Jean, I can’t help but feel that your hunch is correct. I don’t have any inside information or anything close, but look at the following numbers:
Shares Outstanding Novell 367,890,000
Shares Outstanding Sun 183,306,000
It roughly looks like Sun could do a 1 Sun for 2 Novell and come out okay. Sun closed at 57 3/8, so that could work out to something like 28 5/8. Right at what I think Wall Street would value a Novell takeover. Hard to say, but you have a good batting average with Corel and WP. Go with the gut feeling I always say.
Sun really needs to expand its software franchise beyond Solaris, and they are very serious about taking on Microsoft (even to the point of attempting a takeover of Apple). And look at what Sun CEO Scott McNealy named his family dog: Network. Now, if he really believes in a network-centric world, do you think he would put his money where his mouth is? His publicly stated goal is to get the stock to $100 by year end. Can this be done by internal growth alone?
People like to point to HP as a takeover candidate (this was reported in recent editions of PC Week/Spencer Katt), but I don’t really see them as having the leadership potential or track record for successful software (OS) development, or interest. But you can’t deny the ties and the warm feelings that Frankenberg has for HP. And I don’t know that HP has articulated much of a strategy for the future, other than to get into the consumer PC market (I think they did this to drive out Packard Bell). But they have a strong stock price and could certainly afford it.
The timing thing, like when a takeover would occur, now that’s the tough part. But you can bet that Novell management can feel the heat from Microsoft/NT 4.0 (June) and IBM/Warp Server (now?). Both have Novell/Netware in their sights. The inside story at Microsoft is that NT stands for Netware Terminator.
But one thing I feel very confident of is that at the right price, Novell would be glad to sell. It would make a good acquisition. If you have access to newspaper archives, you might want to go back to the 1990 Salt Lake Tribune/Deseret News issues when Ray Noorda sought to sell Novell to Lotus. He was all for it, but the board thought, rightly, that the $1.9 billion price that Lotus offered was too low. Things have changed, but the company wouldn’t put up a fight if a suitor came forward, at least that is how I feel. WordPerfect founders sit on the board and they read the writing on the wall on when to sell WP. They did very well, obviously, from their sale of WP. I would love to know if they still have sizeable holdings of NOVL stock. But you can bet that they would like the security of selling to a larger, safer (more diversified) company.
Anyway, this is just food for thought.
RM |
