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Comment by phpisthebest | Hacker News Reader

Being taken private does not mean Not being beholden to show growth every quarter, in fact often then private equity takes a Tech company private the impetus return value to the new owners is even higher than if it was still public

The pattern of Private Equity take over is clear

1. Buy out public stock

2. Extreme Cost Cutting to make the company profitable by sacrificing Engineering and Customer Service

3. Massive Increase in prices to make the company profitable by sacrificing long term market share for short term profits

4. Sell the company again (or in pieces) before it goes bankrupt due to 1 and 2.

This has happened time and time again.

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That certainly happens but it’s not the only way to go private or even the only playbook for PE

I have been through it many times as a customer of tech companies, I would say the outline I posted above it the most common pattern I have experienced

So much so that today if one of my vendors gets bought out by PE we immediately start planning a migration of that technology

Most recent example is Broadcom who uses a PE-like playbook, we are now evaluating what can replace vSphere...

That is under USA tax laws, not sure if that model can happen in Japan. But you left out the main PE track here, load up in debt and train target company's cash.

> Sell the company again (or in pieces) before it goes bankrupt due to 1 and 2.

This shocks the concience for me - how is there always someone stupid enought to buy a comoany thats a ticking time bomb?

Memorex

It was a good name that got bought and then came out with crappy products we who used to work at RadioSnack had to sell.

Amazing how •consumers• drop money on brand name alone.

Happened to several formerly respected tool brands too. I’ve heard the process called “reputation mining.”

Not Happened, it Happens every day with Tool and Outdoor Power Equipment....

This is still a common and ongoing process. Hell the same brand is manufactured by several companies, for example Brand X may have a pressure washer that is made by MTD, but a Lawn Mower that is made by someone else, and a chainsaw that is made by a 3rd company. All with different levels of quality.

Even if you see a list of who "owns" the brand, many of them contract with each other to make the tools and equipment so it hard to tell who is actually making the product.

That's exactly how Sears' Kenmore brand used to operate. I don't think they made anything themselves. I bought a Kenmore garbage disposal because it was an obvious rebadge of a major brand but was $10 cheaper.

That works as long as there's a long-term stake in the brand.

Because Kenmore was a "face" of Sears, who had a vested interest in staying in business, they had a motivation to say "let's pick competent suppliers, and hold them to specific quality metrics." If that "major brand" model started getting returned too much, the next model Kenmore would be sourced from someone else.

Today's brand resurrections seem like less of a long-term play, and more as a shot of "instant credibility" for more short-lived products. My last office had a bunch of Westinghouse-brand LCD monitors. (That pretty much dates it to the late 2000s) They were competent enough, but the brand basically vanished after a couple of years. I suspect they discovered there was little value in the brand as a long-term venture-- they probably didn't actually sell very many based on "Grandma's 14" Westinghouse CRT was awesome back in 1966" and there wasn't enough market impact to fully jolt it back to life as a memorable, going-forward brand.

Yes, I fell for a couple of "Memorex" products before I realized someone was just using the brand for a shot of credibility. The products themselves were absolute trash.

I guess you probably meant physical tools, but that immediately brought Norton to mind for me.

It's already happened for Toshiba in Japan. Its home appliance brand is sold to Chinese company, and many Toshiba products become just an OEM.

I remember when Toshiba laptops were among the best.

They aren’t dead, but they’re delisted.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstories/toshiba-delisted-...

As someone else said, in whole it is often a tax diversion, a purchase designed to fail to bundle other failures to write off in one go, or various other things

Could also be Patent Capture if the companies has alot of patents

If the company is large it will be sold in pieces to individual competitors of the different market segments.

If the price is right a large competitor will buy it just to shut it down, basically a marketing cost for customer acquisition..

There are plenty of "valid" reasons a failing company driven into the ground by management is still able to be sold...

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