Palm CEO plays down takeover talk

Posted on April 9th, 2007 by Tadd Rosenfeld

According to Bloomberg, Palm Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan is not concerned about investor calls to sell the phone maker and is focused on sales and operations.

“When you’re a public company,” Colligan said, “there are always people who may or may not be interested in any point of time of owning that asset. We don’t control that. If that happens, it happens…. I can’t sit here and worry about that. I can only worry about how the business is performing and what can we do as a team to do better, to get our products out faster, to drive for higher reliability, to grab more market share.”

Colligan told mytreo.net and the Associated Press at a conference last year that he was not in talks with prospective buyers, and that he wished to keep the company independent. Palm’s largest shareholders have been vocal about their desire for a competitor to buy the company out. Acquisition speculation increased when the Wall Street Journal reported that Morgan Stanley was retained to advise the company about its options.

Colligan explained to Bloomberg that Morgan Stanley has been Palm’s adviser for years. He said Palm has been primarily focused the past two years standardizing the Treo’s core to cut production costs and get handsets built faster, which will allow Palm to create a new handset in as little as nine months, down from as much as two years. Palm indicated the design change allows Palm to use fewer parts and buy larger quantities of a single component, cutting material costs. Palm has an investor conference in New York tomorrow, where the company will explain this operating strategy to investors.

Palm shares have risen 25 percent this year before today on takeover speculation and increasing consumer adoption of Treo smartphones.

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Source: Bloomberg Article

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