Posted on 08/27/2007 10:07:25 PM PDT by paudio
Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all of Gateway's outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government approval, Acer said in a statement. Gateway's shares ended at $1.21 Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.
"This is the biggest acquisition in Acer's 30 year history," said J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman, speaking at a news conference in Taipei.
"After this acquisition, we are solidly number three in the global PC market," Wang said.
Acer's acquisition deal with Gateway also derails rival Lenovo Group's plans to acquire Packard Bell.
(Excerpt) Read more at infoworld.com ...
filing
Bad money!
Not IBM. IBM’s laptop business.
Acer was my first PC...it sucked. Would have switched back to Apple had my employer not required using a PC. Hope they’ve improved. My daughter loves her two emachines and was planning on purchasing a new unit.
Oh wonderful, more crappy computers.
Gateway was on top of the mountain in South Dakota for awhile. Great brand, very nice computers. Then came their move to San Diego, the opening of their retail stores and the PC profit margins shrinking to nothing.
Bye bye Gateway
I knew back when Gateway had those stores everywhere, they were going to have problems. I went into one to check out a computer (never having owned one) and found out you couldn’t buy one there.
You had to order it and wait for 2 weeks for it to be delivered and also pay the postage and sales tax (such a deal). I passed!
I recall when the CEO of my company, Lee Stein, invited Ted Waite to visit in San Diego. We were just planning to help him set up a means of selling his products over the internet (1996). Waite liked the city so much he decided to move his headquarters. I wonder how much that decision played into the decline and sell off of the company.
Ted Waite has been using Gateway stock (GTW) as his personal cash machine for years and years. Check out his stock sales just over the last two years; they've been relentless, netting him vast sums of cash while Gateway's regular shareholders were getting seriously hosed (and his sales before 2005 were much, much larger!):
Remember Compaqs acquisition of DEC, they never recovered.
Mine too, it sucked too.
I did some contracting for Gateway about 11 or 12 years ago, commuting from KC to North Sioux City, SD for a week at a time, then coming back home for 2 weeks, for about a year. While Gateway (It was still Gateway 2000 back then) was known for being cut-throat in its wages, it seemed to be a pretty fun place to work, and the people I met were pretty happy working there. A couple of things I remember were BBQ lunches on Fridays during the good weather, with dollar burgers or brats, and a DJ under a big inflatable cow. And Ted had sponsored a couple of race cars, and he'd occasionally have them brought to the factory, and tear around the parking lot in them! That was about the time that Ted rejected a buy-out offer from Compaq, well before Compaq and HP merged.
Mark
They did it to get into the high end workstation / midrange market. Remember that they also bought Tandon at about the same time, known for their fault tolerant systems. It did sort of make sense at the time, but then, this was the time when Intel processors began to leapfrog forward in processing power. NT was also designed to run on the MIPS processor, which was in the DEC systems, and those processors were so much more powerful than the Intel processors of that time.
Mark
I have an Acer computer as my latest one.. I’m very happy with it, things like the keyboard is very high quality, and easy to type on. Also the price was incredible for what I got. Intel Core duo, 2 gigs ram, 250 gb hardrive, dvd dual, vista..
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.