I am posting this piece about a Private Equity offer to Takeover a Public Company. Everything that is WRONG with CEO's & the current Systems is amplified herein. The utter shamefulness of a System, a company and that companies current shareholders is captured in this piece.
This piece should be read, we'll debug it later.
$1B private buy would unlock Aeroflex value
Mar 06, 2007 (Newsday - McClatchy-Tribune Business News via COMTEX) -- Saying it felt misunderstood and undervalued by Wall Street, Aeroflex Inc. has agreed to be acquired by the private equity groups General Atlantic Llc and Francisco Partners Lp in a deal worth about $1 billion.
The Plainview-based communications and microtechnology firm announced late Friday that its board approved unanimously an agreement under which stockholders will receive $13.50 per share -- a 22.6 percent premium over Friday's closing price of $11.01, but less than the $13.87 that shares were worth in March 2006, about the time Aeroflex started going-private talks. Shares closed at $13.06 yesterday, up nearly 19 percent for the day.
"We don't believe that we ever got the valuation from Wall Street that we deserved, because we were never fully understood," president and chief operating officer Len Borow said yesterday, referring to the company's structure of semi-autonomous business units. "It's a very complicated story, and when people think they're going to understand it in five minutes, they're not."
He said he expects to continue in his role and that the company doesn't "anticipate any loss of jobs" or effect on its Long Island operations. The company has approximately 420 employees on the Island out of a total workforce of about 2,700.
Borow said the constraints of Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, which made public companies' accounting more complex, as well as the pressure of meeting quarterly expectations, made it "every CEO's dream to be private."
The deal is subject to stockholder approval, and the company has 45 days to "go shop and see if other funds ... would like to top the bid," Borow said. But he said partnering with different buyers would force the company to pay an unspecified breakup fee and that the company will not discuss any other bids until the board has voted on them.
General Atlantic, headquartered in Greenwich, Conn., manages about $12 billion and has invested in more than 160 companies, about half of them based outside the United States. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Francisco Partners, has $5 billion of committed capital and has invested in more than 50 companies. Both focus on technology.
The move is part of a trend toward going private that has affected local companies, most notably Reckson Associates, which this year split its commercial real estate portfolio between a private group including former owners and a Manhattan-based public firm. The owners of Cablevision Systems Corp. have made several unsuccessful moves to buy back the company, most recently in January.
By Daniel Wagner
Copyright(c) 2007, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.SUBJECT CODE: ND |
