Corel to be bought by Vector Capitol

mgeoffrey writes "Corel announced that Vector Capitol will acquire Corel by buying out all outstanding shares at $1.05 a share. They are buying 22,890,000 shares. Vector Capitol has published a full report." Looks like the natural continuation after Microsoft sold off their Corel holdings.

Comments

Vector own Real Networks!

[Znonymous Coward]

And by the looks of this page, Corel is just another dog to add to thier lackluster portfolio.

Does anyone here check facts?

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

The sale price is $98,000,000.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030606/tech_corel_vector _3 .html

I didn't make that a link because I wanted slashcode to annoy you with the extraneous blank.

Re:cheap?

[PerryMason]

The post isnt actually accurate. Vector Capital purchased 22,890,000 Series A shares from Microsoft on March 10th or thereabouts at $0.5625. They are now offering $1.05 per share for the remaining stock. The board of directors has recommended that shareholders take the offer. It "represents a premium of 42% to the market immediately prior to our announcement that Vector had entered into a non-disclosure and standstill agreement with Corel," said James Baillie, Chairman of Corel's Board of Directors.

So from the point of view of the shareholders, its probably not a bad deal.

Re:va linux buyout?

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of misinformed investors think LNUX is the maker of Linux. So between the Munich news and Balmer memo in the last couple of weeks, there are a lot of people thinking this LNUX company is the next Microsoft. CNBC compounded the problem by calling LNUX "Linux" and comparing it's chart to Microsoft.

Re:cheap?

[PerryMason]

The maths for anyone who cares;

Corel shares;
24,000,000 Series A preferred shares
91,840,000 common shares.

VC bought 22,890,000 Series A shares at $0.5625=$12.876 Million.
They now offer $1.05 per share for the remaining 1,110,000 Series A and 91,840,000 common shares=$97.6 Million.

So all up your looking at about $110 Million for Corel, 'lock, stock and barrel'.

Check out their end of quarter financial report up to 28th Feb '03 for the lowdown on their financial position.
The long and the short is; $50 Million in cash/liquid assets, posting losses but with very few liabilities.

capital vs. capitol

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitol is where the head of a government is.
Capital is goods or money.

Its not very hard.

Notice the original Slashdot poster got it wrong (Capitol) but -- thank goodness -- Vector got it right
on the linked site (Capital).

Re:capital vs. capitol

[PizzaFace]

Capitol is where the head of a government is.

Almost. The capitol is the building where the legislature meets, named after the Capitol in Washington, which was named after the Capitol (a temple to Jupiter) in ancient Rome. The city where the government is based is the capital city.

Re:cheap?

[A Guy From Ottawa]

I read in the Ottawa Citizen this morning that this deal (about 22 million CANADIAN) is about 75% of Corel's annual sales.

Cheap? I think so...

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[Reziac]

Having compared WP10 and OfficeXP myself, give me WP10 any day. Not just because I'm an old WP user back to the 5.0 era, but because Word has too many deficiencies that I'm not going to put up with if I don't have to. And I can't live without PhotoPaint.

I just hope Vector Capitol doesn't screw around with the software depts, but rather beats the management and marketing depts into having some common sense. There's no good reason why Corel can't make a profit -- and they're in a good position to undercut M$'s market and make a comeback, merely by NOT forcing onerous licensing terms down customers' throats. (WP bulk licensing is VERY cheap; OEM lic. for distribution with hardware is only $15 per copy.)

I don't think "focus" is really an issue; there is nothing wrong with having both office and graphic suites, nor with acquiring synergistic programs (such as Bryce to go with CorelDraw). But once they've got the apps, Corel has had a tendency to lose direction and abandon projects in midstream, sortof like a kid who starts hobby projects but never finishes them. If they had looked beyond the short term, by now they could have had a nice corporate-friendly linux-and-office/graphics-suite offering, that would have been ready to fill the gap when enterprise IT started shying away from M$'s "Software Assurance" extortion scheme.

BTW the upcoming WP11 suite is getting good reviews; EWeek rated it very good and a desireable alternative to M$Office (WP being less expensive and more functional).

PS, I still use old WP5.1 every day, plus v8 and v10 regularly, and I own something like 18 copies of versions from 4.1 thru 10.0. :)

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[leandrod]

> if MS had played fair, none of this would have happened.

Would play fair in this case mean be late with a bloated version for MS Windows, and overpriced?

Because that was the case. The first versions of Satellite Software WordPerfect for MS Windows were confusing and bloated. There was one version requiring 6 MB RAM when the norm was 4 MB; MS WinWord at the time asked for only 2 MB. And MS WinWord was cheaper, especially if acquired in MS Office, which was also better integrated. Obviously MS could offer lower prices because of the monopoly, but Satellite could have gone the free software route; at a time, Borland even tried to sell a version of Emacs.

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[DragonMagic]

WordPerfect is also the best word processor for writers because of its ability to properly typographically lay out a page. Word can screw up severely, even to the point that submitting a work on disk or electronically between versions or even platforms can cause your markup to be askew.

If OpenOffice.org or other open source projects want to take up where WordPerfect might be dropped (if Vector chooses to kill it or take it the Real way), Typography, Grammar/Spell Checker lookups, Document Analysis (passives, incompletes, etc) and a saved format that does not change between versions and platforms.

Word fails miserably at all of these (if you believe that Word's Spellcheck is great, check out what WordPerfect's does and be blown away). If Vector doesn't want to continue the line, or want to make it more like Word, then I do hope that OpenOffice.org or another word processing suite can take WordPerfect's place.

It's Vector CapitAl. Please change headline...

[SlashChick]

Several anonymous cowards have already pointed this out, but I thought I'd point it out at +2:

The name of the company is Vector Capital (as in venture capital.) Please update the article.

Thanks.

Re:Ah, the old WordPerfect.

[citdude]

I have been used WordPerfect all my life, from when it was DOS-based up until I switched to Linux recently. It kicked Word's @$$ in everything back then and it still does. Word's grammer-check is nothing compared to WP and so is it's spellcheck. But the real reason I liked using WP so much was that I could see *EXACTLY* what it was doing with "Reveal Codes." For those of you who don't know, you really need to type up a document in WP and then hit Alt-F3 and see what pops up. It is really nifty and shows you exactly how the computer is formatting your document. Writing a document in any other wordprocessor is like being confined to FrontPage to write a website where you aren't allowed to see the html source; reveal codes is that source you can see. Unfortunately, openoffice.org has not developed something like this yet; I'm really hoping that they will though. I have not found a single person who actually likes Word better than WordPerfect, people just keep using it because they are sheep and its more "standard" because everyone else uses it.