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Dell Going Private In $24.4 Billion Agreement
Nerval's Lobster writes "Dell is going private again, as the result of a $24.4 billion deal involving private-equity investors and Microsoft. The deal will close before the end of the second quarter of Dell's fiscal 2014, according to Reuters. Dell founder and namesake Michael Dell, who owns roughly 14 percent of the company's common shares, will continue to lead the newly privatized venture as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. He will contribute his existing shares to the new company, on top of a 'substantial' additional cash investment. As with other hardware manufacturers in the space, Dell faces the specter of a softening PC market. And while Dell has made significant efforts to penetrate other markets—including the launch of a private cloud architecture based on the open-source OpenStack—that weakness has affected its bottom line: for its fiscal 2013 third quarter, the company reported an 11 percent decrease in revenue from the previous year; while it enjoyed an increase in revenue from its servers and services businesses, revenue from its Consumer division dipped 23 percent. Its Large Enterprise, Small and Medium Business, and Public revenue also declined." Another take at the New York Times.
OP was a joke, referencing Michael Dell's 1997 comment about how he would fix Apple at the time. His response: "Close it down and give the money back to the shareholders"
I like microcars
But Nokia didn't have $130bn just lying around. $130bn changes everything.
Repeat after me: It's all on paper.
Amazing how little a company is worth when the stock starts sliding.
Yes, amazing how little Apple is worth without its stock. Hint: it's about $137 billion, all in the bank (well, various banks around the world).
The stock value or market cap, which is what you really meant, is $430 billion at time of this writing. Meaning almost 1/3 of the current stock value is backed by actual cash in the bank.