A fascinating article in San Jose Merc news about the underlying financial engineering in the Seagate (re-)IPO.   First, the setup:

It was only two years ago that a group of investors led by Silver Lake Partners, Texas Pacific Group and August Capital invested $875 million and borrowed an additional $800 million to acquire the disk-drive and storage-area business of Seagate, the venerable Scotts Valley company once headed by Al Shugart.

And what have they been doing the past 2 years?  Spinning off extraneous enterprises and re-focusing on the good old fashioned hard drive biz

...Luczo has flung himself into restructuring the company, cutting 40,000 jobs and pouring money into research and development. The company's share of the disk-drive market is 29.2 percent, up from 23.5 percent in 2001.

And the result?   A financial windfall --

The math tells the story behind this bonanza. The investors and managers were able to buy their Seagate stock at a price estimated at $1.96 a share -- and they're selling for an expected $14 two years later. Not a bad return in a massive tech recession.

This is a textbook case of what good financial engineering is supposed to do.   I read another great article a while back arguing that we'll see more privitization deals, presumably like Seagate, emerging in the tech sector.