on. He knows you're coming and knows the game you're playing so he's waiting for that conversation, maybe, just maybe you've already had that conversation.
Step 5: Put out the offer that the key hold outs will accept. Ideally get to 80% and away you go.

You've got complete control of the company for a dollar cost a lot lower than what it would have taken if you paid everyone the hold out price. In this scenario let's say the hold out price is 3.5 cents. That's 2.2 cents over the first offer which means that Todd have already saved themselves $660,000 for the first 30 million shares they acquired. Or look at it another way $330k saved on the 30 million acquired so far for every cent they end up paying above that price.