Cisco stock making a new surge

EXECUTIVES SELL $149.7 MILLION IN COMPANY SHARES

By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News

Before Google became Silicon Valley's leading source of new millionaires, there was Cisco Systems.
As the San Jose networking company rose to prominence in the 1990s, its use of stock options and its rocketing stock price enriched legions of employees. Alas, the new century has not been as kind, even though it remains the valley's most valuable company by market value.
After plummeting in late 2000 and early 2001, Cisco's stock has bounced around the $20 range for the past five years. It enjoyed a strong run in 2003, topping off at $29.13 per share in January 2004, before stumbling again. Despite fairly steady growth, investors just seemed to shrug.
Since August, though, Cisco's stock has been making another big push, rising from $17.24 on Aug. 4 to $26.84 Friday. Whether it can sustain that momentum remains to be seen.
But insiders aren't waiting to find out. Ten Cisco insiders have sold $149.7 million in Cisco stock since Aug. 16. The $128.46 million sold since Sept. 1 -- the start of Cisco's second quarter -- marks the most quarterly selling at the company over the past five years, according to Thomson Financial. During that time, insiders sold an average of $28 million each quarter.

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Insiders: Silver Lake's Seagate deal continues to pay off

By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News

Almost six years ago, a little known private equity outfit named Silver Lake Partners created a stir by spending $2 billion to buy esteemed disk drive maker Seagate and take it private. It was an incredibly complex deal that involved a Cayman Islands partnership and spinning off a Seagate software division to create Veritas Software.

While Silver Lake was a new name to most, its investors included an all-star lineup of tech heavyweights such as Oracle's Larry Ellison, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Dell's Michael Dell. And since then, the Menlo Park-based firm has grown to become such a formidable deal maker that it was included in a recent list of private equity firms contacted by the U.S. Justice Department as part of an informal probe into the firms' collaboration on leveraged buyouts.
But even now, Silver Lake continues to profit from the deal that helped put it on the map. Between Nov. 1 and Nov. 8, Silver Lake partner James Davidson, who sits on the Seagate board, sold 11 million of his firm's Seagate shares for $244.45 million.

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Welcome

This is a place where I'll post my weekly Insider Sales Column that I'm writing for the San Jose Mercury News. It runs each Monday on page 2A of the print version. Please enjoy and contact me with any feed back or comments. Here we go....