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Discussing a Private Buyout of Microsoft
PatriceVignon writes "Are private buyout companies setting their eyes on Microsoft? The Financial Times claims exactly that in an article called 'Private equity folk could do wonders with Microsoft', as ZDnet reports: 'Consider Microsoft, which has a balance sheet so inefficient that it would make a private equity investor weep ... The new management could take the axe to Microsoft's $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure. The bloated workforce of more than 60,000 could be slashed, to the point where the huge resulting increase in cash flow would at last permit the company to borrow mega-billions.' Business Week, though, begs to differ: 'practically speaking, it's not going to happen,' and quotes Daniel Primack: 'Snakes on a Plane will win a best picture Oscar before Microsoft gets acquired by LBO firms.' What do you think?"
Think about all the advancements that came out of Bell Labs, before it had a need to be more "efficient".
To the buyout firms that is.
What happens in a Leveraged Buy Out is the firm/s would loan money from the bank, making the FUTURE possesion as collateral. Thus the debt will be sadled by the target firm. Meanwhile the raiders/vultures as they usually called(especially KKR) will strip the company, sell it's asset and then sell the firm. Pocketing profits, while the firm itself pocket the debts, not them. These of course has destroyed companies and unnnecessary slashing jobs.
Lately, their newest tactics is they will loan even more money from banks.. to PAY THEMSELVES as FEES for buying the firm. Pocketing up t hundreds of millions. Guess who's taking the debt..And it's all completely LEGAL.
There's been some rumbling within the EU Adminitration about well reviewing the law. So far its up to nought.
While the EU politician aren't in the pocket of businessman/ corporations unlike "some" paragon of "freedom" and "fair play", it is encredibly beraucratic.
There's 8% free float of MSFT in the market.. which the buyout firms can easily buy. 52% in instituition, this is harder to buy but still institutional managers are'nt going to say no to 15% or 20% premiums. Thats quite enough to override the minority shareholder.
Lest you think 300 billion plus is a big number, the trends these days are for buyout firms to gang together. And getting the money wouldn't be hard.
That said though I'll doubt there's going to be a buyout. (Purely my assumption) Gates and Co certainly will have Class B shares. Class B shares are shares that have higher voting previlege/power than normal shares. E'g GOOG class B shares have 10 times voting power than Class A/normal shares.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
maybe. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071494/
i haven't seen either, but i googled fer de lance for the ballmer comment below, and this hit came up.
mod me down. i'm on a bad streak anyways.
...For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
Exactly. Any reasonable person can see that its 100% infeasible for this to ever happen. I would think that a professional journalist for the Financial Times wouldn't be so blind, but I stand corrected. At least it will sell some subscriptions.
Google stands a better chance of a buyout than Microsoft (I'm not saying this would happen either). Google has a smaller market capitilization (around $120 billion) and has unrealized revenue in the form of "evil". Seriously, an "evil" Google would be much more profitable than an non-evil version because evil is just so lucrative. On the other hand, no has ever accussed Microsoft of not being evil enough -- I doubt there is much room for growth.
Having worked at Microsoft, mostly because I desperately needed the money rather than actually wanting to work there, I can honestly say they do have some cool stuff used internally which they SHOULD push out to the general public.
Some of the best are their test automation tools which made it a breeze to do work there. With a push of a single button, I could automagically reinstall Windows on 100 machines simultaneously, have it automatically start different automated tests on each machine, upload the results to a central server, and have those results parsed for any problem that came up in the tests.
Of course, the public will never see tools anywhere near like that. Even if they could make it so that Windows wouldn't be pirated, their management is so dense and top-heavy that they can't manage their way out of a paper bag. Mini-microsoft is right, they should thin out their management.