Contact: Scott Denne
Hexagon has shored up its position in the mining sector with the purchase of Mintec, a mine-planning software company. The deal is the fourth mine-focused acquisition in the last year for Hexagon, a maker of measurement, mapping and CAD software that’s picked up its pace of acquisitions lately.
The acquisition of Mintec, which we estimate has roughly $30-40m in annual revenue, comes a month after Hexagon’s reach for SAFEmine, a maker of fleet management sensors and software for the mining industry, and six months after it bought Devex, a Brazil-based maker of 3-D mine-visualization software. Over the last year, Hexagon has acquired six companies that were at least partially focused on the mining industry. Terms of the Mintec acquisition were not disclosed.
Those deals came amid a backdrop of consolidation in mining technology during the last two years. According to the 451 M&A KnowledgeBase, there have been 20 acquisitions of technology companies that serve the mining sector, worth a combined $5.58bn in disclosed value. The entire five-year period before that saw only 19 deals worth $287.7m.
Mintec is a typical deal for Hexagon, which has grown its business across several industrial markets through a combination of technology and geographic tuck-ins over the past decade. Its pace of deals slowed a bit while it digested the $2.1bn purchase of Intergraph in mid-2010. The company didn’t make a single acquisition in the year following that deal, only one in 2011, four in 2012 and then nine in 2013. Mintec is its second so far in 2014.
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