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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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Interview with Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good excerpt for Mercury News.

“One of the world’s pre-eminent venture capitalists, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, has picked winners like Flextronics, Cisco Systems, Yahoo, PayPal and Google by focusing on small teams or individuals that on first glance might appear to be unfundable. In a rare interview, Moritz spoke with the Mercury News about one of his latest long-shots, a call-center company founded in India, how he picks companies to back, and the silver lining in the financial meltdown. Following is an edited transcript.

Q How has the financial crisis reshaped the economy and affected the way you pick winners?

A I think tougher circumstances just serve to shine a brighter light on everything. The manner in which we pursue the business hasn’t changed.

Q Has it affected the way you view your portfolio companies?

A I think the managements of companies all across America understand that the sooner they don’t have to rely on the kindness of strangers to support their operations, the better off they are going to be. Again, I don’t think that is a startling new insight. It’s just when money is harder to get and credit is tight and investors are less giddy, I think companies and managements become much more disciplined. It means the people who start companies in times like these are people who are genuinely interested in starting companies. You have to be very determined to venture out into atmospheric circumstances like the ones that we’ve been through in the past nine months. Which means that the pretenders and posers and people who are really much more interested, if they are honest about it, in becoming rich than starting a company — those sorts of people will stay on the sidelines and wait for the weather to improve.”

Read the full interview by Elise Ackerman at at SiliconValley.com here.

Others covering this story: Reddit, Trading markets, MATR.

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Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Intellectual capital, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Technology, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.

I recently finished a iPhone project with a company out of Sweden, Resolution Interactive. My task was to reshape the business model from traditional PC- online to something fruitful. Coming into to the company early last spring, the finances was well below bad, the team was in dissaray, and the revenues where nill. When iPhone developer program then came available in mid april, we saw the chance and made a jump for it. Although pretty messy to begin with, Apple continued to publish supporting materials, reached out with a network of visionaries and helped us go through the ups and downs of discovering a new market, new business model and new way of marketing.

When we in mid October release the first game – Clusterball Arcade – we received som good reviews and quickly went for title nr. two – AquaMoto Racing. Succesful in my mission, I was able to create a new businessmodel and find a new market for a struggling game company – this with the help of Apple and iPhone.

So, the release of Android from Google, the OVI initiatives from Nokia etc. are all good, but I wonder if they really will be able to provide the multitude of support that Apple was able to provide to me. Also, the unified developer environment (Xcode), the one device, clean business model and pre-existing audience to market too makes it very hard to understand how anyone will be able to compete with Apple on this market segment.

Mark Sigal just posted a excellent article at GigaOm. His analysis below summed this up very clear to me:

“The reality is that openness is just an attribute -– it’s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It’s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective.”

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Nokia buy Symbian

Posted in Gerbsman Partners, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , on June 24, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Nokia said today that it will buy up the part of Symbian it doesn’t already own and create the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all of its flavors into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The move is a clear response to the realities of today’s mobile market — but will it work?

Click here for a excellent analysis from GigaOm

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