Tag: divestitures

The ever-rising costs of HP’s makeover

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The bill for Hewlett-Packard’s makeover just keeps climbing. Even beyond the $10bn that has been erased from the market valuation of the company since announcing its unprecedented reorganization, the ailing giant is facing some real cost in the coming days.

For starters, it’s on the hook for $11.7bn to cover its pending purchase of information management vendor Autonomy Corp. That’s no small amount. In fact, it stands as the largest price paid for a software company in seven years. (And it’s one of the richest, valuing Autonomy at almost 12 times trailing sales, while HP itself currently trades at just 0.4x sales.) On top of that, there’s also the $1bn charge that’s looming for the shutdown and restructuring of the ill-fated webOS business.

But both of those costs are likely to be chump change compared to the losses that HP likely faces in getting rid of its Personal Systems Group (PSG) – assuming the company even finds a buyer for its desktop and laptop business. Recall that HP paid roughly $25bn in stock for Compaq, a consolidation move that made HP the largest single vendor of PCs. If it is able to sell that division now, we figure HP would be lucky to get about $5bn for it, or roughly one-fifth the amount it originally paid. (See our full report on HP and the rest of the PC industry.)

In calculating the potential purchase price for PSG – and this is strictly on a back-of-the-envelope basis – we looked back on what IBM got when it divested its PC business back in late 2004. Big Blue’s business was generating about $9bn in sales, and Lenovo paid just $1.75bn in cash and stock, plus the assumption of debt. HP’s PC business is slightly more than four times larger, so applying that loose multiple gets us into the neighborhood of $7bn.

However, a couple of factors will undoubtedly put some pressure on the multiple for HP. First, we would argue that IBM had a much more valuable brand with its ThinkPad line than the HP/Compaq brand. But far more important than those specific concerns around brands is the fact that the broader PC market has eroded significantly in the half-decade since Big Blue divested its business. To get a sense of just how far the PC market has fallen, consider the results from the most recent survey of consumers from our sister company, ChangeWave Research. Earlier this month, just 7% of respondents indicated that they expected to buy a laptop in the coming 90 days, with just 3.5% indicating that they planned to buy a desktop.

Corel erases iGrafx from its portfolio

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

A decade after picking up iGrafx, the private equity-backed Corel firm has divested the business process management (BPM) software company to newly formed buyout shop The Limerock Group. The move should allow new focus and resources for iGrafx, which was always an odd fit inside Corel. For its part, iGrafx sold almost entirely to enterprises, while Corel is known as a home for many faded, second-rate consumer brands, such as WordPerfect and PaintShop.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the iGrafx business suffered from a bit of neglect inside Corel. At one point, we understand the business was generating about $20m in sales, although it is probably only running at about half that level now. One area that iGrafx will undoubtedly look to expand is around consulting and other services that tend to play a not-insignificant part of BPM deployments. IGrafx may look to build that up through internal development, or the newly capitalized company could tuck-in a small consulting shop.

The move by Limerock, a firm founded by the team that built and eventually sold NetQoS for $200m, comes after a number of big-name buyers have inked BPM deals of their own over the past two years. (Limerock was advised by Northside Advisors, while Pagemill Partners worked the other side.) Significant acquirers that have bought their way into the market since mid-2009 include IBM, Software AG, Progress Software and Open Text. Valuations for these BPM deals has ranged from roughly 1x sales to almost 6x sales. Given iGrafx’s slumping sales and its awkward fit inside Corel, we suspect the business would have likely traded at the low end of that range.

LANDesk nearly done

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

After a nearly half-year process, Emerson Electric is close to having LANDesk off its books. Emerson, which picked up the systems management vendor when it acquired Avocent for $1.2bn last fall, classifies LANDesk as a ‘discontinued operation’ and hired Greenhill & Co to advise it on the divestiture. We understand that final bids are being submitted right now, and a deal announcement is expected in two weeks or so.

Although it’s unclear who will end up with LANDesk, several sources have indicated that the buyer is likely to be another company, rather than a buyout shop. (Corporate castoffs often land in the portfolios of PE firms for a period of ‘rehabilitation’ before being snapped up by another company. Indeed, that was the path for LANDesk, which was sold off by Intel in 2002 to a pair of PE buyers, Vector Capital and VSpring Capital, before being bought four years later by Avocent.) Of course, a PE buyer could pair the LANDesk property with an existing portfolio company to enjoy some of the cost savings that generally allow strategic buyers to outbid pure financial buyers.

In an earlier report, my colleague Dennis Callaghan highlighted a few potential buyers for LANDesk, including virtualization vendors, hardware companies and security firms. However, we understand that the obvious suitors in those sectors are no longer in the process: VMware and Lenovo, both of which have key partnerships with LANDesk, are said to have moved on.

Another corporate buyer that we can scratch off the list? Novell. Apparently, the company was aggressively courting LANDesk early in the process, including offering a rumored high price in exchange for exclusivity. Of course, Novell has other issues to contend with, and may well be a seller of the overall company rather than a buyer of other assets.

One last sale at VeriSign?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

With VeriSign having somewhat unexpectedly shed its identity and authentication business to Symantec last week, we started to think about what other transactions might be coming from the former serial acquirer. What about this for a final deal? A sale of itself to a private equity shop. After all, the value of the company is hardly reflected at all on Wall Street.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting that there are any plans to take VeriSign private, at least not that we’ve heard making the rounds. Instead, we’re looking at a leveraged buyout from a strictly hypothetical view, given that the company has a number of appealing characteristics for any would-be financial buyer.

For starters, VeriSign is now a very clean story, with just the core registry business remaining. For all intents and purposes, the registry business, which handles all the .com and .net registration, is a legal monopoly. The business certainly enjoys monopoly-like operating margins of about 40%. VeriSign recently indicated that sales for 2010 (excluding the identity and authentication business) will be in the neighborhood of $675m. Loosely, that would generate about $270m in operating income at the company this year.

Fittingly for a cash machine, VeriSign has a fat treasury. At the end of the first quarter, it held nearly $1.6bn in cash. Add to that amount the $1.3bn that Symantec will be handing over for the divested businesses, and VeriSign will have about $3bn in cash banked. The vendor’s market cap is $5bn, giving it an enterprise value of just $2bn. That works out to just 3 times sales and a little more than 7x operating cash flow. (Granted, that’s without any acquisition premium.)

If we were a buyout shop or some other acquisitive-minded group, another way to look at it is that VeriSign’s remaining registry business currently trades at a discount to the security business that it just got out of. And that’s despite the fact that the registry business is far more profitable and faster-growing than the security business. (In 2009, VeriSign’s naming business increased revenue 12%, four times the rate of growth of the security business.) Maybe it’s time for one last sale at VeriSign?

LANDesk on the block

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

When Emerson Electric picked up Avocent for $1.2bn last fall, we noted that the acquisition made a great deal of sense as a way for Emerson to get deeper into the datacenter. We also noted that the systems management business that Emerson was inheriting because of Avocent’s earlier purchase of LANDesk looked ‘increasingly out of place.’

No surprise, then, that Emerson has formally begun a process to sell off the LANDesk unit. What is kind of a surprise, however, is the fact that LANDesk is shaping up as a comparatively pricey divestiture. We’ve heard talk of 2 or even 3 times sales for the $150m business. That could get the price back to roughly the $416m that Avocent originally paid for LANDesk back in 2006.

The reason LANDesk is going for a richer multiple than the conventional 2x sales for a divestiture is that there appears to be a number of interested parties for the business. As my colleague Dennis Callaghan outlines in a new report, LANDesk could appeal to virtualization vendors (notably existing partner VMware), hardware providers (notably existing partner Lenovo) and security firms, which might be looking to match Symantec’s pickup of Altiris. (Incidentally, Big Yellow paid about 3.5x trailing sales in its big systems management buy.)

Additionally, the size and stability of LANDesk is also expected to draw interest from buyout shops. We understand that Greenhill & Co, which advised Emerson on the purchase of Avocent, is also handling the planned unwind of LANDesk. Emerson already classifies LANDesk as a ‘discontinued operation’ and plans to have the divestiture done this year.

Phoenix sheds FailSafe

Brenon Daly

Contact: John Abbott

Phoenix Technologies announced at the start of the year that it was putting its plans to expand beyond the core BIOS software business on hold, and hired GrowthPoint Technology Partners to find a buyer for its non-strategic technology assets. A short time later, CEO Woodson Hobbs was out the door, followed soon after by CFO Richard Arnold. Ironically, Hobbs was originally hired in September 2006 to turn the company around, and his first task back then was to rebuild the BIOS business after Phoenix had lost its way through diversification. It appears that Hobbs fell into the same trap by putting too much effort into HyperSpace, a hypervisor that was being positioned as the basis for an OS for netbooks. Tom Lacey, who previously worked at Applied Materials Inc and before that Flextronics, took over as CEO in February.

Now a buyer has been announced for the first of Phoenix’s unwanted assets: FailSafe, a theft-loss protection and prevention system for laptops, and the associated Freeze computer locking system. The acquirer is security tools provider Absolute Software and the price tag is $6.9m. (This is Absolute’s second acquisition in five months: last December it spent $9.6m on the assets of Pole Position Software, primarily for the target’s LANrev asset management package). Phoenix is still trying to offload HyperSpace itself as well as the eSupport.com line of online PC diagnostics tools.

Since the need for a new OS to run on netbooks now appears to be fading away, HyperSpace could conceivably be utilized by vendors addressing the desktop virtualization market. However, the largest players here – VMware, Citrix and Microsoft – are working with their own hypervisors and are unlikely to want another. Interestingly, Phoenix has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against startup DeviceVM, the developer of the SplashTop lightweight Linux OS. DeviceVM has licensing deals in place with netbook and laptop makers Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Acer and Sony.

New CEO Lacey claims that excellent progress is being made on refocusing Phoenix back onto its BIOS business. At the end of fiscal 2009 (ending September 30), the noncore products made up less than 10% of Phoenix’s $67.7m in revenue, an overall decline of 8% over 2008. That means core BIOS sales are back down to the same level as they were in fiscal 2006, despite the acquisition of direct rival General Software Inc in July 2008. In its most recent first quarter, the company posted revenue of $15.6m (down from $17.4m in Q1 2009) and a profit of $1.1m (including a one-off $7.1m income tax refund). Phoenix has cash on hand of $27.9m.

freenet: getting paid to sell

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

In a time when nearly all divestitures are done on the cheap, freenet’s recent sale of its mass-market hosting business Strato generated an unexpectedly rich return for the German telco. In fact, freenet more than doubled its money in the five years that it owned Strato. Back in December 2004, freenet handed over $177m ($107m in cash, $70m in equity) to German network equipment provider Teles for Strato. When freenet shed Strato to Deutsche Telekom (DT) two weeks ago, it pocketed $410m. (Arma Partners advised freenet on the divestiture.)

On top of that return, of course, freenet will hold on to the cash that Strato generated while owned by freenet. That’s not an insubstantial consideration, given that Strato ran at an Ebitda margin in the mid-30% range. We understand that Strato was tracking to about $50m in Ebitda for 2009, up slightly from about $46m last year. Revenue at Strato was also expected to show a mid-single-digit percentage increase in 2009, despite the tough economic conditions in freenet’s home market of Germany. DT’s bid values Strato at roughly 3x trailing sales and nearly 9x trailing Ebitda. That’s a solid valuation for corporate castoffs, which typically garner about 1x trailing sales and maybe 4-5x Ebitda.

Freenet’s divestiture of the Strato hosting business to DT comes a half-year after it sold its DSL business to United Internet, a sale that was also banked by Arma. The company has been looking to shed businesses as a way to pay down the debt that it took on for its $2.57bn acquisition of debitel in April 2008. Since that landmark deal, freenet has focused its operations on mobile communications, and had been reporting the DSL and Strato businesses separately. We understand that there may be additional divestitures by freenet, but they will be smaller transactions for more ‘ancillary’ businesses.

Amid consolidation, Ixia opens its wallet

-Contact authors: Thomas Rasmussen, Steve Steinke

Historically, networking test and measurement vendor Ixia has never been much of a shopper. However, that has started to change this year as the Calabasas, California-based company reached for Catapult Communications in June for $105m as well as wrapped up its $44m acquisition of rival Agilent Technologies’ N2X product line earlier this month. For those keeping track, Ixia’s recent deals represent some 85% of all M&A spending at the company since 2002. (We would note that the pickup in dealmaking, coincidentally or not, has come since a European private equity investor joined the firm’s board and its strategic planning committee in October 2008.) Having recently assumed the role of consolidator, the small-cap vendor ($425m market capitalization) says it still has about $85m in cash after its recent purchases and is still pursuing deals. Who might be next?

One of the growing fields in the space is wireless network testing. Given Ixia’s desire for a larger presence in the segment, we think it could look to snap up a company here. Two interesting targets are privately held Metuchen, New Jersey-based Berkeley Varitronics Systems and Bandspeed of Austin, Texas. As for more traditional targets, we would point to competitors ClearSight Networks of Fremont, California, and Canada’s publically traded EXFO. EXFO currently sports an enterprise valuation of approximately $150m and would almost double Ixia’s revenue. Doubling down on EXFO might not be such a bad idea given that, despite its aggressiveness, Ixia is still relatively small compared to larger players such as JDSU and Spirent, which could look to do some consolidation in the space of their own.

Ixia’s historical acquisitions

Date announced Target Deal value
October 21, 2009 Agilent Technologies (N2X product line assets) $44m
May 11, 2009 Catapult Communications $105m
January 24, 2006 Dilithium Networks (test tool business assets) $5.1m
July 18, 2005 Communication Machinery $4m
July 14, 2003 NetIQ (Chariot product assets) $17.5m
February 15, 2002 Empirix (ANVL product assets) $5m

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

Summer sun dries up deal flow

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

It really was the lazy days of summer, at least in terms of tech deal-making. With summer officially wrapping up on Labor Day, spending on M&A is running at less than one-fifth the level it has been in any of the three previous years. (For our purposes, we mark summer as beginning on Memorial Day and ending on Labor Day.) In that period this year, acquirers spent a mere $18bn – down from $139bn in the same period in 2008, $101bn in 2007 and $123bn in 2006.

And spending has slowed recently, dipping to just $4.3bn since August 1. (Nearly half of that came in a single transaction, eBay’s divestiture of its Skype property to a PE-led consortium.) Granted, it’s not uncommon for spending to dip in late summer, as even the hardest-working deal-makers look to kick back on the beach for a bit. But this year, it appears as if folks went ahead and remained on vacation. Speaking of which, we will not be publishing on Labor Day but will pick up again on Tuesday, the other side of summer.

Zix: a prescription for divestiture

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

One conclusion to draw from the recent pickup in divestitures is that dividing corporate attention often means diluting corporate returns. Consider the situation at Zix Corp. The Dallas-based company has a small but growing business selling email encryption. In mid-2003, Zix moved into electronic prescriptions through its $1.5m acquisition of the assets of PocketScript. The plan was to expand its business of providing secure communications to the billions of prescriptions written every year in a less costly and more secure way.

However, after nearly six years of trying to realize those goals, Zix has little to show for it. Revenue from the e-prescriptions unit totaled just $5.4m, or 19% of Zix’s overall sales, in 2008. Sales at the division last year slipped 11% from the year before, compared to a 26% increase in its core email encryption business. (And we would note that both units employed some 73 people, giving an idea of the relative returns of each unit.)

Moreover, the e-prescriptions division has only one-third the number of subscribers that Zix estimates would be required to cover the costs of developing the service, according to the company’s own calculations. And now, Zix has acknowledged that it may never get the business to that level on its own. The firm hired Allen & Co late last week to advise it on ‘strategic alternatives’ for its e-prescriptions unit.