Sage News and Discussion

In my view these reports are all essentially re-hashes of the same rumors that typically fly once or twice a year about Sage being taken over. Could they be true? No doubt. But they also could have been true the last half-dozen times. The better question is -- if these rumors are true then what would the acquirer want with a bunch of disparate products held together by marketing glue? - Sell off the individual products - Collect the maintenance revenue stream - Incorporate the products into existing technologies - Farm the existing customer base for migration to another product like cloud, etc. - Hope that there's some secret ""instant upgrade/migration"" tool that can be developed to remove the barrier of switching and then switch existing customers to a new solution Of all of the above I'd think an acquisition by an investment company would be to farm the maintenance revenue stream and if it were a competitor it would be to up-sell the existing base. I still have to squint a great deal to see how such a takeover makes a lot of sense for anyone by investment companies looking to break up the company and sell pieces of it or farm maintenance. And if that were easy to do -- wouldn't Sage have started the ""sell off"" part already (they already seem to be well underway on the farming of maintenance).

I guess these guys figure there is a better return on milking the maintenance than on tbills. It's low risk, almost guaranteed return

Perhaps it would be much easier for an outside investment company to come in and start disposing of product lines. There's no emotional tie and it can be rationalized somewhat. Still not seeing huge value here -- and with Sage's year end approaching who is to say they haven't faned the rumor mill to drive up the stock price?

i'm with you Wayne. Private equity requires tremendous mark up of value to make sense. It also loads the company with debt, stealing cash flow from R&D/Marketing. Sage has already marked the ERP packages it intends to cash out. compared to a purchase value of Sage, they seem almost rounding errors. While Sage has significant new-sale problems with most of its ERP because of no real cloud offering, its connected Services strategy seems to be one that makes the whole more valuable than the parts. So, consider only the ERP they've said they'll keep. Connected Services for credit card, etc actually provides additional value for, say Sage 100. I don't what any investor would change with that to increase value. Who would buy any of the pieces? Sage 100 isn't a stand alone BU. X3 is too small and unproven. I don't see it. I think the rumors get driven by parties trying to get the stock price to oscillate so they can make money on the changes.