Judge is correct.
They say that you had buyer's remorse and Hewlett-Packard, in the light of that remorse, scratched around for reasons to justify its rather immediate writing-off of a large part of the purchase price. That's what they say. You say they're wrong about that and they say they're right about that.
To which I would add:- No-one forced HP to vastly over-pay for Autonomy, from an earlier post
Courtesy FT Alphaville 11/09/19:
We’ll leave you with this, a quote from Sun Microsystem’s founder Scott McNealy. Having watched the stock of his company appreciate nearly 14-fold during the dotcom bubble, and then collapse 95% during the bust, McNealy was bemused that investors ever considered paying what now looks like a rather diminutive 10 times sales for the computer hardware company’s stock at its peak in 2000.
Why? This is what he told Businessweek in 2002:
(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2002-03-31/a-talk-with-scott-mcnealy)
At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realise how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
10 times sales…
… that made me think
Autonomy was sold for $12bn 18/8/11 and revenue to the end of the last FY – 31/12/10 was $870m
That is a ratio of *13.8* times revenue.
And I expect this lawsuit to be a massive waste of money too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
