Tag: Wall Street

Signal Hill draws a bead on Updata

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The aftershocks just keep reverberating across the tech banking landscape. Three months after Stifel Financial acquired midmarket bank Thomas Weisel Partners, another non-tech bank has used M&A to build up its tech advisory practice. On Tuesday, Signal Hill announced that it has purchased Updata Advisors, with all six of Updata’s bankers joining the Baltimore-based firm that has its roots in Alex. Brown.

The deal marks the fourth acquisition of a bank with at least one tech advisory credit so far in 2010. That compares to just six acquisitions in all of 2009. However, this year’s activity trails the massive consolidation we saw during the Wall Street turmoil of 2008, when no less than 14 banks – ranging from boutiques to multibillion-dollar financial giants – got snapped up.

Financial terms weren’t disclosed. But we understand that Updata’s partners rolled over their equity into Signal Hill and now hold a minority stake in the bank. Talks between the two sides played out rather quickly, just over the past three months or so. The firms are neighbors, and are relatively well-known along the mid-Atlantic seaboard. (To be clear, Updata Advisors – the M&A wing of Updata – will be moving under the Signal Hill brand, while the investment arm, Updata Partners, will continue doing business on its own.)

For Updata, the deal comes at a time when it has rung up a fair number of recent advisory credits. The boutique has five prints so far this year, including advising ChosenSecurity on its sale to PGP and PurchasingNet’s sale to Versata. Last year, Updata had sole buyside credit for Compuware’s $295m purchase of Gomez. Overall on our league table, Updata ranked 16th in 2009 and 10th in 2008 in terms of number of advised transactions.

Macrovision buying again?

Email: Yulitza Peraza, Thomas Rasmussen

Since the start of 2008, Macrovision has put on hold its previously active acquisition program and has instead focused solely on divestitures. Now, it looks like the company may be done shedding businesses and may actually look to add them. The switch comes as Macrovision dumped its tremendously unprofitable eMeta business for an estimated $800,000 in November (down significantly from the $35m it paid for the unit in 2006), and finally closed its $255m TV Guide Network sale to Lionsgate in March. Macrovison popped back up as a buyer for the first time in 10 months in mid-April, purchasing Muze from Enterprise Partners Venture Capital for $16.5m.

Macrovision’s portfolio cleanup hasn’t been lost on Wall Street. Shares of the digital home entertainment giant are up 60% so far this year, pushing its market capitalization to about $2bn. It also holds nearly $300m of cash and short-term investments in its treasury. On the other side of the balance sheet, it holds some $888m of debt. Investors will get their latest update on Macrovision on Thursday, as the company is slated to report first-quarter earnings.

In terms of M&A, Macrovision tells us it’s ready to continue shopping, albeit opportunistically. (We suspect that, given its current debt load, the firm won’t be looking at large deals.) As possible targets, we would highlight a pair of micro-cap digital content companies. First, OpenTV, an interactive TV broadcasting middleware vendor that is already reviewing an outright takeover offer by Kudelski Group, which already owns 28% of the company. (OpenTV shares are trading above the offer price, but even then the firm is valued at only twice its cash holdings.) A second possibility is SeaChange, a digital video storage & distribution vendor that trades at just 0.6x enterprise value/trailing 12-month revenue. Picking up either company would help to bolster Macrovision’s standing in the digital content distribution market as well as enhance the value of its metadata search business.

Macrovision’s buying and selling since 2002

Type Total value Total volume
Acquisitions $3.2bn 11
Divestitures $510m 5

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

CA back in M&A

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

It turns out that there is some shopping going on out on Long Island, after all. Back in September, we noted that CA Inc had been out of the market for two years and that some bankers weren’t ‘bothering with the trip’ out to the company’s headquarters. (On a recent call with CA’s corporate development team, which has added four members since the start of the year, one participant good-naturedly tweaked us that he had to end our call to catch a meeting a meeting with a banker.)

Since our original piece, the company has done a lot more than just meet with bankers or ‘book read.’ It has closed three deals and has others in ‘various stages.’ (One note about the M&A pause: CA skipped a period of high-priced deals, and will undoubtedly find that it will get more bang for its buck in the current environment and into next year. In our recent survey of corporate development officials, nine out of 10 said private company valuations are going to come down in 2009.)

The return to shopping is part of CA’s announced intent to add 1-2% of revenue through acquisitions over the year. (On a current $4.1bn revenue base, that works out to $40-$80m of sales at acquired companies.) CA will likely be talking about that – along with other financial matters – during its annual meeting with Wall Street analysts on Friday.

CA’s return to the market

Date Target Target sector
November 13, 2008 Eurekify Identity & access management
October 15, 2008 Optinuity Infrastructure management
October 7, 2008 IDFocus Identity & access management

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

National Lampoon CEO indicted

Brenon Daly

A month ago, we wrote about one of the more unusual deals that we have seen in some time: National Lampoon picked up BarackObamaJokes.com just after the election. At the time, we noted that the acquisition was part of a larger shopping spree by the long-in-the-tooth humor site, which has inked a half-dozen deals so far this year. It was part of a make-over of National Lampoon from a licensing outfit (living off royalties from Animal House, the Vacation series and other earlier films) to one with actual operations. Additionally, we noted that the company traded on the Amex.

Imagine our surprise this morning amid reports that National Lampoon’s CEO Dan Laikin (who we spoke with around the deal) has been arrested and charged with conspiracy and securities fraud, allegedly trying to improperly inflate the company’s share price. According to the indictment, Laikin hired stock promoters to buy National Lampoon shares, as well as bribing other brokers to buy shares. Knowing that, Laikin’s final comments to us make a lot more sense: He asked if we were planning on buying any shares for ourselves.

NetApp: Barenaked savings

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

What do the Barenaked Ladies and SnapMirror for Open Systems have in common? Well, both have been canceled recently by NetApp in a bid to save money as growth rates at the storage giant continue to head south. The company is currently more than halfway through its fiscal year, which wraps at the end of April, and its projected growth rate of 9% is shaping up to be just half the level it was last year (18%), which was half the level it was the year before that (36%). And given the economic environment, estimates may well decline again between now and when it actually reports results.

Like many companies facing the current recession, NetApp’s answer has been to cut costs. In October, it scratched plans for its user conference, NetApp Accelerate (the Barenaked Ladies had been booked to play one night at the event, which was slated for February). And then last week, NetApp said in an SEC filing that it was shuttering the SnapMirror for Open Systems product line. It will take a charge of as much as $20m (roughly two-thirds of that as a straight write-down and one-third for possible payments for facilities closures and severance agreements).

SnapMirror came with NetApp’s pricey acquisition of Topio in November 2006. The company paid $160m for Topio, which we understand was generating less than $10m in sales. The curtain will fall on SnapMirror before the end of NetApp’s fiscal year, which should help its cost structure for the year. NetApp could certainly use a boost in this area. The company runs at just a 10% operating margin, and has seen the increase in operating expenses outstrip the increase in sales during the first two quarters of its current fiscal year.

Select NetApp acquisitions

Date Target Deal value Rationale
January 2008 Onaro $105m SAN management software
November 2006 Topio $160m Disaster-recovery software
June 2005 Decru $272m Storage security
November 2003 Spinnaker Networks $300m High-end storage

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

Thain’s thin fees

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

In the combination of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, it’s all over but the shouting. The banks held separate shareholder meetings Friday to take the pending deal to their respective shareholder bases, with both sides approving it. (Originally valued at some $50bn, the slump in shares of Bank of America has cut the final price of the all-equity transaction to less than half that amount.) The deal will officially close before year-end.

While all that seems straightforward enough, the shouting is coming from a showdown over (what else?) money. Specifically, the insistence by Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain that he’s due a $10m bonus for his work over the past year. We’ll leave the debate on ‘Wall Street greed’ to Lou Dobbs and others, and, similarly, will pass on offering thoughts on whether the bonus would make Thain overpaid or not. However, we would note that a $10m advisory fee for a $21bn deal is hardly exorbitant, as any banker would tell you.

Select 2008 deals for Merrill Lynch and Bank of America

Date Acquirer Target Deal value
October 2008 ebay (Merrill Lynch) Bill Me Later $945m
October 2008 Hewlett-Packard LeftHand Networks (Merrill Lynch) $360m
July 2008 Brocade Communications Systems (Bank of America) Foundry Networks (Merrill Lynch) $2.6bn
April 2008 Blue Coat Systems (Merrill Lynch) Packeteer $268m
March 2008 BMC Software (Merrill Lynch) BladeLogic $800m
January 2008 Microsoft FAST Search & Transfer (Merrill Lynch) $1.2bn

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

Of ‘corrections’ and ‘recalibrations’

Brenon Daly

Since the beginning of September, a new euphemism has found its way into Wall Street parlance: ‘recalibration.’ It is a close cousin to the original euphemism, ‘correction.’ In fact, the pair of linguistically neutral terms are often popping up in the same sentence, such as ‘Given the market’s correction, we have recalibrated the deal.’ We gather that’s a lot more sensitive than saying, ‘Look, stocks have gone to hell, so we slashed the deal.’

Whatever the language, we saw two cases of this on Wednesday. Not unexpectedly, Brocade ‘amended’ its offer to buy Foundry, originally inked in late July. (‘Did we say $3bn? We meant $2.6bn.’) And Broadcom took a pair of scissors to its agreement to buy AMD’s digital television unit, cutting 25% from the price.

At least the deals will get done (probably). The same can’t be said for a transaction a banker described for us yesterday over coffee. Working on the sell-side, the banker and his client hammered out an agreement with a strategic acquirer over the summer. Terms called for the buyer to pay about $30m, about $25m of that in cash, the rest in equity. As shares in the would-be buyer ‘corrected,’ the company ‘recalibrated’ the price down to about $20m. The final kicker: the company planned to pay in stock. The would-be target is ‘recalibrating’ its interest in the offer.

Smoothing the spread

Brenon Daly

With the stock market in turmoil, more than a few deals have seen a gulf widen between the current price of a would-be target and its proposed takeout price. So the question becomes: How to smooth the spread? Well, two different approaches – with wildly different results – seem to support the idea of disclosure, with more being better. Wall Street, apparently, is a little skittish these days.

A month ago, JDA Software took the unusual step of issuing a press release to assure Wall Street that it can actually pay for its PE-style acquisition of i2. Originally, JDA was banking on Wachovia to help fund its purchase. But as that bank came undone, Wells Fargo stepped in to join Credit Suisse as the lenders to JDA. That deal, which was launched in mid-August, goes to i2 shareholders a week from Thursday. Meanwhile, i2 shares are currently changing hands at about $14, compared to JDA’s bid of $14.86.

Contrast that clarity with the cloudy situation surrounding Brocade Communications’ planned purchase of Foundry Networks. When Brocade unveiled its ‘Cisco-killer’ acquisition in July, it said it would pay $18.50 in cash plus a sliver of stock for each Foundry share. The networking equipment maker’s stock traded near the bid until a disastrous decision Friday to delay its shareholder vote on Brocade’s offer, citing ‘recent developments.’

While the company may have had its hands tied about what it could say about these ‘developments,’ the ominous move spooked the market. Concerns immediately arose about Brocade being able to pay for the $3bn acquisition, given the tight credit market, as well as the SAN vendor perhaps knocking down its offer price. Shares are now changing hands at $13.36 – almost exactly where they were before Brocade launched its bid three months ago. We’ll see if the initial offer holds up when Foundry shareholders vote on the deal Wednesday afternoon.

Tombstones for a law firm

Brenon Daly

As if the recent bankruptcy of one investment bank and hasty sale of another wasn’t disruptive enough to current deal flow, we now have yet another major M&A adviser headed toward breakup. Only this time, it’s a law firm: Heller Ehrman indicated that it will dissolve on Friday. Unlike the banks, however, the winding down of Heller Ehrman was not caused by the current upheaval on Wall Street. Instead, the San Francisco-based law firm, which traces its roots back to 1890, has been slumping since the end of last year, as partners defected amid a slight dip in revenue in 2007.

Like its financial brethren, Heller Ehrman had clients across industries, with a significant technology practice. The firm worked on 42 tech deals last year, including IronPort Systems’ $830m sale to Cisco in January, Hewlett-Packard’s $1.6bn purchase of Opsware, Autonomy Corp’s $375m acquisition of Zantaz and the $200m leveraged buyout of Embarcadero Technologies. Overall, Heller Ehrman tied for fourth-busiest law firm in terms of tech deals, according to our rankings.

Legal league tables, 2007 deal volume

Rank Firm Number of transactions
1 DLA Piper 63
2 Cooley Godward 61
3 Jones Day 57
4 (tie) Heller Ehrman/O’Melveny & Myers 42

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase