RUMORS ABOUND ABOUT APPLE COMPUTER PARING PART OF FIRM.Byline: John Markoff
New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times Are slices of Apple Computer up for sale? Just five months after Apple's board spurned spurn v. spurned, spurn·ing, spurns v.tr. 1. To reject disdainfully or contemptuously; scorn. See Synonyms at refuse1. 2. To kick at or tread on disdainfully. v. a takeover bid Noun 1. takeover bid - an offer to buy shares in order to take over the company two-tier bid - a takeover bid where the acquirer offers to pay more for the shares needed to gain control than for the remaining shares by Sun Microsystems and chose instead, to hire Gilbert Amelio as chairman and chief executive, Amelio's turnaround prospects look increasingly grim. Sales have continued to crumble. The schedule for new products that might restore consumer confidence has slipped by at least a quarter. The stock price, which edged down 12.5 cents Tuesday to close at $19, is at its lowest point in nearly a decade - and well below the $23 to $24 a share that Sun offered in January. That put Apple's market capitalization Market Capitalization A measure of a public company's size. Market capitalization is the total dollar value of all outstanding shares. It's calculated by multiplying the number of shares times the current market price. This term is often referred to as market cap. Tuesday at $2.37 billion, or less than 40 percent of Apple's $6.2 billion valuation only one year ago. Peering through the gloom, financial analysts and market researchers have begun to conclude that Amelio no longer has the leisurely luxury of a one-year turnaround timetable, but will need to take some sort of quick action to appease shareholders. And so Silicon Valley is rife with talk that portions - or even all - of Apple may be in play again. Of course as Apple executives meet with all sorts of companies these days in an effort to devise a winning strategy - including a recent retreat that found Amelio talking technology with Bill Gates, chairman of Apple's longtime archenemy arch·en·e·my n. 1. A principal enemy. 2. often Archenemy The Devil; Satan. Used with the. archenemy Noun pl -mies a chief enemy , Microsoft Corp. - it is possible, of course, that Apple watchers are confusing brainstorming with horse trading. And Apple officially declines to comment. But while people close to the company insist that the whole Apple is not for sale, they do not rule out a paring of one or more parts. The likeliest may include Apple's printer business, the division that produces the Newton hand-held computer, or the company's new Pippin Pippin. For Frankish rulers thus named, use Pepin. A multimedia game and Internet machine from Apple that used the PowerPC architecture and a limited version of the Mac OS. television set-top CD-ROM CD-ROM: see compact disc. CD-ROM in full compact disc read-only memory Type of computer storage medium that is read optically (e.g., by a laser). and Internet terminal. The latest storm of speculation involves Oracle Corp. Oracle has held on-and-off merger talks with Apple over the years, and its chairman, Lawrence Ellison, has long let it be known that he would like to add Apple's lineup of personal computers and software to Oracle's market-leading lineup of corporate database management programs. Last week Ellison and Oracle's president, Raymond Lane, at the last minute canceled their attendance at a long-scheduled gathering on Bali of several hundred of Oracle's top sales representatives. Word among the Oracle sales force, jittery over the implications for their own company's stock, was that the two top executives were back in Silicon Valley negotiating some kind of deal with Apple. Oracle has declined to comment, except for the attempt by one company executive to laugh off the rumors. |
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