HP confirms its position as one of the technological giants with the announcement of a millionaire deal to buy 3Com. The move marks the expansion of HP's corporate product line. 3Com coming to reinforce its presence in the data centres, combined with the networking solutions already avaiable. Also, it's being considered a big step in the competition against Cisco, since it will influence directly the main operations of this top company - major market rival. In addition, HP will benefit from a firmer position in the Chinese market, where 3Com had reasonable growth in recent years and retains good market share.In the financial press, I could basically find this story in 4 sources: BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Generally speaking, the US and the UK media published pieces with similar contents. However, within the American publications there has been some notable differences in the approach to this news.
Cisco is mainly involved in the impact caused by the advances of this deal, and that's on what BusinessWeek decided to focus. Right from the headline and first lines the author makes it clear that his assumption is that this negotiation has been made in order to secure HP's place in the business by calling the attention of the market, especially Cisco's since it is the current "big boss" when it comes to switches, routers and related equipment. The author also adds briefly the importance of the deal in conquering China and finalises with a hopeful tone by mentioning HP's financial figures.
Still considering the outcomes of this acquisition to HP operations in the Chinese market, the FT provided a an article in which the details of 3Com's presence in the Asian country was clarified. Hence the role of Cisco in the news wasn't given much space there. The correspondent sounded quite optimistic in my view, by the way he talked about the expanding opportunities 3Com might offer to HP.
Reuters, characterised by its straight-forward tone typical from press companies, states the main facts surrounding the negotiation using bullet points as well as fast reading sentences which can be very understanding. As a result it mentions a bit of everything, from HP's reputation in the business to Cisco's and China's future impact. Besides, it gave me a broader view of the ongoing situation in the technological market which could be summarised with one of the sentences: "The deal is the latest sign that technology giants from IBM to Oracle Corp are increasingly encroaching in each other's markets as they seek to become one-stop shops for computing, networking and data storage".
Finally, the WSJ's piece for this story emphasises Cisco's role in the acquisition too. But, the author decided to picture that reviewing recent moves in the areas concerning hardware and software, and even other device producers - dispersing a little bit in my opinion. Thus, I wouldn't consider that article really biased, yet phrases like "Buying 3Com was a surprise" and the general tone that is not actually informing about 3Com's good points gave me the impression of his personal view to be more critical.
All in all, the sources I chose here seemed pretty clear and not that favouring to any either side of the competitors involved. Indeed I find it a good thing the different approaches and way of detailing the information, the readers are the ones who are benefited from that. As for the deal itself, my personal view is that HP has a great potential to absorb from 3Com. Nowadays in the business scenario it's widely seen 2 ongoing trends, companies gathering in order to strengthen in a world of increasing competition and the rush to conquer developing markets, mainly the most believed one which is China. Thus, notably HP can combine both and take advantage of a firmer position in the sector in it's possibly successful path in the future, which will alarm its rivals. Therefore, if I were to chose one of the articles I'd go for a combination of the FT and Reuters, that would lead to a piece of news including what I've just mentioned above. The negotiation is to be completed in the first half of 2010, so let's see with which quality HP will really print this deal.
The FT:
Reuters:
The Wall Street Journal:
Good analysis of the style; sentence structure; identifying bullet points etc. Well done 7/10
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