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Best Buy Founder Makes $8.5 Billion Bid To Take Company Private
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."
Good point, his net worth is only $2.5bn apparently, and I'm curious as to who his backers could possibly be for a company that's been tanking lately. On the other hand, with all the cheezy, unimaginative, and downright obnoxious ploys Best Buy has implemented in the last few years, I can see where losing the stress of those "pesky shareholders" could work in the company's favor. I'd be willing to step into a Best Buy again maybe 6 months after it went private just to see if it has improved. (as it stands now, I'd rather go to a used car lot)
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
dead serious, I have a 100$ 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
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.
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.
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