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.

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.