The private equity playbook for buying a public company:<p>1. Find company with lots of cash on the books but trading very cheaply<p>2. Acquire company and use cash on books to fund it<p>3. Cut costs as deeply as you can and still have a company<p>4. (Optional) Combine it with anther firm to create "synergy"<p>5. Spin it back out for a profit<p>Corel was a company that got eaten and spit out in this fashion by Vector Capital.<p>It was purchased for about $120 million but it had $90 million of cash on its books, meaning the deal didn't require putting up alot of capital.<p>After the deal was done, there was a large head count reduction, which for a technical company is the equivalent of a retailing dumping inventory and not restocking it.<p>It was then merged with WinZip, WinDVD and a few other companies and then spun back out as a new company under the Corel name again.<p>It turns out that this didn't work so well for Corel and Vector reacquired them in 2009 to try this all again.<p>see: <a href="http://247wallst.com/banking-finance/2009/10/29/corel-strangest-go-private-ma-ipo-story-of-the-decade-crel-msft-adbe/" rel="nofollow">http://247wallst.com/banking-finance/2009/10/29/corel-strang...</a>
I used to work at Dick Smith at the time they still carried the suffix Electronics, from 2003 - 2007. I loved it there, grew up going there and playing with the gadgets and electronics. They're a shell of their former selves now, just a cheap consumer electronics store that tried to compete with other Australian retailers selling house branded and lower-end branded products.<p>They could probably significantly revitalise by moving back to tools & parts, I doubt many former customers would be loyal now though given how they were treated at the point all the PRZ range was dumped (parts, resistors, capacitors & semiconductors).<p>Be interested to see how this all plays out.
How could Woolworths be so stupid?<p>Net assets of Dick Smith before acquisition were $370MM and that's not even accounting for intangible assets such as value of Dick Smith brand.<p>Why would Woolworths think selling for $115MM was ever good idea? Who was in charge back then?