Contact: Brenon Daly
The market giveth and the market taketh away. While the giving and taking are usually lopsided, there are rare occasions when it does balance itself out. Consider the recent swings in Sonic Solutions. The company announced the largest deal in its history, the $325m acquisition of DivX, on June 2. Along with the purchase, it also warned that financial results for the quarter were going to be a bit light. That started a slide in shares of Sonic Solutions that had lopped off 40% of the company’s market value by July.
The pain of that slide wasn’t lost on shareholders of DivX. The reason: roughly two-thirds of the consideration for their company was coming in the form of Sonic Solutions stock, with the remaining one-third in cash. (We noted near the bottom of the stock’s slide that the decline had cut the purchase price of DivX by about $50m, or 15% compared to the original offer price.)
But by the time the transaction had closed last Friday, shares of Sonic Solutions had regained the ground they had lost in the four months since the deal was announced. In fact, Sonic Solutions closed Friday at almost exactly the same price it did the day before the company announced the acquisition. So from the perspective of DivX, it was almost like nothing at all happened this summer.