Strategy in TECH...
SnapAV announced today that General Atlantic, its private equity partner, has sold its ownership interest in the company to San Francisco-based Hellman and Friedman, another private equity group. The move, while unexpected, is not unusual in the world of private equity – especially in the case where a portfolio company transitions stages of growth that move it beyond the the investment strategy of the PE partner as compared to when the investment was initially made.
AVAD, one of the custom integration industry’s leading distributors, is in the process of going through a major transformation, out from under the – some would say – clueless shadows of its previous owner, monster I.T. distributor Ingram Micro…to a more focused posture under new owner Kingswood Capital Management. Now being managed by CEO Tom Jacoby and President Fred Farrar, the company has begun a series of initiatives to transform their geographic footprint, business model, and push to higher revenues.
LG Electronics announced this week an interesting new compact laser projector targeted at the home cinema enthusiast. Although quite affordable, this light and compact projector – called the LG ProBeam – features some very cool technology and features sure to delight residential movie fans.
Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai is feeling pretty good these days. After an incredibly tough turnaround period where many questioned his plan, Hirai said this week that the company expects to book an operating profit of ¥500 billion ($4.5 billion) in the fiscal year ending March 2018, its highest operating profit in 20-years according to a report by the Nikkei. But the CEO admits that, as good as this news is, the company is still short of a full turnaround.
What’s needed for a complete turnaround of Sony’s business? Innovation…
What started as a roar appears to be ending as a whimper, as Asian wannabe-giant LeEco announced this week plans to lay-off nearly 70% of their entire U.S. workforce. This significant retrenchment occurs just weeks after its proposed $2 billion acquisition of Vizio fell apart just before closing, and suggests the company, which is in multiple businesses, may have gotten ahead of itself…and ahead of its funding.
My assistant spotted it immediately. “There’s a strange letter in today’s mail,” she said with a slight hesitation in her voice one day last week as she handed me a small stack of mail that she had just picked up from our company post office box. That hesitation in her voice wasn’t so much concern as it was uncertainty as to whether she should bother to bring it to my attention. After all, it could simply be just another example of cleverly disguised junk mail.
You know things aren’t going well when divisions of your own company want to break the chains of their association with you. That is essentially what happened when Toshiba Machine “bought” its independence by buying out the shares of its stock held by parent company Toshiba Corp.
In November 2016, we learned that Samsung had acquired Harman International Industries in a deal valued at $8 billion. At that time, everyone pretty much assumed the deal was all about automotive audio – and area that inside-Samsung sources had identified as a market the company sought to penetrate. Now we learn that it wasn’t just about cars.
Bloomberg is reporting that Chinese mega brand LeEco missed its normal payroll at the end of March, telling employees it would pay them a few days later. While this is a situation that is not unfamiliar to many small business owners, LeEco is anything but your typical small business owner. They are supposedly in the final stages of a $2 billion acquisition of major TV brand Vizio.
But if LeEco can’t make their own payroll…how can they still buy Vizio?
Network systems provider Access Networks announced this week that it has hired Roy Beiser, a former Intel executive, as its first ever Director of IT. But even more than that, Beiser, who is said to be highly credentialed in network technologies and cyber security issues, will assist in helping Access Networks to establish “the highest IT and cyber security standards for the company’s base of integration professionals and their clients.”
