The revolt against the landmark $24.4 billion buyout of Dell originated a thousand miles from Wall Street, in an office park overlooking an arterial highway in Memphis, Tenn. Graceland Mansion is 20 minutes away. Beale Street, the city's corridor of blues music and open-air drinking, another ten.
On an upper floor of that building are the offices of Southeastern Asset Management. O. Mason Hawkins and Staley Cates run the $33-billion asset manager with a small staff. They encourage their analysts to indulge in research pursuits, and relish the low profile that a Memphis headquarters provides. "Our egos are not so out of control that we think we're Warren Buffett or John Templeton, but it's not to be lost that Buffett and Templeton didn't have waves of industry analysts and that they're in the middle of nowhere. I don't think it's a crazy thing," Cates said a few months ago in a rare interview.
Wood trimming and panels—made from longleaf pines, the timber that Hawkins' father milled—adorn the office walls, and make the place seem like a hunting lodge. And Hawkins and Cates are indeed stalking a prize: a better deal for Dell's investors. They're "extremely disappointed" with the bid and basically say that billionaire founder Michael Dell and his investment partner, Silver Lake, are trying to steal the eponymous PC maker. They plan to vote against the deal, and Reuters is reporting that they're putting together a coalition of like-minded value investors. Right now, if Reuters is correct, the Southeastern-led group controls about 11% of Dell; Michael Dell held more than 14% as of last May.
Cates and Hawkins do often become activists. While they don't command the same kind of name recognition as, say, Carl Icahn, they regularly partner with folks like him (Icahn joined them in Chesapeake Energy), and their investing strategy winds up in B-school curricula. Other major Southeastern investments today include Loews Corp., Directv and FedEx.
Forbes was the last publication to score an interview with the reclusive investors, and in December, published a lengthy profile on the controversy surrounding the two investors—several bad bets have tainted their excellent long-term record. To learn more about the daring duo now set to battle Dell, the December Forbes story can be found here.
Reach Abram Brown at abrown@forbes.com.
