In the initial confrontation of the Sun Microsystem bid, the West Coast Capital team initially had the upper hand in public opinion, which caused the stock price of Sun Microsystems to fluctuate, and it rose by as much as 10% at once, approaching $5.5.

However, this is not the end of the battle.

After a brief truce, perhaps seeing a change in public opinion led IBM to adjust its offer from $10 per share to $9.4 slightly, claiming that it was the final offer.

The board of directors of Sun Microsystems was enraged by IBM's backsliding, and they stepped in to terminate the negotiations with IBM.

The curtain has come down on the temporary acquisition, which makes the new shareholders in the stock market very worried.

The stock price began to slide in ups and downs.

The M&A team began to divide over this.

Do you want to quote directly?

Or wait a little longer?

Both arguments are reasonable, but neither side can convince the other.

Admittedly, waiting time will cause the stock price to fall even more, and perhaps back within $5 is also very likely.

However, Greg has long known that Oracle is eyeing the solar microsystem internally, and if he misses the opportunity to let Oracle make an offer, then he will be passive to West Coast Capital.

...

On the MIPS side, progress has gone much smoother, and after engaging with the MIPS board of directors, the company directly quoted a $320 million purchase price for privatization, which is very attractive to the board.

The price given at the moment is basically a 100% premium.

All of them are cash, which ensures that the company's employees are retained intact, so there is no loss for employees.

Not to mention the commitment to inject $100 million in R&D funds, which is even more good for employees. The board of directors is basically close to agreeing with the plan.

For this reason, MIPS made an announcement on the suspension of trading.

...

After Schwartz saw MIPS's announcement, he no longer doubted West Coast Capital's entry into the IT industry.

This action is clearly a strategic investment, not a simple capital speculation.

MIPS is not short of cash, and its operations are also good, and its cash flow is quite healthy, after all, the company is very small, with more than 100 people under R&D management.

The annual revenue of more than 60 million US dollars is basically obtained in the form of licensing fees, in other words, there are no other major costs except for the salaries of R&D personnel.

Therefore, there will be nearly 20 million on-the-books profits a year, of which about 50% will be turned into dividends for shareholders.

If you spend more than $300 million to get this profit, of course, it is not cost-effective, and it will take at least more than ten years to recover the cost.

In Schwartz's view, MIPS's business is unlikely to have the opportunity to expand significantly.

From the perspective of the mainstream market, the application space of MIPS is basically limited to a few professional fields, and it is no longer a general-purpose CPU designer.

Investing another $100 million in R&D products for the acquisition is very unnecessary in Schwartz's view, so what can be done by investing in it now?

At present, the application field of MIPS32 is basically fixed, and it is very good to use, and it is difficult to find more expansion fields.

MIPS64 is difficult to open up the market, servers and high-performance workstations, MIPS64 has not been able to keep up with the pace of PowerPC and even SPARC servers.

It is rare to see the application of MIPS64 in the computer field in the market.

If it were Schwartz, the best decision he could make would have been to leave it as it was.

This is also the expectation of MIPS to the industry, so its stock price has been sluggish.

...

"Ladies and gentlemen, Schwartz called and said that if we offered an 80 percent premium and stated that there would be no layoffs and no cash siphoning out the company, then he would cooperate with the statement that this is the best outcome:

The solar microsystem needs to have a strong action to support future development. Then privatization is a good option. Tony Chua relayed to his M&A team.

"Guys, should we make a quote on this? At the current share price, we need to quote a purchase price of $9.5, which will pay a total of $7.4 billion in cash. ”

This price made the M&A team excited. Compared with the maximum price given by Liu Ruoyi, it is nearly $1.1 billion lower.

In other words, the M&A team has seen a huge dividend opportunity of $11 million!

Everyone's eyes were on Greg, who should have the most say now.

Greg thought for a while, obviously his heart was fluctuating violently, but finally he spoke: "That's it, although we may have to wait for a lower chance, but the night is long, and too greedy will reap the consequences." ”

Tony Chua thinks the same thing in his heart.

In his opinion, it is not that the dividends are valued. Instead, he successfully completed the task given by Liu Ruoyi.

This little money is mixed with Liu Ruoyi, when will it not be earned?

But the question is, how can I make sure that I can keep up with this God of Wealth.

This ability is of course the most just manifestation.

...

West Coast Capital quoted its own purchase price and conditions.

As a guarantee of privatization, West Coast Capital is guaranteed by Lehman Brothers and will inject at least $5 billion or more to save the company if it has abnormal operations over the next five years.

At the same time, after the acquisition, the company will not have large-scale layoffs or major changes in positions, and the existing company's customers will get the best after-sales protection, and the original company's after-sales commitments will be effective.

Schwartz's announcement reassured Schwartz, who publicly declared that West Coast Capital's involvement was the best outcome.

Sun Microsystem can develop better, the public does not need to worry about the RISC server market being monopolized, and Sun Microsystem's customers can also rest assured that they can purchase and use it boldly.

This is a win-win situation, and Schwartz believes that the company will be more dynamic and open up a larger market after privatization.

In order to ensure his position, Schwartz also fought hard.

This statement naturally stabilized the turmoil psychology of a considerable number of customers, and for those customers who bought the Sun Microsystems server and software system, they were most afraid that the company would suddenly collapse, and then his equipment and software system would be killed.

Without after-sales maintenance service guarantee, no one dares to continue to use these equipment and software systems for commercial use.

...

...

West Coast Capital had no roots in the IT industry, and after making two news stories at once, including one big news, it quickly became famous in the IT industry.

Tony Tsai was interviewed by ComputerWorld.

Tony Chua is serious nonsense, claiming that West Coast Capital is not just a financial investment company, but will also transform into a technology finance company in the future.

Therefore, the company is laying out the technology industry, and the current acquisition is only the first step of the company's action plan, and in the future, according to the development of the company's strategy, we will further look for suitable targets to make the company's layout more reasonable.

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems is to turn West Coast Capital into a technology and financial enterprise standing in the cloud, and will use the technical advantages of Sun Microsystems in the cloud hardware server and software system to build a financial cloud!

MIPS will become the source manufacturer of mobile computing for the West Coast's capital layout, and will further enhance its competitiveness in the future, increasing R&D investment to provide consumers with more choices.

Contribute more to the popularization and cost reduction of mobile computing.

These words were Liu Ruoyi's intention, and they became half-truths and half-truths in Tony Cai's mouth.

In any case, the tech community finally has some direct understanding of the involvement of the newcomer West Coast Capital.

Of course, most of them are still in favor of the entry of West Coast capital.

In their view, these planning directions are basically difficult to achieve. Maybe in another two or three years, the two companies will have to sell out again.

West Coast Capital will not gain anything but lose a large amount of cash.

The big business of the solar microsystem is already terminally ill, and it is not possible to bring the dead back to life by changing one person.

Unless drastic reforms are carried out to cut a large number of product development that will only eat up R&D expenses but not much market, the first is the huge cost of self-developed SPARC chip projects.

However, West Coast Capital has already stated that it will not do this, tying its hands and feet, so the only chance to come back to life is actually buried by itself.

MIPS is not enough, there is still a surplus after the current R&D investment and revenue are subtracted, and it will not become a burden after privatization.

But Sun Microsystem, West Coast Capital is indeed too confident.

Oracle was ready to make a move, but it was against IBM, and they didn't want to fall into the hands of such a powerful competitor.

For them, this target is actually a bit chicken, and there is actually nothing worth thinking about in it, and the only worry is that they are afraid that this company will be bought by its competitor IBM.

Because SUN has the intellectual property of a very popular development language, almost all of oracle's products are based on this development language.

If IBM were to get the rights to the language (the term has sensitive letter combinations, you know) to make trouble, it would obviously be extremely bad for Oracle.

But if someone else makes a move, then the problem is not very big, especially in West Coast Capital, which has almost no reputation in the technology industry, and it looks like an investor.

At most, it's a matter of licensing fees, which can be followed by stereotypes, and there is no problem at all.

On the contrary, after the purchase, the server hardware part of the business is not interested at all, and most of it is disposed of by spin-off and sale.

Therefore, even if they want to bid now, they dare not promise not to lay off employees like West Coast Capital and carry this huge burden on their backs.

Due to Liu Ruoyi's clear strategic considerations, the M&A team will give generous conditions, so that competitors will not be able to play.

In this way, the board of directors of these two companies was smoothly approved, and then the relevant departments approved it.

Since there are no antitrust provisions involved, this approval is relatively easy. The entire privatization process will be completed in about half a year at most.

However, after the acquisition agreement was signed, Liu Ruoyi's West Coast Capital began to send someone to take over the board of directors.

As for the management, the current strategy is not to move. Just start setting KPIs based on different positions.

Of course, the KPI setting of business indicators in the last three years is also quite relaxed, and it is qualified to be able to make steady progress.

In terms of MIPS R&D, an additional US$100 million was added, mainly to establish an Asia-Pacific R&D center in Heung Kong, to remove manpower and recruit new people to develop new models for mobile applications, and to be responsible for the process optimization of old models.

The first step was to develop a new processor for the HTC G2, which would allow the G2 to achieve a better performance advantage than other phones.

The G1 was well received in the sales of PCCW, and the built-in first generation was sought after by users, and the first batch of 500,000 was sold out quickly after it was launched, which made HTC overjoyed.

And WhatsApp's activation registration rate has reached almost 80% or more, and many of them are word-of-mouth. This is a perfect start for Liu Ruoyi's first step in the mobile Internet plan.

However, this has nothing to do with the MIPS Asia Pacific R&D Center.

The reason why this mobile processor R&D center is located in Xiangjiang is mainly close to the processing plant.

After all, from the current customer base, the use of MIPS in some special fields is still quite extensive, among which Broadcom, the original major customer of the Xiangjiang Dragon factory, is also a major customer of MIPS, and it is even more beneficial to bring R&D into the factory for future optimization.

According to the original initial design, the 74K core chip series they used was produced using the 65nm process, and after replacing the original OEM, the production line of the Dragon Factory needed to be readjusted to the 45nm process.

At that time, the efficiency and power consumption will be better, and the preliminary estimate is that the performance will be increased by at least 20%, and the power consumption will be reduced by nearly 15%.

In this way, all three parties are winners for MIPS, Broadcom and Dragon Factory.

The yield rate of the dragon factory has improved now, but the production capacity has not increased much, that is, there are too few customers and not enough OEM products.

Therefore, it is now possible to improve the better process for some customers of the original 65nm process and introduce it into the 45nm process, which has a certain cost and capacity occupation for the dragon factory, which is actually not very cost-effective, but the production capacity is already idle, it is another matter, how much is also a good way to generate income, and an opportunity to improve the yield of run-in equipment.

If there are not different products to test and verify, it is difficult to improve some processes, after all, production line optimization is a very important accumulation of experience.

If there is a lot of accumulation, not to mention anything else, it is not a problem for this 45nm production line to meet the production of 40nm process after slight adjustment of some process links.

That's some of the added benefits.

In contrast, these low-end products of MIPS32 24K/34K core were originally produced using 130nm or 90nm process technology.

With the support of the mips native technology team, the production and manufacturing of MIPS chips in the future will have better optimization than others.

For example, the M4K core can be produced using 180nm process technology, but the mW/MHz index is 0.37, but it is replaced with 90nm process production, this index can be immediately reduced to 0.06, which is directly increased by several times! For some power-sensitive micro devices, this is a earth-shaking improvement.