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SUSE to go private

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Re: SUSE to go private

#21
post #5

I’ve never seen anything good come out of PE delisting like this. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

X formerly twitter was one of the biggest LBO in history which is typically the process PE companies acquire companies as well. Priority is to increase margin, because the leverage comes from loan and debt servicing & principal repayment are pretty big sums. Its done capex reduction. Easiest way to do it is to reduce labor cost. X went from >7000 to ~1500(I may be off on numbers) Another is to increase revenue, so twitter blue(a subscription) and increasing incentives to be on twitter blue(no ads, potential account growth because you are shown up on follow list, no or less throttle on number of posts in feed).

Re: SUSE to go private

#22

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Dell I think would be one? Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.

that feels a little different because i thought michael dell was a large part of that “private equity”.

Re: SUSE to go private

#23

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Dell I think would be one? Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.

Dell is a special case because it was the original founder who delisted the stock. Not some Bain Capital type firm that was just buying it to suck the marrow out of the bones before tossing it in the trash.

Re: SUSE to go private

#24

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

lol. This does not happen, at least not intentionally. PE takeovers are solely about turning companies with a relatively stable revenue stream into a packageable financial product. Huge cuts will be made to staff, support, and R&D to get expenses to a specific level, and large amounts of debt will be taken on under the company's name, to deliver a specific ROI to the PE investors over a relatively short term window of four to five years, all under the assumption that the company will be able to coast for that time on its previous success, after which point it can be sold for IP, trademarks, and any physical plant, or just allowed to go bankrupt under the unsustainable debt load and lack of investment.

That's the purpose of PE firms. They accept pre-investment in this sort of scheme, and do this with several companies at once over a 5-7 year total period, taking a slice of the revenue with no capital risk of their own, and the investors get a good 5-7 years of 12-18% ROI. The companies are trash at the end of the cycle but hey, that's capitalism.

Source: I was "lucky" enough to work for a tech startup through its IPO period after which it was acquired by PE, and exactly the above happened. We had the opportunity to "buy in" to the investment cycle with our own money, and so they had a pretty detailed presentation about exactly how this all works. I was somewhat surprised by how honest they were willing to be with the employees (although it did take a little bit of reading between the lines).

Re: SUSE to go private

#25

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

Well, SUSE after Novell was in a woeful state, EQT got them to where they are right now.

This^^^

I actually think this has the same potential of a “good” PE move as the Dell success.

Re: SUSE to go private

#26

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

None. Private equity's entire business model is to suck the quality and staffing out of the product and make money off the gap between the product getting cheaper and people moving to a viable alternative.

Conversely I would answer "high".

PE is basically a parasitic business, designed to suck money out of the purchased company until it collapses. You do this by borrowing a ton of money to purchase the company. Then for the privilege the company pays the buyer a special bonus that conveniently covers its costs (and often more) out of the cash it had on hand when bought. Then the buyer continues to get various payment streams, like guaranteed dividends or all sorts of other obligations, until the company collapses.

Sad to say I'm not exaggerating.

I say "basically" because there are a couple of exceptions. Dell was purchased in a special deal with the founder so that the company actually operates but the founder was enriched in the process.

VC is a branch of private equity (an almost invisible pimple on the PE business TBH) where they don't buy the whole company and hope to make money on the IPO. But it's a small business: there are numerous companies out there with an asset base larger than the entire VC industry.

Re: SUSE to go private

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell I think would be one? Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.

Dell is a special case because it was the original founder who delisted the stock. Not some Bain Capital type firm that was just buying it to suck the marrow out of the bones before tossing it in the trash.

Silver Lake Partners gave the majority of the capital when they took Dell private, ~$20B of the $25B total

Re: SUSE to go private

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell I think would be one? Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.

that feels a little different because i thought michael dell was a large part of that “private equity”.

He was, so he structured a special deal that mostly benefited him but also shared a bit with friends who did the rest of the deal.

Re: SUSE to go private

#29

What are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)

There are many such companies (otherwise PE as a concept would eventually die out as the supply of fools becomes exhausted). But just one example: Gibson.

Re: SUSE to go private

#30
Yet another reason to move to Debian.

While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar.

Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulled out from under it, switch to Debian.

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