Edelman Reportedly Makes Datapoint Bid

Asher B. Edelman, an investor who owns a 10.8% stake in Datapoint Corp., offered $416.3 million to acquire the rest of the computer maker’s stock, a source involved in the proposal said Friday.

The source said the $23-a-share offer was made to the investment firm Kidder, Peabody & Co., which Datapoint retained to explore various proposals after Edelman disclosed last month that he was accumulating Datapoint shares.

The source would not divulge details of Edelman’s offer, saying they would be filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Followers of Datapoint on Wall Street said that, while the offer was no surprise, they were reluctant to comment on it since the terms were not available.

The stock market also appeared to view the offer with caution. Datapoint’s stock rose 50 cents a share to $20.875 on the New York Stock Exchange, after losing $0.625 the previous day.

Analysts said Wall Street wanted to know whether the offer would be in cash or involve securities, how it would be financed and whether Edelman was making the bid alone or in concert with other investors.

The analysts also said that until more details were known, it was hard to determine whether Edelman was interested in operating Datapoint, selling the company piecemeal or forcing it to seek a merger with another company at a price above $23 a share.

Edleman, reached by telephone at his New York office, said he had no comment on his reported proposal. Edelman currently owns about 2.1 million of Datapoint’s 20.2 million total common shares outstanding.

At Datapoint’s headquarters in San Antonio, spokesman Jack Milne said he had not seen any details concerning the takeover proposal and hence declined comment.

When Edelman disclosed his Datapoint holdings to the SEC last month, he said he considered Datapoint a “good candidate” for being acquired, liquidated or merged into another concern.

In the past, Edelman has often acquired stakes in companies for the purpose of restructuring the operations, including the sale of assets, in an effort to maximize shareholders’ return.

For example, he recently bought into Mohawk Data Sciences Corp., a computer and communications systems maker, and was named vice chairman. From that position, he is pushing to sell Mohawk’s assets, pay off its debt and distribute the remaining proceeds to shareholders.

Datapoint has fallen on hard times in recent years after recording rapid growth in the late 1970s.

In its fiscal first quarter ended last Oct. 27, the company reported a 73% slide in net income to $1.5 million, while sales edged up only 1.5% to $140.1 million.

The company had been a darling on Wall Street, in part because it pioneered the “local area network,” which linked its various computers and other equipment and allowed them to share information.

But Datapoint has struggled in the increasingly competitive computer market of the 1980s, in which a host of companies have developed local area networks. Its momentum also suffered after the company underwent an accounting scandal and management shake-up in 1982.

Some industry trackers said Datapoint also made a serious mistake in waiting until four months ago to provide equipment that allows its computers to communicate with the best-selling computers made by International Business Machines Corp.--a move many other competitors already had taken.