Why Would Icahn Care About an ERP Company?
I returned from vacation to find that Carl Ichan wants to talk with the founding Lawson (LWSN) family and to Lawson CEO Harry Debes about “enhancing the shareholder value” of the 30-plus-year-old ERP company. Doesn’t that usually translate into somebody bites the dust? At MOTO he got the CEO fired. At BEA, he got the company sold out from under the CEO/founder in a bid that arguably undervalued BEA shares. LWSN is trading around $8 and Ichan would probably be happy to get it up to $10 and cash out. But that is most likely not what Lawson’s founders had in mind when they brought in Harry and acquired Intentia and Healthvision in order to hopefully reach critical mass. The Start Tribune has a pretty complete analysis of the news aspect of this “news.” But the story got me thinking about why any investor even cares about ERP. When Microsoft (MSFT) acquired Great Plains and Navision almost 10 years ago, Intuit (INTU) rolled out its then latest Quickbooks, and those 35 separate companies be
