Citrix bought Wrike from Vista for 2.5B. Wrike had negligible revenue.
Citrix ELT tanks stock - No one believes 2021 was an accident.
Vista uses 2.5B in cash and Tibco Equity to bankroll 16B in debt for CTXS acquisition.
Citrix ELT parachutes out with multi-million dollar payouts.
4 replies (most recent on top)
Do you have paperwork? It doesn't matter whether it's fraud if you can't prove it.
"Pro ball" means no paper trail.
You are confusing incompetence with mal-intent... In 2020, the sales team was told to sell as much as possible during COVID. They did, but sold mostly 1 year licenses, because customers were not sure whether they will need the licenses in the long-term. That created a bubble that was hard to replicate in 2021. That was a challenge that many other companies also faced- see Zoom, Peloton...
The issue and opportunity for the PE deal was structural though. Not having a real growth business beyond VDI, just relying on extracting more from the customers for the same old stuff. PE are really good in squeezing that last drop of milk from the cow. Unpleasant work but someone has to do it, and they make a pile with it.
The real incompetence was acquiring Wrike- a completely left-field solution that had no commonality whatsoever with core Citrix. That's when I think Vista and Elliott saw that the Citrix ELT was digging their ho-e and waited for the ho-e to be big enough...
Executive white-collar crime is rarely punished. Remember, this is America...
Agreed.. COVID profits simply delayed this. This has been in the works for years.. we even had structures offered during covid in 2020 to make 2021 a poor year. This was all planned and intentional.