Emulex dissed and dismissed an unsolicited bid from Broadcom this morning saying it “significantly undervalues Emulex” and is not in the best interests of shareholders. In a blistering letter appended to the rejection announcement, Emulex CEO Paul Folino described Broadcom’s unsolicited $9.25-a-share cash takeover offer as “an opportunistic attempt to take advantage of Emulex’s depressed stock price” in a souring economy.
Sun chairman and co-founder Scott McNealy probably has a good joke or two about the way the company’s acquisition discussions with IBM have gone down, but he won’t he won’t be relating them as CEO any time soon. This afternoon Sun dismissed speculation that McNealy will replace CEO Jonathan Schwartz in the aftermath of the deal’s collapse.
Here’s further confirmation that Time Warner is looking to spin off AOL. In an SEC filing Monday, the company said it is seeking to amend debt agreements that restrict it from unloading the struggling business. Coming as it does after the hiring of Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive, as AOL CEO and chairman, the move would seem to suggest that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has given up on the idea of an AOL merger with Yahoo and is pushing ahead full-bore with a spinoff.
“We will not simply ride out the storm. Rather, we will take a long-term view, and go on offense.” That was the promise IBM CEO Sam Palmisano made in his annual letter to shareholders this week detailing Big Blue’s plans to forge new markets in infrastructure services. Here we are just a few days later and the company has already set about fulfilling it. IBM announced a new water-management services effort today, one that will see it bringing its information technology acumen to bear on the systems used to monitor reservoirs, water pipes and the like.
Whatever does not kill us will make us stronger. That’s the view of IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, who says the recession will not do to Big Blue what it is doing to so many others. In an exuberant letter to shareholders today, Palmisano wrote that IBM will not cower before the current economic turmoil.
Aside from a spontaneous “Happy Birthday” sung to an absent CEO Steve Jobs, Apple’s annual meeting today was something of a nonevent. Shareholders re-elected the company’s board of directors despite concerns about its handling of the disclosure of Jobs’s health problems. And the board continued to wave off questions about the company’s succession plans and Jobs’s well-being.
As one might imagine, Apple’s shareholders did not take the news of Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence well. And learning that his “health-related issues are more complex” than first believed certainly didn’t help matters. After trading resumed, Apple shares tanked, plummeting eight percent to $78.50 (and knocking about $6.4 billion off the company’s market cap) before recovering a bit.
Trading in Apple shares was halted this afternoon when the company announced that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence until the end of June. Apple COO Tim Cook will handle day-to-day operations in his absence. And Jobs is to remain involved in major strategic decisions. Jobs broke the news to investors in the following memo…
At Sirius XM’s annual meeting Thursday, shareholders approved a reverse stock split plan that empowers the board to split common Sirius shares by a 1-for-10 to 1-for-50 ratio by end of 2009. They also approved the issuance of up to 3.5 billion new shares. Should Sirius need to, it can now effect a reverse split that will raise its stock price above the $1 necessary to avoid delisting and sell new shares to meet the almost $1 billion in loan repayments it faces next year.
Now that Yahoo is trading at $12.63 in an economy that’s falling Homer Simpson-style down the long rocky slope of economic collapse, some of the company’s institutional investors are hoping to convince it to sell itself to Microsoft again.
You can make money without doing evil. You can also make it without using so much fossil fuel. That’s the word from Google, which today unveiled a $4.4 trillion plan it says will reduce the nation’s dependence on coal and oil. Google’s “Clean Energy 2030” plan proposes to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 by relying on power from wind, nuclear and geothermal sources instead.
Yahoo’s attempts to rally shareholders in advance of its annual meeting on Aug. 1 are going about as well as its attempts to rally its business. Which is to say, not well at all.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
Best use of the Beeker “meee” ever.
While the technology behind the Telephone is new, the design is reassuringly old-fashioned, reminiscent of a phrenologist’s horn or ear-candle in form. We found the experience far more comfortable than the one we had with the Telegraph.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
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