bounce-bounce-bounce
[Cue 4th movement, Beethoven's 9th Symphony]
Freude, Freude, Schadenfreude,
Tochter der Gemütlichkeit...
Symantec's share price has plunged on reports that its planned merger with Broadcom has fallen through. According to CNBC, several sources have confirmed that the deal is off after Symantec insisted on too high a price – $28 a share – to sell up. That report, and the claim that it was asking too much, appear to have been …
Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to witness SYMC's executive management and C-suite in action from the belly of the beast can only be surprised it's taken this long. It's a remarkably efficient engine for absorbing valuable companies, their best people and IP, and systematically wrecking their value. Somehow churning the C-suite every 18 months over the last decade hasn't helped at all. Almost as if they all realised it was a doomed mission and the best case scenario for them would be to collect a fat signing-on bonus, stacks of (not very valuable) stock, and to get a fat payoff 18 months later. Each successive new broom flourishes some brilliant new insight or methodology that's bound to turn things round, except it doesn't - because it can't. The best thing they could do would be to divest themselves of all the acquisitions and let them fly free again. If they hung onto 49% of the stock in those demerged units and became nothing more than a brass plate over a holding company that shuffles paper and banks dividents, the world would be a less bad place.
The C-suite is always given free reign at Symantec. Then about 18 months in, the board says they want the steering wheel. And another leadership team is ejected. Three times the board has put one of their own in charge. The pissed off the one CEO that could have done it, Greg Clark. My opinion is the board needs to go. They are the only consistent variable over the past decade of lackluster.