Wednesday, April 28, 2010

HP Buys Out Palm at $5.70 a Share

Well, it seems that HP has just gotten into the smart phone game in a big way.

Neither RIM nor Lenovo will be putting Palm in its pocket. Rather, it's computing giant Hewlett-Packard, which is snapping up the company in an all-cash transaction valued at about $1.2 billion — $5.70 for each outstanding share of Palm stock.

That's a healthy premium over the $4.63 the stock closed at Wednesday, valuing the company considerably higher than the $781 million it was worth at the end of the Wall Street trading day.

I avoided PALM shares as the stock went into takeover speculation mode because if it failed to get a bid it was a dead duck. Now what is interesting is that we will have a three way race between tech giants in the smart phone game. We have Google with Andriod, Apple with IPhone, and HP with the Palm Pre. You add to this RIMM and the Blackberry and we have a very crowded field with tons of cash to throw around to gain or retain market share. Hopefully, this "Battle of the Smart Phones" will be to the consumers great benefit.

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