back to article Battle erupts in Adaptec boardroom

Struggling Adaptec faces a boardroom battle, as an activist investor attempts to force a company sale. The story starts with Warren Lichenstein and his Steel Partners' hedge fund. They bought shares in troubled Adaptec in 2007, and waged a campaign to have the company sell itself and so release asset-value to shareholders. …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quick guide to boardspeak

    when a board member

    says

    "I'm concerned about shareholder value" = I own lots of shares and I'm worried that I'm only worth n million rather than n+1 million.

    "releasing shareholder value" = making a quick buck now and the devil take the workers

  2. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

    How sad

    Sounds like Steel Partners have no interest whatsoever in the business - just in how much they can make by stripping it and selling the assets. Doesn't exactly improve the poor image of the finance sector does it.

    Mind you, although I've used lots of Adaptec stuff in the past - I don't think I've bought a single product since they abandoned the Apple market many years ago.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Investor scum

    Does a company calling itself "Steel Partners" really have any credibility running a high tech company? These guys are enterprise rapists and deserve nothing better than castration. I hope they loose their shirts.

  4. PushF12

    Storage controllers are like sound cards and modems

    Adaptec is going where sound card and modem manufacturers already went. I remember paying $500 for a SoundBlaster 16 and another $500 for a USRobotics 14.4 modem. In the 90s, that was primo kit, and had the kind of margins that Adaptec needs to stay in business.

    Today, an AC97 chip costs a nickel, so every computer has audio and modem capabilities for nearly free. This happened because interfaces converged to a de facto standard and everything was offloaded to the CPU.

    The market pressures are identical. The physical interface has been formally standardized as SATA, the logical interface has been standardized as AHCI, and offboard RAID matters less now that ZFS is mature and BTRFS is nearly ready.

  5. Francis Grosz
    Grenade

    Please, never again

    Please, never use the phrase "financial engineering" again!!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Asset strippers.

    That's what these creatures used to be called.

    Let's hope they have enough money to buy EDS next, and screw over Hurd the Turd.

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