"Did we accept the Proposal (which contained a condition of a...

"Did we accept the Proposal (which contained a condition of a period of confidential DD).
Or did we Reject it and instead allow them non-exclusive DD in an effort to get them to improve it.

The announcement says “Following receipt of the Proposal, the Cynata Board decided to grant non-exclusive due diligence access to Sumitomo” which is quite opaque"


There's a lot of variables here. But any potentially true hypothesis has to be consistent with all known facts. If I miss a known fact my guess/hypothesis will be wrong.

I don't know what was in the Proposal exactly obviously. But I'm assuming the Proposal was the first offer containing some key commercial terms such as price that would have been complete enough to have been capable of being accepted (but not expected to be accepted probably its just a first offer). I'm assuming the board was pleased to be approached by Sumi (hooray competitive tension) but not wanting to accept first offer as written immediately so counter-offered (which is sort of rejecting politely offer 1 but moving in friendly fashion to offer 2 and so on).

Sumi would have wanted to do dd, (most cos would ).
And Sumi would have wanted the scheme of arrangement to be successful (get 75%). And not have their mere interest jack the price up. Its to avoid jacking the price and possibly avoid telling Fuji they were moving in on their date that they'd want confidentiality about talking to cyp at all maintained until they were ready to go public.

Boards of targets have to walk a fine line. They have to be open to approaches that might produce a deal that is in the best interest of shareholders. They can't just recklessly reject plausible looking deals because if some shareholders discovered that they'd be upset.

Asking for confidentiality whist discussing potential deals is not usually unreasonable so long as confidentiality is possible to be maintained. The CYP board (assuming only competence) would not want future approaches from other companies or from Sumi to be impeded because those cos think the board would out them and wouldn't give them a chance to talk confidentially.