A lot is happening around Palm the past few weeks. The company put itself up for sale, with HTC and Lenovo being the most important candidates. HTC has now backed down, leaving only Lenovo as the major contender. In the meantime, Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein continues to believe the company can go at it alone, but is nonetheless open to the idea of being bought – while also opening the door to licensing the webOS.
Reuters is reporting that despite the geek lovefest that would ensue, HTC has backed out of buying Palm. Their source is someone close to the matter, who states that “there just weren’t enough synergies to take the deal forward”. This could, of course, all be part of a corporate game to force Palm to lower its asking price.
This leaves Lenovo as the only (known) contender to buy Palm. In light of good results and the prospect of them buying Palm, Lenovo’s shares rose 5.9 percent today to a 23-month high. “A most suitable candidate [to buy Palm] will be a mainland Chinese company,” Lu Chialin, an analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei, told Reuters, “They’ve got a lot more free cash and don’t have the brand presence in the United States, so that will all give them that boost they need.”
In the meantime, Palm’s CEO Jon Rubinstein still believes the company can go at it alone. “I believe Palm can survive as an independent company,” Rubinstein told the Financial Times, “We have a plan that gets us to profitability. [We’re working] fast and furious on new handsets. We do have a strong pipeline of products in the future.”
Plan or no, the company is open to buying bids, Rubinstein said. “If someone comes to the board with a reasonable offer of course it’s something we have to consider,” he stated. Rubinstein did not want to confirm that Palm hired banking advisors to help in a possible takeover.
Another option for Palm would be to license its webOS – definitely the strong point of Palm’s product line. “If there’s an appropriate strategic relationship or business deal that makes sense to us then of course we would licence webOS because obviously the more scale we get the more the benefit there is to us,” Rubinstein said.
Then licensing out the OS is a fail in progress, unless the licensees only restrict their phones to markets where Palm can’t afford to enter for whatever reason: otherwise, manufacturers with more money to absorb the costs will be able to beat Palm at making and selling WebOS-running hardware, and Palm will be that much worse off, because they can’t afford to lose on hardware like they’ve done previously. If Palm licenses the software, and it isn’t on those terms, they might as well completely give up on selling hardware: otherwise, they’ll have demonstrated they’ve learned nothing from the Apple clone wars, namely that others will undercut the mother ship, so to speak.
For me this news indicates me that Palm is not doing good and soon it will die on its own, or will have to merge & dissolve itself into the acquiring company.
is that right ?
That’s been correct for the better part of the past ten years.
I REALLY hope they license out WebOS. As an OS its pretty damn incredible. again, only speaking to the OS, not the phone itself.
I’m surprised HTC didn’t want it.
Even if it never used any of the technology or webOS and completely shut Palm down after acquiring it, the patent portfolio alone as a defensive strategy fending off suits like the current one from Apple would probably be worth every penny spent.
I still think it’s going to be cheaper to just handle the court cases and pay your lawyers.
NOt when Apple seems to have the best legal budget of any tech company right now, but that would depend on how much Palm ultimately goes for. I guess HTC are confident enough on their own.
Why would anyone want their crap? It’s been dead since the first news story about it. Android was out and so webos was fail from day 1.
Just like their products.
This is possible too:
http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/04/23/palm.may.be.in.radica…
I am hoping Lenovo *doesn’t* get them.
Recently I had the displeasure of discovering what Lenovo has done to the ThinkPad line, or at least what it had done to it a few years back, with a T61. It was heavy and built of cheap-feeling plastic that didn’t seem to fit especially well together–in fact the screen hinges had quite a lot of wiggle. The software (ThinkCentre) is an unmitigated disaster. The machine was slow as molasses despite its Core2Duo chip. And to top it off, it had cost around 2200 Euros….
I can only imagine the wonderous quality of hardware and software Lenovo will lend to Palm’s smartphones…