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Will McNealy Take Sun Private?
krygny writes "There is speculation that with $7.5 billion in cash, and liquidation of other assets, Sun could leverage a buyback of all publicly traded shares of SUNW at between $5 and $5.50 per share. I suppose, that would relieve them of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, which Scott McNealy never really liked. (Who does?) For anyone at Sun who survives the tumult, hopefully, there could also be a return to the former corporate culture."
No.
There's a lot of people that care about what happens to Sun, theres no need to flame just because you dont care about Sun.
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
http://theinquirer.net/?article=22920
They've already called it "a joke":
Sun Micro President Denies Report of Plan to Go Private
What's your damage, Heather?
As anyone going over to Google News can easily find out, this as already been denied by Mr. McNealy himself ...
See Forbes, for example.
Scott has already dismissed this.r umor/2100-7341_3-5689924.html
http://news.com.com/McNealy+dismisses+Sun+buyout+
Although Sun does have a sizeable cash position, the underlying businesses are not terribly strong. Moreover, any buyout firm would need to work amicably with McNealy, which is no small feat.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
This is supposed to be some kind of business-Hoax thought up by a bunch of hedge-fonds-managers to fool investors, as heise.de pointed out already yesterday.
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
This rumor circulates every few months. In the three years I worked at Sun it popped up at least every six months. Especially after donut Wednesdays went away. There alwasys seem to be this talk about the stock being substantially worth less than the assets of the company. Wasn't that what all those stock buyouts in the 80's were about? Buying companies for their assets versus their worth as a producer?
--- Location Unknown
I realise that this particular situation is a hoax/joke, but I have a question regarding the actual buyback process.
What happens if some stockholders DON'T want to sell?
Can they hold up the process indefinately?
liqbase
That sounds more like pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.
While I would love to see something like that
happen myself the likely hood of McNealy turning
the ship around let alone keeping it afloat is
less than likely since he's the problem not the
solution.
I can see a future where Sun's hardware business
dies and Java is bought be another company which
makes Sun the next SCO.
Corporations are the only things that actually generate welfare in a modern society. Governments and consumers just consume and feed on the fruits of private entrepreneurship. I think that should entitle the corporations and people who shoulder all the responsibility to some benefits and latitude of action.
Look, I am not advocating that CEOs should ass-rape little girls, but yeah, as far as they act to the good of the company, they're acting for the good of the society and should not be troubled with inane governmental control.
I, as an investor, think Sarbanes-Oxley is a Good Thing(tm).
Of course as a consultant I think it's friggin' awesome!
I've often thought that if I ever started a company, that I would vastly prefer to keep the company private. The requirements on public companies are so onerous that I just don't see how it is really worth it long term. It forces you to look at the short term only. And the expenses of stuff like Sarbanes-Oxley are just drains on productive company activities. (Talk about making the problem worse. Sarbanes-Oxley is nothing more than a cash transfer from productive company activities to public accounting firms and lawyers. ) The only time I can see going public is when I was ready to "cash out".
My Weblog
That is why corporations are SO f***ing wrong. No personal responsibilities and/or liabilities. A CE* should be held responsible for their actions. Ken Lay, Nachio, Anschutz, and the rest should be in prison for embezzeling/texan-style accounting. The idea of successful entrepreneurship is that you get to reap the rewards of status and money. It does not entitle them to lie and cheat. What is needed is not only less gov. controls on business, but more laws to hold individuals responsible.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Friggin' awesome?
I, as a corporate droid who has spent the last year and a half dealing with the bullshit that SOX is making my fortune 100 company go through, do NOT think that SOX is friggin' awesome.
Friggin' annoying, maybe.
Of course, it got me a nice chunk o' change last year for a performance award, but now it's becoming a royal PITA.
That's why I love it as a consultant! Your PITA is my $$$! SOX is the ISO-9000 of the 21st century! Woohoo!
According to yahoo finance, SUNW has about 3.15 billion in cash (some of those other assets in the 7.5billion mentioned above are going to be hard to sell. They may be decent collatoral for a loan, but they don't, in and of themselves, free up cash), and 1.12b in long term debt. If they buy at 5.50 (which is probably as low as they could possibly pull it off for) the price would be 18.5b. This would leave them with 16 or so billion in debt.
Interest on this alone would be about 800 million per year, wiping out all of this year's real (not EBITDA) earnings.
The only way to solve that issue is to sell assets, cut costs (including labor) and cross your fingers. Sun would definitely be a miserable place to work for some time to come.
For anyone that's interested, the book 'Barbarians at the Gate' is a great read on the subject, following all of the players in the leveraged buyout of RJ Reynolds in the late 80s.
Sun colapsing into itself - the creation of a black hole within our own galexy!
Investors on the event horizon won't know if they're falling in or not.
Going private is irrelevant. McNealy is irrelevant. Veracity of Bill Gates and GWB is irrelevant. You will be assimilated. Bill Gates of MS has been chosen as the liaison to facilitate the assimilation. Resistance is futile.
Lower your Free and Open Source software and prepare to be boarded.
bork bork bork!
I thought we were talking about our friend the sun in the sky. I would have lost all hope of the survival of humanity with these privatizations and patent laws.. oh wait..
This is one thing that bugs me. Sun's strategy is looking two and more years out, but the investors care only about the next three months. One advantage of going private would be getting those asshole analysts off their backs, I guess, but the costs might be too much. I'd much rather see them put that money into R&D. They have three CPUs in the pipeline now (USIIIi+, USIV+, Niagara), and getting them to market sooner is always a good thing.
If people genuinely believed that sun were prepared to pay $5+ to buy back stock then the price would probably rise above that.
Granted i'm no financial expert but if you intend to buy a huge pile of stock, it's best to keep it on the downlow so that rumours dont push the price up.
SGI has too much cash. Novell has too much cash, Microsoft has oodles of cash. There are lots of companies that have this problem. If you spend cash to buy assets, those assets have to have a reasonably fast return or Wall Street will skewer the buyer.
In a less shaky economy, where your next dollar or euro or pound or yen or shekel of profit were clear, you'd be spending them. But it's not clear, because of lots of ennui in the market place. Corps are stagnating, playing only to Wall Street and their options packages, not to general stockholders. Their guts are gone. Now, entrepreneurship is found in the ASEAN countries, and in odd places like the Ukraine and Slovenia. These guys are afraid to move, not because of SarBox, but because of some dimwitted analyst who will roil when the price of oil climbs or when an earnings target is honestly missed by a shaved penny per share.
But this isn't a rant, it's an observation that control has been pulled from too many corps and handed on a platter to the speculators on the NASDAQ, and NYSE. Those bozos, who've helped ruin the economy along with the depravity of a weak dollar, are wreaking havoc. On the surface, a cheap dollar helps exports-- but deficits are at an all-time high! This is because the dollar is leaking out of the US economy at staggering rates into labor costs across the world. Soon the dollar is going to be like the lire. Get bigger wallets, which will hold far less.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Thats just an invitation for traders to push the price up before he gets to make a bid - corporate raids like this have to be executed quickly.
It would make sense for Sun to go private though, as long as the stock market expects than to behave like a Dell and produce incremental growth every quarter rather than the R&D firm which has peaks and troughs that they are its going to be a nightmare for them. They appear to have halted the slide, they just need to start regaining customers now.
And like it or loathe it, Solaris 10 is damn impressive, the opterton boxes are very cool - and we have yet to see the Andy Bechtolsheim designed boxes (Bechtolsheim is a visionary and could turn Sun by himself - he was one of the first investors in Google back in 1998, silicon valley legend says that he cut a cheque for 200k on his doorstep when he was first approached by Brin and Page, he founded Granite systems (sold to Cisco for 220 million) and headed up Ciscos gigabit networking businesss) and the teasers about the Niagra chips (e-week article /. managed to miss my submission of) sound very interesting.
They have a hell of a lot of clever people working there, its just the management layers that are a bit of a problem - from what I've heard the problem is in the middle management layers, and the useless idiots they have in sales and marketing, not at the top with the possible exeception of McNealy.
That's the great thing about democracy: we have a revolution every four or so years, and nobody gets hurt.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I agree, thats why I FGI. try here
duhhh, wrong link nevermind im a wetard
This would not change much about the company's situation. Sun's biggest weakness is that they're selling custom, 'high-end' hardware into a commodity market, all the while undermining that business with cross-platform Java. The ownership of the company won't change any of this. Thus, SUNW is a bad investement, even for Sun itself.
If it happens, McNealy will be gone, 50% headcount reductions will happen at the minimum, and every product line that does not translate into short-term gains will be axed. I would expect and long-term architecture plans to be shelved, an emphasis on squeezing money from Java, and some changes in how the products are marketed.
Private equity firms typically want to bring the company back to an IPO within four years, and typially the changes they bring in are radical in terms of timing but obvious in terms of strategy.
Now you could try to self-fund from the firm's income, but that won't happen quickly unless you are selling drugs.
Also note that your employees, the best ones, are constantly being lured away by the thought if stock options from a competitor. Compensation is important, and its easier to let the investing public do the heavy lifting.
A company like Sun, with tens of thousands of employees, has an incredible burn rate with regards to compensation, benefits, etc. Sun could easily go broke in a few years unless revenues ratchet up. Novell, SGI etc are in a better position by virtue of having few(er) employees, so their burn rates are not too bad. Microsoft is in a class all its own, the annual interest alone from their horde is larger than the cash balance of many firms with as many employees. It will take a very long time for MS to die.
Private companies that do services for a public SOX compliant company have to get SAS70 certification in many cases. SAS70 is SOX for the private sector, for the most part. Since Sun has convinces it's customers to outsource to them, Sun would still have to get SAS70 certification.
It was Judge Woodlock, in the US District Court for Massachusetts, with a gavel.
[ disclaimer - I used to work for Sun, left two years ago ]
The sigma stuff is a royal pain in the ass for development and they seem to have realised that, but some aspects of it are usefull.
Unfortunately it will take time to undo the damage that it has done, and it will take longer for the muppets that introduced it to spot how many incompentent managers and crap teams it has made look good while talented staff have left or been layed off because they were interested in doing a job rather than generating pointless data. Sun's hr have a lot to answer for this on this as well - Crawford Beveridge should have got the boot ages ago, everything about the man screams management towards mediocrity, which is exactly what Sigma allows.
solaris 10 is not all that cool because all promised parts of it haven't been released yet: where is ZFS, Janus, where it the opensolaris that complements it? There's all kinds of issues running legacy 32 bit applications on it, and even more tangled ones trying to port 32 bit apps to be 64. Have you looked at the expansion slots & disk bay counts for Sun's opteron boxes? bleh.
Big business doesn't run Sun's free enterprise java server, they buy Weblogic and others instead (can't give the shit away). Other companies already make jvms. Sun has no way to make short-term money from java. They should turn over java to a standards body and thus rid themselves of an unprofitable money sinkhole.
Corporations are the only things that actually generate welfare in a modern society.
The most dangerous truths are half truths. It is true that corporations contribute to the general welfare by pursuing their private interests, which is why the instution exists in our laws.
It is not true that they are only capapble of contributing to the public welfare; nor are they the only kind of institution in our society that does so. Yes, even government contributes to the public welfare, especially in the are of non-excludable goods.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is no reason to spend any money on US3i. Dead technology. Focus chip R&D on niagra and rock.
In typical fasion sun is sabotaging its Opteron prospects. They are not putting enough engineers behind this line, and the products are slipping in schedule, some even cancelled. Naturally this allows HP and IBM in the door as Sun can't deliver products within Customers engeneering cycles.
Sad but true
on top of which all the galaxy boxes look to be slipping in schedule, with at least one line being cancelled outright. What kill sun is their current engineering cycle.
1. develope a product.
2. one month before release, find out what customers need.
3. Re-engineer product to meet customer expectations.
4. Watch market errode to competitors as you re-develope box and try to convince customers that you are still relavant.
Just as a matter of interest, why do you single out Bush etc. here and completely ignore virtually identical statements made in the Clinton era, particularly around the Desert Fox (more tonnage of bombs than any other action since WWII) Iraq action?
Not trolling to start a fight here, seriously. I really do want to hear a coherent answer to that one particular question, why is it an article of faith to people like you that Bush is uniquely duplicitous when Desert Fox was justified by the Clinton administration using the same arguments that Bush used four years later for Iraqi Freedom? Whether those arguments are true or whether the attacks were justified I'm not interested in here, I just want to know why your sort thinks that the Clinton administration was truthful and the Bush administration lied when what they said was identical. It seems very strange indeed. But being Canadian and all, perhaps there's some subtlety I'm missing here...
Because Emmanuel Goldstein runs the republican party, and he is double plus ungood. Therefore anything the republicans do is double plus ungood.
Bush is always on TV with the republican's ridiculous duckspeak. He is nothing like our glorious politicians who can properly duckspeak.
Haven't you been watching the two minute hates?
I think I need to report you to Miniluv.
(The above was humor, but near the end I think I scared myself with the analogy.)
It will not relieve them of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements if they are a government contractor. Private companies that are contractors are bound by SOX requirements.
I suppose it's possible they don't have any government contracts, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
Yes, because being the leader of the greatest military and economic power on earth and sending 130,000 troops overseas to attack a couple of countries on "misinformation" is far better than being well-aware of everything and simply lying about it to achieve your objectives.
Wow. Why was this guy marked flamebait? Sun was one of the staunches supporters pushing the whole "there's not enough qualified tech labor in America" thing in the late 90s that lead us to the situation we have today.
However, I don't think the "foreigners generally dislike documentation because it requires effective use of English" thing is at all accurate. Most overseas companies who have support contracts (which most anyone with a lot of Sun hardware will have) has people who speak fluent (or fluent enough) english. And nobody loves having everything documented - english or otherwise - than the Japanese. It's like, if it doesn't say it somewhere on an official piece of paper - it isn't right.
(For the dim: not Holland Michigan)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Pete Townshend said it best. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
You're in for quite a suprise should you ever find out how wrong you are.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I worked for Sun in the late 80's/early 90's. At that point, McNeally had the trust and respect of a lot of bright folks. I don't think that is the case any more. When I've interviewed folks that have more recently come of Sun-it just isn't like it was in the old days.
In the mean time, I can envisage traditional UltraSPARC development being canned after IV+ and 1-2 way processors will be bought in from Fujitsu, whose SPARC64 kicks UltraSPARC's ass.
In the future, big SMP systems from Sun will probably be AMD Opteron based. I reckon that by 2007 you'll be able to buy a 64-way dual- or 4-core Opteron machine (effectively 128 or 256 processors) running Solaris 11.
The instruction set wars are over. AMD has the best thread execution engine on the planet. IBM is close behind with Power PC.
Tthe main reason for a company to have an IPO is simply that it gives the owners a chance to sell their share on the open market. For example, Microsoft has never needed to raise money from the stock market, but Bill Gates needed the IPO so that he could spend his billions. The same applies to Google, and many other companies.
This works especially well (for the original owners, that is --- not for the people who buy shares on the open market) when there's a stock market bubble. But even if there wasn't, the VCs who invest in startups would still want their chance to cash out.
McNeally still has a clue. McNeally knows what matters and where it's at, but the pointy-hairs have gotten too much grip.
Sun needs to ditch TI, muzzle Schwartz, get AMD to make some UltraSPARC processors, market Java better, buy Apple's GUI (or ressurect OpenSTEP or adopt GNUStep), support gcj instead of pretending it doesn't exist, kill Blastwave and get with pkgsrc, port Solaris to POWER, PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, (you can port Solaris in a few weeks - it really is that good), port it to itanic so that the world can see how shit itanic really is etc.
Oh, and Greenline shouldn't have been a higher priority for Solaris 10 than ZFS, the Opteron port or Janus.
Sun says Janus (Linux emulation) will be in mailine Solaris by the middle of the year. Shame they RIF'd all the Janus Engineers.
To quote HAL from 2001 (approximately), "You're going to find that difficult without your space helmet Dave."
I love Sun. I hate to see it suffer so. There are thousands of great people there.
Linux is not ownable, so how could Oracle buy it? Or did you mean Oracle buy Sun?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You can do a lot with cash. The best thing to do is not to burn it, rather to build on it. Basic capitalism. Sun, like other tech corps, get too much of it. Then when their stock goes down, they're worth more as a purchased entity-- but a buyout ploy will make their stock buoy, which drives away the buyers. You could buy SGI for the Friday price and instantly earn several hundred million after you burned everything and fired everyone. This is bad economics. The current climate discourages boldness, and makes people think inside the box. The box is the big problem. Sun is trying to become IBM, whose dependency on hardware is nearly over. They're a services company, and a pretty good one. They used to be iron movers, and left the details to others. These days, iron rusts, but the needs that they serviced remain the same. Sun is starting to learn that lesson, but their run rate is too high to sustain both models successfully. They need to sack a bunch of nitwits at the top and get back to their entreprenurial roots before they just wither in a pile of bile.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Pardoning obvious crooks would cost Bush almost all of his political backing. He would then be powerless to accomplish anything. He's not fool enough to put himself into that position.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If it's sad when it happens to Sun it's many orders of magnitude sadder when it's happening to the whole industry. (which IMHO has happened).
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
lots of people are getting deeply into java (not something i personally advise)
if sun ends up as a desperate public company in crisis who can say what will happen to java. Remember java is NOT free software dispite the fact its source is availible and if sun decide to tighten the screws you could find yourself with no updates to java unless you pay and no way to legally make them yourself.
Not to mention i belive that some binary distributions of java (freebsd springs to mind) are made based on revocable licenses so those could also dissapear if sun wants to tighten the screws on java users.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
...why would HP want to buy an overvalued, declining asset?
*cough* Compaq *cough*
Someone should get a rumor going that Apple is buying Sun.
Then Steve can make a remark to a journalist that the only reason to buy Sun would be for the office space in the Valley.
Old wound but I'm still bitter about that one...
I can see a future where Sun's hardware business dies and Java is bought be another company which makes Sun the next SCO.
Has Sun ever made so much as a wooden nickel on "Java"? They've been giving away [for free] the virtual machine, the "compiler", and the libraries since Day One.
Know what would be funny? ... and then they could pull that stunt Google pulled where they did a Dutch auction of stock prices ... they would make so much money, and maybe even start a new revolution, the tech boom second generation!
If McNealy takes Sun private, then waits a year and goes fucking IPO on us.
It would be the next coming of Christ - Sun, inventor of Java and profitable (hint : wait until Sun has a profitable quarter to do this) for a tech company
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
My current job is a direct result of Sarbanes-Oxley. The position (sysadmin) was opened up because the IT manager was the sysadmin, but because of SOX, had to take a "hands off" approach to the systems. This created a job position for me.
;)
:)
So, it's not *all* bad.
it's also nice because when engineers come over and say "Hey, I NEED to have root on that (production) box to test things because it's more convenient than working on it in the lab...." I can say "No. Sorry. Sarbanes-Oxley regulations. No root for you."
It's great.
That would be terrible. All it would do is take Sun right back out of the low-end markets, because no one buying $3000 1RU Linux servers really wants to spend another $10,000+ on Oracle per server. Oracle does some really neat stuff, but they are slowly facing the same problems Microsoft is: free competition are eroding profit margins rapidly. Hell, Microsoft can't even give Windows away in some places.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
uh-huh, when I downloaded Solaris 10 I filled out a form saying 25 dev licenses, 25 production, 25 of whatever please.....used exactly 2 of them. Do you suppose their 1,000,000 licensed copies of Solaris 10 boast might be a tad inflated because most people did what I did, estimated a bit high? Same for JES?
Then we have a bunch of incompetent managers and useless sales and marketing people. Its heart breaking to work here when you see so much good work being done and then being destroyed by their incompetance.
Personally I nearly lost my marriage due to the hours I was working last year - and then watched yet some very good friends who are outstanding engineers get riffed after actually deystroying their personal relationships because they were working so hard. I love working here, but my marriage and my personal life are much more important, which is why I am looking elsewhere at the moment.
Of course we all got to provide feedback last month in a Bevridge inspired "management excellence" survey. I've filled in nine of these in my time in Sun, I've never seen a change other than the managers getting more incompetent out of them.
please increment the exposure to the six-sigma stuff,
... going private may be
as it is now making critical wall st. rounds via the
vault company surveys.
i'm also ex-sun (tenure 7+ years), who survived two
massive re-orgs but quit before RIF #3 precisely because
of the bilious GE/Sun sigma cruft, which is
garbage-in-garbage-out (GIGO) applied to metrics.
so sad.
janus team laid-off? shameful. bill joy-style expertise
outsourced? yikes. incompetent middle managers
still holding on only because their stock options are priced
at 3/4/5? horrorshow. NIH driving decision-making? gulp.
now, i'm still rooting for the good engineering work
in the face of such madness, though switching my shares
to AAPL has served well as household-preserving
defence. will niagra save the day? yes, if price-performance
becomes so right that amazon/ebay/yahoo/google beg to
turn the switch from x86 white-box maintenance. too late
to turn the linux tide, though
just the ticket to ride!
Friggin' awesome?
I think the original poster meant that SOX is friggin' awesome for consultants in the same sense that the Y2K bug was friggin' awesome.
That goes to show just how desperate things got at Sun. The same almost happened to me too, but luckily they put me out of my misery earlier this year.
When I interviewed for the job at Sun, they assured my that Sun wasn't like that, and it wasn't at first.
Where the PHBs went wrong was not listening to us when we warned them of the competition coming along from cheap PeeCees (the AMD vs intel performance war). They didn't believe that Opteron would work, and almost ignored it until it was too late. I remember seeing a talk given by Bo Thorsen of SuSE who was working on the AMD64 port of Linux (on a software simulator on an Athlon laptop) back in 2001. Sun didn't do the AMD64 port of Solaris until 2004.
They continue to be disrespectful of Linux and the Free and Open Source software communities, thinking that as long as they suck up to Wall Street, everything will be all right. Jonathan Schwartz makes disparaging and inflammatory comments about Free software in public, thus alienating thousands of developers who would otherwise be ensuring their code compiles and runs on Solaris.
Finally, UltraSPARC development has been way too slow. They are effectively cancelling it now in favour of Fujitsu SPARC64 and niche products like Niagara and ROCK. TI is partly to blame, as far as I can tell.
Solaris is a great product. The Opteron workstations and servers are great products. The high-end SPARC machines are great products. They scale superbly, and when UltraSPARC IV+ comes out, they'll be competitive again.
There are thousands of great people at Sun, and I really feel for them. I'm sorry things have gotten to this, and I sincerely hope that things improve soon for everyone's sake.
Stick Men
Yes he will take SUNW private. They really have no choice. The requirements of a public company are weighing heavily on Sun now and the competition is too fierce for them to survive much longer, unless they divest themselves of public-ness and go back into private, guerilla tactics. When a CEO goes to the Wall Street Journal to pointedly deny a rumor, the odds are much higher that he's lying, than that he's not.