Dell Going Private In $24.4 Billion Agreement 217
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dell is going private again, as the result of a $24.4 billion deal involving private-equity investors and Microsoft. The deal will close before the end of the second quarter of Dell's fiscal 2014, according to Reuters. Dell founder and namesake Michael Dell, who owns roughly 14 percent of the company's common shares, will continue to lead the newly privatized venture as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He will contribute his existing shares to the new company, on top of a 'substantial' additional cash investment. As with other hardware manufacturers in the space, Dell faces the specter of a softening PC market. And while Dell has made significant efforts to penetrate other markets—including the launch of a private cloud architecture based on the open-source OpenStack—that weakness has affected its bottom line: for its fiscal 2013 third quarter, the company reported an 11 percent decrease in revenue from the previous year; while it enjoyed an increase in revenue from its servers and services businesses, revenue from its Consumer division dipped 23 percent. Its Large Enterprise, Small and Medium Business, and Public revenue also declined." Another take at the New York Times.
Re:Give the money back to the shareholders! (Score:4, Informative)
They are. You are getting all shares cashed in for 13.65 a share.
Re:Nokia welcomes you, Dell! (Score:3, Informative)
Really? according to that article, Nokia has turned back into a profitable company.
Re:Could be the best thing... (Score:3, Informative)
Dell earns $1.2 per share. That's about 10%. Interest rates on debt are not that high and interest payments are tax exempt. So I doubt unless they screw up the business pretty badly they are going to get through just fine.
Michael Dell and Microsoft are the people putting in most of the money to begin with, and debt holders (banks) cannot put pressure (they are non-voting, by definition, else it would be just preferred stock), so I can't see why this would not work.
On the other hand Michael Dell wants to make it into a services company, that part I am not so sure about
Re:Give the money back to the shareholders! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Memo to investors: (Score:4, Informative)
More importantly, they are getting Dell tech support.
My condolences.
Actually Dell's Enterprise level support is fairly good. Fortunately I haven't had much experience with consumer level support.
Re:Memo to investors: (Score:4, Informative)
So, sparky, anybody who likes Dell systems, and has had good experiences with their support and dares to tell about it on a public forum is, to you, a shill... Have I got that right?? I also like Dell's enterprise systems (Optiplex/Precision/PowerEdge/Latitude), and the support for those systems. Since until about 2 years ago, I'd been supporting about 200 of these Dell systems in my then day-job, and have been doing so for 10+ years, I think I might know a thing or two about these Dell systems, and have some credibility in what I've experienced with their support... But you go right ahead and keep calling people shills who haven't had the same experience as you....
Re:Give the money back to the shareholders! (Score:5, Informative)
But Nokia didn't have $130bn just lying around. $130bn changes everything.
Repeat after me: It's all on paper.
Amazing how little a company is worth when the stock starts sliding.
Yes, amazing how little Apple is worth without its stock. Hint: it's about $137 billion, all in the bank (well, various banks around the world).
The stock value or market cap, which is what you really meant, is $430 billion at time of this writing. Meaning almost 1/3 of the current stock value is backed by actual cash in the bank.