Leveraged Buyouts - good for PR companies?
This week saw a Leveraged Buyout for Intergraph valued at $1.3 billion. The new owners are taking the formerly public company private and betting on a number of future opportunities that can be seen - according to Randall Newton, it's the Patents which have garnered Intergraph a cool $900 million in license fees. But according to Motley Fool, it's also the future of increasingly complex requirements in the oil business that are attractive to investors.
And Motley Fool identifies a growing number of Leveraged Buyouts in the industry.
So, i hear you say. How is that good for us PR folks? Well, we have recently lost two clients to acquisition - you know, where the acquiring company takes the software and casts off all those pesky attachments that include employees, buildings, overheads and of course, PR reps. And we recently retained along-time client through a Leveraged Buyout. They said to me "If it ain't broke, we ain't gonna fix it."
Just for the good of our cash flow, we prefer this reaction.
Autodesk and Bentley seem to keep buying members of the Open Design Alliance. Not good for our cashflow, but then, we're a non-profit organization to start with.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with Intergraph... they're one of our members too.
Posted by: Evan Yares | September 11, 2006 at 11:45 AM