I was just sitting down to pen today’s Display Daily when a story broke over the wire that InFocus Corporation will be acquired by Image Holdings Corporation, based in Oregon and controlled by John Hui, the co-founder of eMachines. According to today’s InFocus press release, Hui will make a tender offer for all outstanding shares of InFocus for the grand total of $39M…or about 95 cents a share.

If you haven’t been following InFocus’ stock price recently, that number may come as a bit of a shock, particularly those readers who recall share prices in the high $30s, prior to the tech bubble collapse in 2000. But Hui’s offer represents a 36% premium over InFocus’ April 9th closing price ($0.70 per share) and a 90% premium over the previous 30-day average price of $0.50.

The recent history of InFocus, one of the first companies to bring overhead projector LCD panels and then portable LCD projectors to the worldwide market, can be best compared to the silent film-era classic "The Perils of Pauline."

You name it - it happened, from massive turnovers of company executives to shareholder revolts, miscues in the home theater front- and rear-projection markets, the acquisition of long-time rival Proxima and ASK, a $1M tax lien and property seizure by the Chinese government, and a failed attempt a few years back by activist shareholders to liquidate the company’s assets for about $6 a share when the stock was trading around $4.25 a share. (Those must seem like the good old days now!)

Despite many years of red ink, InFocus actually ended 2008 with some bucks in the bank, but they were disappearing quickly. According to a Portland Business Journal story from February 10, InFocus had less than $33.4 million in cash, restricted cash and securities on hand on December 31st, down a staggering 60% from $84.1 million at the end of 2007.

Hui’s offer appears, at first glance, to be a "cash for cash" deal. Why bother? $40M represents a "fire sale" purchase price, barely enough to re-start the company - at least, not in its present form. And the value of the company’s other physical assets, such as land and buildings, isn’t substantial.

The answer is the worldwide value of the InFocus brand. InFocus has been around for almost 25 years, and they were a major player (if not the dominant player) in business projection for at least 15 of those years.

InFocus isn’t the only display manufacturer whose brand is currently more valuable than any underlying manufacturing, IP, and physical assets. But that brand has proven to be quite resilient. (Think of the "I’m not quite dead yet" line from the 1977 movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.)

So, while the immediate impact of this transaction is that InFocus will become a privately held company, the less obvious result - and one that I suspect we’ll see fully implemented by Q4 of this year - is the complete transformation of InFocus. This will change it from a manufacturing and technology innovator to a slimmed-down, "me too" OEM projector branding and marketing operation, possibly with a reduced presence or maybe none at all in the Portland, Oregon area.

Now…who’s next?