HP Acquires Palm – leading Mobile Manufacturers in US

Though Palm has considerably a significant improvement in their products and its WebOS phones are available with almost all leading mobile carriers in US but had a disappointing quarterly results, early this February.The CEO of the company Jon Rubinstein started to investigate its options and decided on selling the company would be a feasible and better option.Initially board of directors were having an option to sell only the patents of Palm or even just licensing WebOS but later decided that all the previous options may degrade value of Palm IP and may not even adress long term problems.

Many companies started to grab this opportunity and approached palm for a deal.Finally, some top 5 countries were shortlisted for the deal and HP was one among the top 5 companies.So after Palm decision on selling the company, 4 other companies along with HP started its bidding.Other than HP all the companies were just referred as Company A,B,C and D.Companies like C and D were initially engaged only with just buying the patents but since Palm dropped out the option company D also dropped its plan.Company A approached with $600 million in cash and Company B apporached with stock by stock option.HP approached Palm with a different offer which is all around $4.75 per share.

During April 18 Company C entered into similar kind of HP deal and offered around $6 to $7 per share.So Palm asked HP to really just increase its bidding value and hence HP came with just a small increase of about 25 cents which is nothing but $5 per share.

Now Palm on April 19 sent out some draft merger to both of the companies.With HP increased its share to $5 Company C dropped out its share to just $5.50.Palm
Board of directors Palm directly told HP that its offer was not competitive with which HP immediately raised its offer value to about %5.70 per share and there after Palm closed the deal following Company C’s drop from the proposal.