A number of financially-troubled publicly-traded IT companies have decided that going private is the best way for them to overhaul their organization – Avaya Inc. is one, while Dell Inc. is the latest.
No decision has been made yet, but Reuters quotes a source as saying the company’s board is at least looking at the possibility.
The news comes as this week two market research companies reported BlackBerry’s market share is getting worse despite the introduction of three new handsets running the powerful BB 10 operating system.
IDC reported that BlackBerry has slid to fourth place among smart phone platforms in the second quarter of this year, having been overtaken by Windows Phone devices for third. Meanwhile comScore reported that in the U.S. BlackBerry lost almost a full percentage off its sales between the second and first quarter.
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Why go private? So a company can step away from the public glare and restructure itself without having regular news stories about its troubles push investors away. Every three months publicly-traded companies have to issue financial results, plus research companies issue reports out of the blue.
When a company is private it can afford to take a long view – if it has the resources – and put itself in a better position to come back to the public markets. Hopefully it will by then have more solid sales.
However, to go private a company has to find investors to buy out the public shareholders – often a private equity firm.
