For an industry that some analysts wrongly insist is dying, the PC business is sure getting an inordinate amount of attention.
PCs were certainly on the mind of activist shareholder Carl Icahn last week as he made the media rounds. The chairman of Icahn Enterprises, which has made its own offer for Dell Computer in response to the $24.4 billion leveraged buyout led by Silver Lake Partners and co-founder Michael Dell, told Bloomberg Television that Dell could look to either sell off its PC business, or perhaps even acquire Hewlett-Packard’s.
“We think there’s a chance the PC business could be acquired or that we might acquire somebody in the PC business, like Hewlett-Packard. There’s many iterations of this,” said Icahn. “There’s a shot down the road that we could, with the PC business, could merge with a Hewlett-Packard or acquire their PC business. Hewlett-Packard, like us, are divided (between PCs and enterprise solutions). We should be divided sooner or later.”
In recent years, Dell has moved away from the low margin PC business on which it rose to prominence, launching a series of acquisitions around software and services that have made Dell a significant player in the enterprise data centre.
HP has gone in a similar direction, investing heavily in software and services in recent years with a series of high-profile acquisitions. HP already considered selling off its PC business before beating an embarrassing retreat, but nothing should be ruled-out as CEO Meg Whitman seeks to get the vendor back on track.