Tag: acquisition

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[Jurassic Park] The New Big (Company) Kid on the Block

I drove to my client, a company on the Peninsula, past what was formerly Genentech Inc. (acquired by Roche) in South Francisco, on the same day that General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

If I had driven further south I would have passed buildings that formerly housed Bay Networks and 3Com, long gone former or diminished competitors of Cisco, and by a location that was Informix (subsumed by IBM), Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), and Silicon Graphics , a leader in computer graphics in the mid-1990’s and a recent bankruptcy participant, acquired by Rackable Systems.… Read the rest

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[The Barclays iShares and Genentech Acquisitions] Deals Are Done – Now Comes the Fun

Business and organizational observers in San Francisco and its environs will get a first hand view of how smart – or not-so-smart – the buyers of Genentech and Barclays Global Investor’s iShares unit are in getting real value for their acquisitions. [Update: See Kathleen Pender’s good overview column Net Worth from the April 12th  San Francisco Chronicle here ]

While the buyers are different, the name of the game is the same: get value equal or greater to your purchase price.… Read the rest

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[Through the Glass Door] Barclays Global Investors and Genentech: Stuck in the M & A Middle?

In Roman Catholic theology, limbo is that afterlife condition for those who die without being assigned to hell. For employees in companies waiting for the post-acquisition dust to settle such as Genentech, or for those waiting for part of the organization to be halved off, such as Barclays Global Investors (BGI) with its iShares division,  limbo is a pretty good description of what it’s like to be inside the organization.… Read the rest

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[Through the Glass Door] Genentech’s Future Looks Much Like Chiron’s Recent Past

From the headline of Tom Abate’s story in the San Francisco Chronicle “Roche-Genentech deal called close, with offer raised”, folks at 1 DNA Way in South San Francisco should take a look across the bay at Chiron’s former campus in Emeryville to see their likely future.

As noted elsewhere (see the “Land O’Spin series on best practices of assessment on this blog), one of the best predictors for future behavior is to look at past patterns of behavior.… Read the rest