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Tech Titans Holding $260 Billion In Cash

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2009| Leave a Comment »

As the economic slump is fading off, tech titans have amassed cash for possible takeovers. Here is an opionion further explaining this from 24/7 Wall Street Blog.

“The economy is obviously getting better, so long as you are not one of the unemployed or about to lose your job.  Now with more than a 50% rally from the March lows and a Dow Jones Industrial Average challenging the 10,000 level, suddenly everyone wants to put on their investment banker hats again and look for buyers and buyout candidates after deals are announced.  This week’s Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) deal for Perot Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: PER) was a $3.9 billion acquisition versus $12.7 billion in cash and equivalents held at the end of the quarter.  The Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) deal for Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) is valued at $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.  We went back through our list from September 2, 2009 where we noted that outside of the financials  in the 20 largest US companies had a cash hoard of $335 billion that could be used for mergers and acquisitions, and that is not accounting for lines of credit, stock or debt that could be sold, and other means of financing a deal.  While nowhere near all of the cash will ever be used, many companies could pay big dividends before any tax changes.

So we wanted to look through the technology sector and after we looked through the top 100 markets caps in our 24/7 Wall St. Real-Time 500 we added a few new additions in the tech sector that still had over $5 billion in cash.  Out if the $335 billion from those in the top twenty, we broke out Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM), Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL).  Even after a huge rally, $335 billion and then some could go a very long way for strategic and bolt-on acquisitions as a positioning strategy for the next decade.  Now, going further down the list of the top 100 companies with $5 billion or more in cash from tech companies alone adds in Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), QUALCOMM Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM), EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO). When we tally up all the cash, there is over $260 billion available from these few tech companies that could be deployed for mergers, acquisitions, or the good old dividends.  Again, that is before tallying up credit lines, factoring, debt sales, and other financing methods.

Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) had almost $25 billion in cash and long-term investments.  Now that it has migrated away from just selling PCs and printers, we think that there will be a rather long lull before H-P tries to match its big buyout of EDS even if Dell is tip-toeing into IT-services and consulting with Perot.  But in the end, what we think may not matter.  Nearly $25 billion in cash when you know you will be profitable ahead leaves a lot of room to go out make purchases.

QUALCOMM Inc. (NASDAQ: QCOM) was the 29th largest company as of Wednesday with a $74.12 billion market cap. If you tally up its cash, short-term and long-term investments, it is sitting on almost $15 billion in cash and equivalents as of last quarter.  After all the lawsuits that the Jacobs team are settled, it might consider a way to deploy capital to get around future patent cases.  If only it was possible, although anything is possible.”

Read the full article here.

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Zappo provide returns for Sequoia

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, google, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good VC article from Alibaba.

“BURLINGAME, Calif. — Marc Andreessen, in a recent Forbes interview, noted there are hundreds of venture-capital outfits slogging it out right now, trying desperately to squeeze profits out of a terrible investing environment–but only a handful worth their salt.

He’s right. And this week’s news that Amazon.com ( AMZN – news – people ) would buy online-shoe retailer Zappos for $807 million in Amazon stock, plus some cash, highlights the staying power of one of those perennial Sand Hill Road stars, Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia is the notoriously tough firm that backed winners like Google ( GOOG – news – people ), Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), Cisco ( CSCO – news – people ), YouTube and PayPal. (I could go on.) It also owned a big chunk of Zappos, a company with a somewhat unlikely business model that excelled by providing unparalleled customer service and shoe selection on the Web. Sequoia recently told its investors it put about $48 million into Zappos and will get just over $169 million from the Amazon transaction. That’s not a “home run” in VC parlance. But it’s a very respectable return of about three-and-a-half times Sequoia’s original investment, particularly in these depressed times.

In the first six months of this year, there were only four tech-related M&A deals of over $100 million involving companies that took venture capital, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. (There were a few VC-backed IPOs in the first half, too, but no blockbusters.) The biggest of the tech M&A deals, Cisco Systems‘ $590 million purchase of camcorder maker Pure Digital Technologies, also involved Sequoia, which owned a small stake.

Sequoia’s profits from that deal were very small, but it still made a nice return: Sequoia told its investors in March that it invested just over $1.4 million in Pure Digital and would receive $13 million in Cisco shares and $1 million in cash after the acquisition. (The biggest VC-related deal in the first half of this year was Medtronic’s ( MDT – news – people ) $700 million purchase of CoreValve, a company with a new catheter technology to improve heart-valve replacements. Sequoia doesn’t do health care investing.) Plenty of other VCs have sold companies in fire sales this year for less than what investors put into them.”

Read the whole article here.

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V.C.’s Look for a Return to A B C’s

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Distressed IP, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an excellent article I found at NY Times blog section.

“For a group accustomed to looking outward for the next big thing, Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are getting very introspective these days, The New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller writes.

Much of the soul searching along Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the venture capitalists have offices, is leading to the same conclusion: venture capital needs to go back to basics. The biggest names in the industry are concerned about low returns and are blaming several factors: funds that have grown too large, the M.B.A.’s that have invaded the industry and older partners who have lost touch with what is new in technology.

“I personally believe and I think the evidence proves that the venture industry has gotten too big, the funds have gotten too big,” said Alan Patricof, an investor for 40 years, who backed America Online and Apple, at a recent venture investing conference in San Francisco. “Our biggest challenge today for venture capital is to think smaller.”

Mr. Patricof is part of a growing chorus of voices calling for the amount of money in venture funds to shrink drastically to levels last seen two decades ago. His firm, Greycroft Partners, is taking a retro approach with a $75 million fund that makes smaller investments.

Many in the industry predict that a third to a half of the 882 active venture capital firms could disappear, if only because poor returns will force underperformers to shut down. It is already happening: Investment in venture capital funds shrank to $4.3 billion in the first quarter, from $7.1 billion in the same quarter a year ago.

There will be “a ton of venture capitalists who disappear over the next 18 to 20 months, and it’s going to be painful for a while,” Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock, told The Times. “But the best thing that could have happened to V.C. is this economic crisis, because it’s lowering the flow of capital into these funds.”

Read the full article here.

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Analyst forecasts 900% Android phone sales growth

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Investments, Market research, Venture Capital, Wireless, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2009| 1 Comment »

If you look for growth opportunities, look no further say Strategy Analytics. With a 900% growth forecast, and Google support in the background – the mobile ecosystem will see some intriguing innovations shortly. With iPhone and AppStore showing the way, Android from Google may provide a business opoortunity for global opportunities for mobile developers.

Please also see our previous articles: “Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness may Not Be Best” and “Android to do what no one else managed!”

Hardware Register has more on this story:

“Android-based smartphones will ship in massive numbers this year – at least compared to last year’s total, market watcher Strategy Analytics has forecast.

In its latest report, the firm predicted that Android smartphone shipments will increase a whopping 900 per cent during 2009 over last year. Shipments of Apple’s iPhone will grow 79 per cent this year, SA said.

The Google-developed OS hasn’t featured on phones for as long as Apple’s handset has been on the market. Nonetheless, healthy support from “operators, vendors and developers” will continue to help increase Android’s adoption, SA said.

“A relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open source structure and Google’s support for cloud services have encouraged companies… to support the Android operating system,” said Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics.

The number of Android-based devices is certainly set to expand this year. Vodafone recently launched the world’s second Android phone in Blighty – the Magic. It’s also widely rumoured that Samsung will launch an own-brand Android phones this year.”

Read the article here.

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Apple Hits 1 Billion App Store Downloads

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Mobile, tagged , , , , , , , , , on April 24, 2009| 4 Comments »

Since its inception in July last year, Appstore has become a steady and viable business model for Apple. With over 1 Billion downloads, its fair to say that the rest of the mobile industry needs to take a very close look at the model.

As a result, Apple can now show some very significant numbers towards the mobile content market.

“There are over 37 million devices running Apple’s mobile operating system: over 21 million iPhones and over 15 million iPod touches (with 35,000+ apps available in the store) according to the company. Besides driving the success of the App Store, these devices also helped Apple control 50 percent of the mobile ad market and drive the most mobile OS Internet traffic in the U.S., according to the latest market reports.”

In relation to mobile advertising, the PC World story continues;

“AdMob’s research shows that the iPhone and iPod touch serve around 50 percent of the mobile ad requests in the U.S., followed by Research In Motion with 22 percent and Windows Mobile with 11 percent. Worldwide, Apple’s handsets go neck-to-neck with Nokia‘s when it comes to traffic generated by smartphones. AdMob’s data shows that Apple’s devices drive the most traffic world wide, counting in at 38 percent.”

Mashable, which mainly covers Web 2.0 news, made an interesting comparrison.

“The milestones comes just over three months after the company surpassed 500 million downloads, and about nine months since launching.

While it’s certainly an enormous milestone, how does it compare to some other massive numbers that various Web companies have reached recently? Here’s a look at a few huge stats:

While impressive in its own, and somewhat unrelated to eachother – web.20 have proven to produce some gigantic numbers that are serving as benchmarks for success.

Comprehensive blog coverage can be found here:  IntoMobile, MediaMemo, TechCrunch, SciTechBlog

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