Sale: Palm grinded between competition

Smartphone company looking for buyers - HTC and Lenovo interested

A sale of the ailing smartphone manufacturer Palm has already become apparent in the past few quarters. At least a solution to the group's financial problems became necessary. Now Palm is looking for buyers together with Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners, as Bloomberg reports, citing Insider. Despite the "iPhone killer" Palm Pre, the company was apparently crushed between overpowering competitors such as Nokia, Apple, Google or Microsoft. With HTC and Lenovo there should already be interested parties.

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Smartphone manufacturer Palm before a possible sale (Photo: palm.com)

"Palm got the curve from PDAs to smartphones very late and had no special devices on offer for a long time. The company still gets good reviews for the Palm OS operating system," says Nicolas von Stackelberg, an analyst at Macquarie http://www.macquarie.com, in conversation with pressetext. The sale would therefore not be a surprise. According to data from comScore, Palm's smartphone market share in the US has recently fallen to 6,1 percent.

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Interest in takeover remains questionable
Even the roughly one year old Palm Pre, which was supposed to stand up to the Apple iPhone and bring Palm back into the black, could hardly stimulate demand. In the current final quarter of the fiscal year, the company expects again slumped revenues, after a deficit of 22 million dollars graced the balance sheet in the previous three months alone. Who would actually submit an offer for Palm remains open for the time being. Neither HTC nor Lenovo have wanted to comment so far.
"A serious interest from HTC in particular would be surprising," says Stackelberg. The Taiwanese have a strong position in the smartphone segment anyway. After Windows Mobile and Android with Palm OS, it makes little sense to "tie up an additional operating system that has to be further developed," the expert told pressetext. Takeover rumors had already led to price jumps in palm paper on the stock exchange last week, in which the stock rose from $ 3,86 to $ 5,16.

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