Palm Changing Hands
Looks like Palm will change hands this week. The bidders are the usual suspects: Nokia and Motorola on the vendor side, and TPG and Silverlake on the Private Equity side. I was suprised that Dell isn’t bidding, and did some digging to see what’s going on, and found this:
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Here’s why, according to one insider familiar with the thinking: Ron Garriques, the former Motorola Executive VP of the handset business who had been opposed to the deal, left Motorola and is now at Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL - message board). Motorola CEO and Chairman Ed Zander is currently running the day-to-day of Motorola’s handset business.
Zander has said that Motorola needs to get out of its low-end price war with Nokia and others and introduce more successful mid-tier and high-end models. “The Treo 680 is doing well, and it is exactly the sort of ‘feature-rich phone’ that Zander said the company needs to develop to get back some pricing leverage,” the source says.
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Nokia is clearly winning the low end game and the emerging market wars. Just look at their 79% market share in India. And on the high end, Apple is putting pressure on everybody with their high profile iPhone. Indeed, Motorola is vulnerable, and could use Palm.
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