Interest in HP Spikes After News of Dell Buyout

Unnamed sources have told Reuters that Hewlett-Packard (HP) has seen in recent days a surge in interest from other companies looking to purchase some of its assets. However HP reportedly has no intentions of selling any major unit despite what's going on with rival Dell.

During this past week, reports surfaced that Dell, a $19 billion company, is in talks with private equity firms on a potential buyout. The company has supposedly conducted "on-and-off" talks with the firms for quite some time, but they began to heat up late last year.

According to unnamed sources, a deal involves equity investment from CEO Michael Dell himself who owns 14-percent of the struggling company, or 244 million shares. Dell founded the company back in 1984 when he was just 19 years old. He now invests and manages his vast fortune through MSD Capital, Reuters reports.

Earlier this week as news of Dell's buyout began to surface, unnamed sources said many potential buyers were now swarming around HP as well. These buyers expressed an interest not in the company as a whole, but its Autonomy and EDS units. The values of these units have been written down in the billions of dollars since they were acquired in the past years.

But there's no sign of HP giving up these two units. HP Chief Executive Meg Whitman has expressed in the past that the Autonomy and EDS divisions are key technological assets for the company. Instead what HP plans shed will be the non-core, small assets that "no longer help us meet our objectives" as announced in a recent regulatory filing.

_{Contact Us for News Tips, Corrections and Feedback}