Another LMI engineer here. The deal itself would take place next year anyway. Any restructuring would be late 2020/early 2021 the earliest. The deal provides

Another LMI engineer here. The deal itself would take place next year anyway. Any restructuring would be late 2020/early 2021 the earliest. The deal provides an $86 exit for every single shareholder (including employees & managers who own shares). Not saying no to such an offer makes sense, but it also implies that nobody is really convinced that these stocks will ever be worth, say, $100. All-time top was $120 in early 2018, since then the price plummeted and has been moving sideways. If looking from this perspective - how does this PE firm plan to make money, especially that the deal implies that most shareholders don't expect this stock to rise by any means, which is a bad sign for any kind of publicly traded company? These PEs would buy the company for ~$4bn. Last year's EBITDA is was just short of $400M - probably they don't want to wait 10+ years for their investment to pay back. Maybe they will try to 'restructure' (i.e. cut expenses where possible, split the company into multiple companies along business units, deprecate some products), get as much profits as possible in the upcoming years and then try to sell the whole thing again to e.g. a tech company. Of course this is just speculation, but keeping things 'as is' simply wouldn't generate enough returns to justify the all-cash investment.