buyout

Yahoo has been contacted by investment firm Silver Lake Partners about a potential acquisition bid, the Wall Street Journal is reporting, citing anonymous sources.

According to the Journal, executives from Silver Lake are currently lining up a deal for Yahoo, though the companies have yet to actually meet and discuss the planned proposal. In a separate report from Bloomberg last night, the publication, citing sources, reported that Silver Lake's plan involves liquidating Yahoo's Asian assets, and then focusing on the firm's core business elsewhere around the world in the hopes of potentially finding a new buyer.

Silver … Read more

Hulu is planning to hold discussions with a "range" of potential buyers, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Citing anonymous sources, the Journal reported today that Hulu will be meeting with potential suitors "in the coming weeks." However, forces at play within the company might make a sale difficult, the Journal's sources said.

According to the sources, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar is currently having trouble getting his company's owners--ABC, Fox, and NBC Universal--to offer more content to the site. The owners reportedly believe that they can make more money on their content by partnering … Read more

The idea of Apple buying chip designer ARM, a rumor originating in London that swirled over to the U.S. on Thursday, would be messy, pricey, and unpopular.

None of those reasons necessarily preclude such a buyout, but simply make it more difficult than snapping up tiny chip designers like PA Semi or Intrinisity--which Apple has done already without hardly lifting a finger.

And ARM CEO Warren East has chimed in with less-than-supportive comments, according to the Guardian. "Exciting though it is to have the share price pushed up by these rumours, common sense tells us that our standard business model is an excellent way for technology companies to gain access to our technology. Nobody has to buy the company."

Let's look at three facets of the fallout following a hypothetical acquisition.

Messy: It would probably attract regulatory scrutiny somewhere in the world, if not the U.S., because ARM, though relatively small, holds the keys to the cell phone chip kingdom. ARM licenses technology to virtually every large chipmaker, including Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, Freescale, Marvell, and Nvidia--all suppliers of the core silicon in smartphones and portable media players. The upshot: ARM technology is in virtually every smartphone in the world and will be in many of the tablets (e.g., Apple's iPad) that hit the market over the two years.

"Historically, Apple makes bite-sized acquisitions and then they customize to get better bang for the buck," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. "Why not just focus on this core expertise? Silicon is not in their DNA and, besides, it's a commodity these days," he added.

Unpopular: A corollary to messy, this would trigger a chain reaction of events that would not be healthy for the ARM chip architecture, as CEO Warren East intimated above. No matter how many assurances Apple gave about respecting the integrity and independence of ARM, every chipmaker would be immediately wary.

"If Apple owned ARM, Apple could exert on undue influence… Read more

Technology companies seeking a white-night buyer had a long wait this year, according to a study released Thursday by research firm The 451 Group. And 2009 isn't looking any more promising.

During 2008, tech mergers and acquisitions fell 40 percent across virtually every sector of the industry, with $290 billion in deals getting done to date. And deals worth $1 billion or more dropped even further, with only 32 megadeals getting done so far this year, compared with 80 last year.

Corporate tech titans that have historically had a large appetite for snapping up companies left and right went … Read more

Updated at 11:40 p.m. with SanDisk response to Samsung letter.

Samsung on Tuesday withdrew its $5.85 billion bid for SanDisk, citing an increasing "risk profile."

This follows a new manufacturing agreement between SanDisk and Toshiba disclosed Monday and a stiff rejection by SanDisk last month of the Samsung offer.

"After nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress, we are withdrawing our proposal to acquire SanDisk," Yoon Woo Lee, vice chairman and CEO at Samsung Electronics, said in a letter that Samsung released Wednesday in Seoul.

"I … Read more

Toshiba to the rescue? The Japanese electronics giant may try to stave off a Samsung takeover of SanDisk.

In the aftermath of Samsung's $5.8 billion bid for flash memory supplier SanDisk and SanDisk's unceremonious rejection, Toshiba looms as a large and potentially obstructive factor to a deal.

Toshiba and SanDisk have a partnership dating back to 1999 and operate two joint ventures called Flash Partners and Flash Alliance, as EE Times spelled out this week in an analysis of the dynamics of a possible deal.

SanDisk has a 49.9 percent interest in each of the two … Read more

Updated at 5:00 p.m. with closing share price.

SanDisk for Sale? The stock price says so.

The world's largest maker of flash memory cards for digital cameras jumped 31 percent, or 4.18 points, Friday on rumors that Samsung would buy the company.

This follows a recent spate of rumors including one that said Seagate was interested in SanDisk. While Samsung already makes flash memory and is a leader in the emerging solid state drive market, Seagate does not sell SSDs and is looking to get into the market.

Samsung doesn't need SanDisk to grow; the … Read more

The drama surrounding Electronic Arts' attempt to buy Take-Two Interactive is, increasingly, playing out like a combination action-adventure and shooter game.

As noted in a story published Friday in The New York Times, Take-Two has become a moving target not only because of maneuvering by the company's officers but because of changes in its shareholder group.

The offer EA presented on Thursday directly to Take-Two shareholders--$26 per share, or about $2 billion--is essentially the same one it offered the video game publisher in February. But as the Times story points out, Take-Two's shareholder population has in … Read more

Business, finance, and tech worlds are abuzz with news of Microsoft's sudden proposal to Yahoo. It's not the first time Seattle's best has courted the Sunnyvale, Calif., company once touted as Silicon Valley's hottest Internet portal. To many, the buyout offer signals Microsoft's continuing woes in a playing field now dominated by freeware competitors and other rivals that have done Microsoft's end-user businesses longer or better.

See which products and companies are eating into which of Microsoft's potentially profitable businesses in this slide show.