HP Snaps Up 3PAR For $2 Billion

adeelarshad82 writes "The bidding war between HP and Dell has reached a swift and dramatic conclusion. One could even say HP sniped the auction at the last minute — to the tune of $2 billion for the acquisition of data storage provider 3PAR. HP's not-so-subtle efforts to pull the company away from a preliminary merger agreement with Dell — a $1.15-billion arrangement announced August 16 — took three successive bids to reach an ultimate conclusion. The final acquisition cost of $2 billion, confirmed by 3PAR late Friday, represents a price of $30 per share of 3PAR stock. That's triple the closing price of the company's stock before Dell's initial offer was made public, and more than double after."

What the summary doesn't say:

[Z_A_Commando]

This article was written two days ago! Dell and 3PAR both confirmed that as part of Dell's original merger agreement (and each successive agreement) Dell has the option to simply match any competing bids. This has hardly been settled, which you'd see if you RTFA.

Re:Why?

[phantomfive]

That's a good point, and in some cases it is true, but I'm not so sure it is here. There are a lot of players in the SAN market, so that $200 Million isn't going all to HP or Dell. It's going to be spread out to a lot of different companies.

Also, I'm sure you realize this, but it's important to distinguish between revenue and profit. Yes $2B/$200M = 10 years, but they are also spending around $201M every year, so in the end, unless they improve the efficiency of the company, they will have made negative $10M at the end of 10 years. Not a good return on investment.

Re:What the summary doesn't say:

[BBTaeKwonDo]

Why the dig on PC Magazine? TFA headline is "Sans Dell Match, HP Snaps Up 3PAR for $2 Billion". Sans is French for "without". TFA text continues with "...Dell still maintains the right to match HP's offer if it so chooses..." . So PC Magazine looks spot-on to me.

The fault lies with the Slashdot submitter, who submitted a bad summary to a 2-day-old article, and with Soulskill who accepted the misleading submission, and with you, Lucas123, for not understanding either TFA or the GP's point that TFA was correct.

Re:What the summary doesn't say:

[Lucas123]

It's a lame story either way. The dig against PC Magazine is for writing something like it was news. There have been six bids for 3Par. What's different about this one? Nothing. It's simply the largest so far. So the headline, while not misleading, gives the reader the expectation that something different than past bids has occurred. It's the same as if when HP bid $1.6 billion last week, PC Magazine had written "Sans Dell bid, HP Snaps Up 3Par." Then when Dell submitted a counter offer writing, "Sans HP Bid, Dell Snaps Up 3Par."