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Shareholders approve Palm's deal with private equity firm

Ed Hardy
This summer, a deal was announced under which a private equity firm, Elevation Partners, will be buying 25% of Palm, Inc. for $325 million. Last week, Palm's stockholders gave their approval to this deal, which is on course to be completed before the end of this year.

The Federal Trade Commision gave its approval in July.

Management changes
As part this deal, Jon Rubinstein, former head of the iPod division at Apple, will join Palm as executive chairman of the board. Rubinstein will lead the company's product-development efforts.

Fred Anderson and Roger McNamee, managing directors and co-founders of Elevation, will also join Palm's board of directors.

Payout for shareholders
In order to allow Elevation to buy a quarter of the company, Palm will need to issue a large number of additional shares. This will decrease the value of all the currently existing stock, so the company will be paying $9 to each current share holder.

Palm will use the $325 million it received from Elevation, along with existing cash and $400 million of new debt to pay for the cash distribution, which will total approximately $940 million.

"We appreciate our stockholders' strong support of these proposals and look forward to an era of renewed innovation and focused execution at Palm," said Ed Colligan, president and CEO.

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