UPDATED 17:28 EST / APRIL 23 2013

Activist Investors Talking-Up Microsoft With Billion-Dollar Buyout

Is Microsoft underappreciated as a software giant? One hedge-fund thinks so.

Jeffrey W. Ubben, founder of ValueAct Capital Management L, stated that his firm owns about $2 billion dollars in Microsoft stock during an investor conference.  The information suggests that holds less than 1 percent of Microsoft’s total shares outstanding.  But what exactly brought about the hedge-fund executive’s disclosure?

On this morning’s Live NewsDesk Show with Kristin Feledy, SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto dropped by to give his Breaking Analysis on the situation.

First off, ValueAct is known for flipping things around, investing in companies and seeking out board seats and changes in companies it invests on, thus being dubbed as an activist investor.  It invests in companies to shake it up.

As for Ubben’s disclosure, Casaretto stated that he just want it to be known that his firm own a significant chunk of Microsoft shares and is drawing attention to the fact that Microsoft’s business isn’t appreciated by investors as it should be.  Ubben believes that Microsoft is dominant player in the tech industry and investing in the company will pay off in the long term.

Ubben’s comment may  have done Microsoft some good as it shares were up by 3.6 percent yesterday.   A Microsoft spokesperson already stated that the company welcomes investors’ perspective, but what actually brought the hedge-fund exec from suddenly speaking his mind?

“Microsoft spent the latter of 2012 and the early part of this year really reinventing themselves,” Casaretto said.  “Say what you will about their consumer ambitions, but their valued proposition to the enterprise is pretty incredible and unparalleled, really.  Because if you think about every single text section, every single segment that’s out there that we talked about today, whether it’s cloud, the database, Bid Data, virtualization, web apps, mobility… Microsoft has a competitive and often leading presence out there.

“So, in each of those markets, and there’s only one company you can really describe like that, and that’s Microsoft.  Now, the backend corporate software and the databases that Ubben talks about they’re no different.  Microsoft has got some leading products there.  Their secret server product, they’re still a giant, still big.  It may not be the attention-getting headline, cloud buzz type of company there is, but in the real world, in the enterprise where most of the adoption is, most of the growth remains to be seen, they deliver products that are easy to adopt , easy to integrate, easy to manage and that’s Microsoft’s value prop to the enterprise.”


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