Читать книгу Investment Banking For Dummies - Matthew Krantz - Страница 48

During the Internet boom of the late 1990s, going public was the ultimate goal of many companies. The dream of creating a company, selling the shares to the public and becoming instantly fabulously wealthy was the reason many Internet companies existed.

But some companies actually want to do just the opposite. There are major, short-term pressures associated with being a publicly traded company. The biggest obligation is that public companies must provide the investors a complete rundown of their financial performance during the quarter, disclosures you can read about in Chapter 7. This required disclosure is fine when the company is doing well — kind of like plastering a grade-school paper with an “A” on it on the refrigerator door.

When a company is suffering, though, and needs to make major changes in a painful restructuring, the quarterly reporting can be an exercise in humility. And this is one reason why some companies look to going-private transactions, where investment banks assist in allowing private investors to buy back all of a company’s shares.

One classic example is computer maker Dell. The company had been struggling with slower sales of personal computers. It wanted to go private to give it the time to restructure its business. Dell’s management team offered to take the company private for nearly $25 billion in a bid in early 2013. Going private would allow the company to make the necessary long-term investments (which short-term investors may not like) to make it more competitive in a world where mobile gadgets have become a big threat to traditional desktop computers and laptops. It worked. Dell returned to the public market as Dell Technologies in 2018 as a much stronger company.