Who would buy Sun?
July 16th, 2008
Ashlee Vance has an interesting article on the future prospects for Sun Microsystems now that its market cap is $7.7B.Sun needs to maintain at least a $10B market cap to remain a potential holding of large cap funds. If Suns market cap slips below $10B for too long, large cap funds holding Sun will have to sell and thereby cause a further drop in Suns market cap. With short interest growing from over the past month, compared to a 3 months trading volume of 17 million, the sharks are definitely circling.
On the other hand, Sun has over $2.5B of cash on hand which should allow them to ride out the storm. This is especially true when you consider free cash flow from $137 million to $467 million over the past year. (i.e. Sun is making more from operations than they are spending, so they wont burn through the $2.5B in cash just yet.)
Ashlee suggests that Fujitsu would be a good candidate to merge with Sun. I wouldnt have considered Fujitsu. But Ashlee makes great points about the R&D culture of Fujitsu & worldwide reach and customer preference of the combined company.
But what about the other leading IT players? Would any of them make a move for Sun?
• IBM? Unlikely, there would be huge overlap in hardware and software product lines
• Oracle? Unlikely, they wouldnt want to get into the lower margin hardware business, and there would be large overlap in software portfolios
• Microsoft? Unlikely due to corporate culture, although the combined Java + .NET, Solaris + Windows, OSS + Proprietary would be pretty compelling from a customer choice standpoint
• Accenture? Unlikely, they wouldnt want to be tied to one vendors hardware and software
• Red Hat? Unlikely, too much overlap in the software product lines
• HP? Maybe, there would definitely be overlap from a hardware standpoint, but the ability to drive Suns software into more shops via the new HP+EDS could be interesting; remember that HP has a history with open source, from Linux to products such as JBoss...
In the end, my money is on Sun remaining independent. But, rumors of Sun seeking a replacement for Jonathan (as per Ashlees article) concern me enough not to put my money on any outcome.
What about you? What do you think lies ahead for Sun?
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