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Best Buy Founder Makes $8.5 Billion Bid To Take Company Private

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the escaping-those-annoying-shareholders dept.

zacharye writes "Best Buy founder and the company's largest shareholder Richard Schulze has offered as much as $8.5 billion to take the company private. Schulze had been rumored to be preparing a takeover offer for some time, and he recently assembled a team of executives that will run the company if his buyout offer is approved. His offer amounts to between $24 and $26 per share, a premium of as much as 47% over Best Buy's stock price at Friday's close."

9 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Riiight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Title should read "Best Buy Founder Tells World He Will Try To Find $8.5 Billion To Take Company Private"

    I doubt he gets it.

    1. Re:Riiight... by sarysa · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Good point, his net worth is only $2.5bn apparently, and I'm curious as to who his backers could possibly be for a company that's been tanking lately. On the other hand, with all the cheezy, unimaginative, and downright obnoxious ploys Best Buy has implemented in the last few years, I can see where losing the stress of those "pesky shareholders" could work in the company's favor. I'd be willing to step into a Best Buy again maybe 6 months after it went private just to see if it has improved. (as it stands now, I'd rather go to a used car lot)

      --
      Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
    2. Re:Riiight... by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Interesting

      dead serious, I have a 100$ best buy card.. Ive had it for 2 years.

      today i spent over an hour in my local best buy trying to find something for under 500$ to buy and i simply could not do it. 5-8 years ago, best buy was "the place" to be for a retail store. today, I have free money and cant buy something.

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    3. Re:Riiight... by NFN_NLN · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...although they did try and convince me that "building your own is over, and its cheeper to buy an all in one" ...

      If you don't care about expandability or the quality of components; then he is correct.
      I technically haven't bought a new computer since the 90's. I just keep upgrading components when the price/timing is right for me. Although, nowadays you often have to buy the MB/CPU/RAM together so it almost seems like you're buying a new computer.

      It does appear that a pre-assembled computer is cheaper, but they always include some junk I would never buy. A motherboard with no 16 lane PCIe (so you can't upgrade the video). Or an HDD where the next size up would have only cost $10 more for 50% more capacity, etc, etc. I know they're just trying to offload inventory at the lowest price point; which for 90% of people is all they care about.

      So technically a pre-assembled computer is cheaper.

    4. Re:Riiight... by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But looked at a different way... the shelf space taken by a computer vs a router doesn't differ a whole lot. And that space is your resource to work with. So it's not so much that you have to get margin per item, but you have to make the retail space pay for itself. And that doesn't vary a lot between items.

      Well, then they'll have a very good story for when they go out of business.

      Plus you are giving an accountant's version of reality. One in which the customer is a mindless automaton.

      When I as a customer, go into a Best Buy and see a cable I can buy online for 4 dollars and they are selling it for 30 dollars, it pretty much pisses me off. I leave the store, and don't go back. Because for all the calculations about profit per square inch, if the customer won't return to the store, it doesn't matter how clever the accountants are.

      You see this a lot these days, in big box stores. Our Lowe's stores hardly ever has any parts for repairing things, even if they have a thousand five gallon buckets of contractor grade wall paint. I've wasted a lot of time looking for things they should have, but don't. They have a lot of overhead, and won't stock small parts that I need because some accountant figured there wasn't enough profit in that. So I just travel across town to the True Value store. And yeah, for that one purchase, True Value only makes a little bit. But then when I need something bigger, I just go to the True Value instead of the Lowe's. The price is often better too.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  2. Re:Surprise. by JoeMerchant · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You get old enough (and rich enough) and it's not about the ROI anymore, it's about making 'em do it they way you tell 'em to.

  3. Re:The next circuit city. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Full disclosure here: I work on a Geek Squad, one of the few women in the business. Maybe I'm just lucky (large store in NYC, and no, I WON'T say which) but this GS seems a lot better than most of them. The dead weight from the last couple of hiring cycles is long since gone and we've all become a sort of piecewise machine. They also have me selling a fair amount, despite my habit of getting customers cheaper items and discouraging them from certain services and products ("Don't buy an ethernet cable here, don't bother with the restore discs, you can make those yourself and here's how").

    The GS is not the problem. We're hamstrung by SOP for the most part. Left to our own devices we'd be giving much better customer service. But there are Ways Of Doing Things, which must be followed on pain of pain. My supe, bless him, allows us to bend the rules just short of breaking in the interest of customer service, and we get very high customer service ratings for a GS.

    I guess the point is, we're not all bad. And the stupid high school kid in Bumblefuck, MO isn't representative of the entire brand. If you want good service, BE INFORMED. Ask us questions. Don't be afraid of the machines; they're just tools. Make use of us; we in the GS are the one contingent with a triple-digit IQ in the store. You can get much more than the brochures say.

  4. All Best Buy jokes aside.... by Kwirl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This actually is very interesting. I don't know what the plan is for this, but i do know that being beholden to shareholders has forced many companies to make business decisions that were not very prudent in the long term.

    by going private, this would allow Best Buy to alter their current strategy and become more competitive in the electronics marketplace.

    no one is going to invest 8.5 billion dollars for something like this without a solid plan. i can think of dozens of ways to improve their bottom line, and i'm sure that people more experienced than i could think of hundreds. what best buy has at the moment is a huge chain (nationwide?) of retail locations that their local demographic typically depend upon for their electronics needs. however, with amazon and probably newegg biting hard into their overhead, this might be part of a strategy to expand their online presence. this would be a move that the shareholders would never agree to, as it would involve short term loss for long term presence - but as a private entity beholden to none, they could make a mint by simply offering electronics online or 'ship to store' at competitive prices by investing in distribution and warehousing facilities

  5. Re:He is a job creator by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Jobs are a bit like energy, you can't really "create" them. Either there is a market or there is not. If there is a market, there will be jobs. By the very nature of the market laws. Someone will come and want to fill that market. And to do that he needs to hire people. If he doesn't hire people, then he will not be able to saturate the needs of the market and someone else will try his hand at it, too.

    So please stop praising people who "create" jobs like they're the next coming of the messiah. The only reason they "create" jobs is that creating these jobs and hiring people to fill them is the necessary evil to them on their quest for money. If they could, they'd instantly cut all those employees because essentially they're just costing them money.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.