Rumor: Dell Itching to Buy a Company
Dell is sitting on a big stack of cash and looking to go shopping.
Several reports today say that computer giant, Dell has $10 billion to spend on an acquisition it will make in the coming months. According to WSJ, Dell officials have publicly said they want to do more deals, and an anonymous source has said CEO Michael Dell expects his company to acquire a "significant-sized company" in coming months, according to a person who has spoken with the CEO.
So where is all this money talk coming from? WSJ reports that on Wednesday, Dell sold $1 billion in bonds, adding to the $9 billion it already had. While the paper suggests that Dell wants to expand its data-storage and tech-services businesses, citing sources who have spoken to CFO, Brian Gladden. However, others are coming back to rumors from earlier in the year that suggested Dell might be considering buying Palm.
March was filled with reports about Dell’s plans to produce at least one, if not two smartphones. Word on the street was the company was planning on making one touchscreen phone and one with a full QWERTY keyboard. One would run WinMo and one on Google’s mobile OS, Android. However toward the end of the month, analysts began speculating that Dell may be considering a Palm buyout in order to get a jump on the smartphone market. However, now that Palm has launched the Pre, we can't imagine the company selling up before it gets a chance to see the fruits of its labor over the last couple of years.
Businessweek has a number of suggestions for Dell's mergers and acquisitions team:
- Palm
- Motorola’s phone unit
- Affiliated Computer Services
- BMC Software
- Symantec
- EMC
Which of these is most likely? Place your bets.
- Dell ,
- Acquisition ,
- Palm
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If the motivation is cellphones then they'd want Palm but Palm won't sell yet, so Dell will go to Motorola who haven't done a damn good thing since the RAZR.
Anything else is really open to question.
Motorola who haven't done a damn good thing since the RAZR.
I'm sorry but are you implying the RAZR is a good phone? I got given one and hardly used it... no memory card slot, about 10mb of usable memory, terrible camera, badly designed (keypad imprint on the screen after about a month), I could go on...
Only upside to that phone? The look. Not enough to save it in my books. Replaced it as soon as I had the cash.
@Kraynor:
The RAZR was a good phone in the same way the iPhone is a good phone, i.e. it's years behind on the technology front wrapped up in a glorious casing and marketed extremely well.
Let's give Motorola credit for getting the RAZR so damn thin, despite the fact it was a mediocre phone, and the fact that the RAZR saved them really.
Motorola have the technology to produce something I'm sure - the V9 isn't too bad and was (I think) the first phone to use a NVIDIA graphics system - but they're now so out of the marketplace I don't see them coming back; a perfect candidate for a Dell takeover?
May be Motorola..
@Kraynor:the V9 isn't too bad and was (I think) the first phone to use a NVIDIA graphics system
Sony Ericsson W900i uses nVidia GoForce 4800 graphics processor(in 2005). That was much before Motorola V9.
A Moto buy out makes the most sense from a cost perspective because Palm is not going to sell. Moto wants to get out the phone business and Dell wants in.