Dell indicated that it would take Carl Icahn's bid for the company seriously when it struck a deal with the billionaire investor earlier this week, and it may have more reason to do so now — multiple sources are reporting that Blackstone has now abandoned its rival offer. According to the Financial Times, Blackstone's investors weren't convinced of the deal's merits, and felt that Dell's value on the stock market is already fair...
Dell’s board is looking at two surprise takeover bids from Blackstone Group and billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn, reports Reuters citing sources close to the discussion. A special committee is deciding whether either proposal would trump an existing $24.4 billion buyout offer from the PC maker’s founder Michael Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake.
The new bids mean that Michael Dell could potentially lose control of the company he founded in 1984 and that he and Silver Lake will most likely need to reconsider their original proposal to make it more attractive to Dell shareholders, some of whom have complained that its terms undervalue the PC maker.
Icahn and Blackstone put in their bids on March 22, the last day of the “go-shop” period to solicit competing offers for Dell. The company could potentially announce as soon as Monday whether or not they will be interested in either of the new proposals.
After what seemed like ages of hints and feints, Dell has finally, officially reached a deal to go private. It's going to be led by its founder Michael Dell, with a financial assist from private equity firm Silver Lake and PC enthusiast Microsoft. Will it be enough to make the company—and more specifically, its products—relevant again?
The iPad Age and the rise of the Mac have challenged the entire Windows ecosystem, but it's hard to think of a company that felt the sting more sharply than Dell. Once a PC juggernaut—a decade ago, it sold more computers than anyone in the world—the company's market share has faded in recent years, falling behind relative to the likes of HP and Lenovo at a time when the entire segment was collapsing under the weight of tablets. Dell has no mobile products to speak of. Its PC lineup has been competent but uninspired. It's spent the last several years, in other words, as an afterthought.
Michael Dell, the founder of the computing and technology company that bears his name, confirmed today that he intended to buy it back from shareholders. In a deal announced this morning, Dell and Silver Lake Partners will buy out the company’s existing shareholders in a transaction worth $24.4 billion.
The deal values Dell at $13.65 a share, amounting to a 25.5 percent premium over the closing price of $10.88, where Dell was trading on Jan. 11 before the first reports of renewed interest in a buyout transaction emerged.
The deal also brings together private equity fund Silver Lake with software giant Microsoft, and represents the latest step in a relationship that began when Microsoft bought out Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.
A $24 billion deal to take computer maker Dell private faces one last hurdle: The company's board is voting on the offer tonight, Bloomberg reports.
According to multiple reports, Silver Lake, a buyout firm will invest $1 billion or more; Microsoft will invest $2 billion; and founder Michael Dell will contribute his 16 percent ownership of the current company and $700 million for a majority stake.
The deal will also be backed by $15 billion in debt.
Besides Michael Dell, who's the board chairman, Dell's board includes Facebook investor Jim Breyer, former American Airlines CEO Don Carty, and Ross Perot Jr., among others.
Silver Lake is known for doing big technology deals like the 2000 leveraged buyout of hard-drive maker Seagate Technologies.
Michael Dell is on a mission to take his $23 billion PC company private once again, and a deal could be struck as soon as Monday.
The final details are being worked out, Reuters reports, and everything is expected to be finalized over the weekend. Dell, the company's founder and CEO, will use up to $15 billion in debt financing to reclaim the company from Barclays, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and RBC Capital. Silver Lake Partners and Microsoft would become minority investors.
Dell is putting a lot on the line to gain back majority ownership, including his 15.7% stake and up to $1 billion of his personal funds. Making Dell private would allow its executive team to take bigger risks while attempting to save the company from a tanking PC market.
Dell and Quest software officially revealed what the world already knew: that Dell was in a bidding war against a band of private equity firms to buy Quest Software.
The two companies announced that Dell would buy Quest for $2.4 billion -- slightly more than Dell's own last bid of $2.32 billion
Dell will pay $28 a share for Quest -- or $5 more per share than what Quest was willing to take before the bidding war started in May.
Quest's chairman and CEO Vinny Smith didn't want to sell to Dell, reports the Wall Street Journal. Smith wanted to sell to private equity firms Insight Venture Partners and Vector Capital. This set off a tug-of-war for the company. Smith wanted to sell to the private equity firms so badly, that in June, when they were able raise enough funds to offer $2.17 billion and top Dell's latest bid, Quest issued a press release announcing the deal with them.
Back in February, Dell revealed its intentions to enter the ARM server field. Today, the company announced that it is shipping ARM-based Copper servers to a limited number of customers. Copper is lower power than x86 servers, and Dell thinks this makes it a good fit for energy-intensive platforms such as Hadoop. In that same vein, the company views Copper as a cost-effective option that can be used for light workloads and for testing performance. In addition to deploying its new servers to select clients, Dell will be looking to the open source community for help in further developing its ARM system (the platform currently runs Linux). No word on when Copper will move beyond the testing phase.
Dell can't seem to get it together in the U.S. mobile market.
Dell has stopped selling smartphones in the U.S. effective immediately, reports PC World.
Its Venue and Venue Pro smartphones no longer appear on the company's U.S. website. A spokesperson vaguely told PC World that Dell will some day offer more mobile products. But the company hasn't announced any new smartphones yet.
Dell today acquired SonicWall for terms it wouldn't disclose. However, the New York Times says the deal cost Dell $1.25 billion.
Apparently Dell feels $1.25 billion isn't a material number its investors need to be bothered over.
A spokesperson for Dell told Business Insider that Dell never reports the terms on acquisitions of private companies and that it would not confirm or deny the $1.25 billion amount.
The rivalry between HP and Cisco has to rank among the biggest and baddest in the IT world.
Cisco often slings dirt at HP, calling it names (the "good enough" network), running demonstrations of HP gear compared to Cisco's, and writing trash talking blog posts.
We asked Mike Banic, vice president of marketing for HP Networking, to tell us how HP plans to compete with Cisco in the coming months.
Dell reported better-than-expected third quarter earnings, no revenue growth and provided an anemic revenue growth picture for the fiscal year.
The PC maker reported fiscal third quarter earnings of $893 million, or 49 cents a share, on revenue of $15.36 million, flat with the year ago quarter. Non-GAAP earnings were 54 cents a share.
In a recent interview with Clickz, Rishi Dave, executive director of online marketing for Dell’s Public and Large Enterprise Business Unit talk about some of Dell’s success online including B2B social media marketing outreach.
