Author: Brenon Daly

Is QlikTech a billion-dollar baby?

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

IPOs are not what they used to be. The companies looking to go public recently have had to scale back their expectations, cutting both the amount of money they hope to raise and what they expect to be worth as they start life as a public company. The implications of these slimmed-down debuts extend far beyond the IPO candidates themselves. Smaller offerings trim the fees available for underwriters, which rely on these hotly contested mandates to offset the cost of supporting research and trading for public companies. And perhaps more alarmingly, the lower IPO valuations make it difficult for venture capitalists and other investors to realize decent returns in what was once a fairly sure path to outsized performance.

At least that’s the situation for most IPO candidates. (For instance, we’re not knocking either Meru Networks, which went public last week, or Nexsan, which is slated to come out this week, but both are valued by the market at less than $300m.) However, there are exceptions. Just as a few companies were able to make it public in 2009, while most would-be debutants just had to ride out the recession as private businesses, there will be rich valuations doled out to IPO candidates, even during this time of discounts.

From our perspective, the next player that’s likely to enjoy a warm welcome on Wall Street is QlikTech. (At $100m, the offering itself is one of the largest enterprise software IPOs in some time.) In fact, if we pencil out the initial valuation for this fast-growing, profitable analytics provider, we come up with a number that’s in the neighborhood of $1bn. QlikTech may not hit that magical mark on its debut, but we suspect that it won’t fall too far below it. Look for our full report on the company and the offering, including our projected financials and valuation for QlikTech, in tonight’s Daily 451 sendout.

Nexsan: Next to go out

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Nearly two years after it first filed its IPO paperwork, storage vendor Nexsan appears set to hit the Nasdaq later this week. The company is planning to sell 4.8 million shares at $10-12 each. At the high end of the range, the offering would raise some $59m for Nexsan, which would start life as a public company with an initial valuation of about $200m. Thomas Weisel Partners is running the books for Nexsan, which will trade under the ticker NXSN.

The offering continues the trend of smaller IPOs and lower initial valuations that we recently noted. Back in April 2008, Nexsan planned to raise $81m in its offering. However, the actual proceeds will come in about one-quarter below its original expectation. Similarly, the valuation that we penciled out for Nexsan two years ago has proved a bit too rich.

Back in our initial report on the company, we figured that Nexsan would hit the market at a valuation of around $300m. Built into that projection, however, was the assumption that the storage vendor would be able to increase revenue at about a 20% clip. (That didn’t seem unreasonable back in 2008, considering Compellent Technologies – a similar storage startup that had recently gone public – increased revenue 78% that year.)

Instead, Nexsan actually shrank. In its fiscal year that ended June 30, 2009 – a period that basically covers the recent ‘Great Recession’ – overall sales slipped to $61m from $63m in the previous fiscal year. In the two quarters since then, Nexsan has started to grow again, although at a rather muted 6% pace. On the other hand, Nexsan did manage to move into profitability during the worst economic conditions that most US businesses have seen.

An exclusive ‘club’

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The price of admission for a ‘club deal’ just got a bit more expensive. The trio of private equity (PE) firms bidding for Irish e-learning firm SkillSoft recently bumped their offer to $1.2bn, up from the original $1.1bn bid in mid-February. The buyout firms teaming up to take SkillSoft private are Berkshire Partners, Bain Capital and Advent International. According to terms, the trio will be using equity to cover slightly more than half of the purchase price ($680m, or 57% of the $1.2bn transaction).

The planned leveraged buyout (LBO) of SkillSoft is one of only three take-privates by a PE club since January 1, 2008 valued at more than $1bn. (That doesn’t include syndicate purchases of divestitures or other parts of companies, such as the carve-out of Skype from eBay by a quartet of firms.) When credit was flowing freely in 2006-07, multibillion-dollar LBOs were plentiful, which was a primary reason that overall spending on tech M&A in each of those years topped $400bn. In both 2006 and 2007, PE shops accounted for more than 20% of all money spent on tech deals.

The topping bid for SkillSoft comes at a time when overall PE spending is dropping to some of the lowest levels since it began to recover last year. After averaging about $9bn in both of the quarters since the US recession officially ended, the value of deals by PE firms fell to just $6bn in the recently completed first quarter. Incidentally, the decline of PE deal value matched almost exactly the drop-off in overall first-quarter tech M&A spending, which came in at the low end of the range that we’ve tallied in recent quarters. Click here to see our full report on first-quarter M&A.

PE activity

Period Deal volume Deal value
Q1 2010 63 $6bn
Q4 2009 92 $9.9bn
Q3 2009 83 $8bn
Q2 2009 76 $2.8bn
Q1 2009 46 $250m

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

Consistently inconsistent M&A in Q1

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The first quarter is in the books and it’s hard to read much from it, at least in terms of M&A. While the quarter saw more deals announced than any other quarter since the credit crisis erupted, the aggregate spending on those transactions is lingering about one-third below the recent average. In the just-completed quarter, we recorded 841 acquisitions, with a total bill of $31bn. (We should note that nearly one-third of the M&A spending in the quarter came on a single telecom deal, where an Asian operator spent $9bn on mobile businesses in Africa just two days before the end of the quarter.)

Overall, the numbers point to an inconsistent recovery in the M&A market. On the one hand, many of the big buyers were busier than ever. CA Inc, Google, IBM and Oracle (among others) all announced at least three transactions in the just-completed quarter. But on the other side, we also saw a number of deals that continued the worrisome trends that we thought we might have left behind in 2009, with additional scrap sales and low-multiple divestitures in the first few months of 2010. Look for our full report on first-quarter M&A in tonight’s MIS and TDM sendouts.

Recent quarterly M&A activity

Period Deal volume Deal value
Q1 2010 841 $31bn
Q4 2009 822 $55bn
Q3 2009 758 $38bn
Q2 2009 778 $49bn
Q1 2009 663 $10bn

Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase

‘Pay us to shut up’

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Add another deal to the hit list for plaintiffs lawyers. The ink was barely dry on Thoma Bravo’s $143m all-cash offer for PLATO Learning late last week before the ambulance-chasing law firms launched their ‘investigations’ into whether the online education company did right by its shareholders. Equally wrongheaded lawsuits (at least in our view) have been filed against Chordiant Software and Techwell in recent days.

Never mind that the bid of $5.60 for each share of PLATO represents the highest price for the stock since November 2006. And never mind that with the premium, shareholders in PLATO have seen the value of their holdings more than triple over the past year. (That’s five times the return booked by those of us who had our money in the S&P 500 over the past year.)

According to PLATO, it wasn’t looking to sell itself when the buyout shop approached it a few months ago. (Terms do include a no-shop provision, but there is a ‘fiduciary out’ that would allow the company to talk with other suitors, if any surface. There is a $5.8m breakup fee, representing a slightly higher-than-average 4% of deal value.) Of course, none of the terms really matter in the strike suits. The law firms are just looking to make noise, hoping the companies will pay them to shut up.

IronPlanet: heavy metal and high margins

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

We recently noted that for the IPO market, thin is in. The offering sizes for many of the would-be debutants have been trimmed, as have the initial valuations. But in one area, some of the companies that are looking to come to market are still very, very bloated: funding. Force10 Networks, which put in its IPO paperwork earlier this month, had hit up investors for more than $400m. Motricity, which filed back in January, also raised at least that much.

So it was refreshing to skim the recently filed prospectus from IronPlanet, an online marketplace for industrial machines. Certainly, brokering the sales of tractors and bulldozers isn’t the sexiest business. But there’s good money to be made, at least based on IronPlanet’s recent performance. The capital-efficient company has been profitable for the past four years. (And that’s GAAP profitability, not the ‘kinda, sorta’ profitability that most private companies talk about.) Although it has raised some $47m in venture backing, IronPlanet currently has $30m of cash and equivalents on its balance sheet – a number that’s growing.

The 10-year-old company has increased revenue more than 50% in each of the past two years, finishing 2009 with $54.7m in sales. (It sold nearly a half-billion dollars worth of heavy machinery on its network last year.) And IronPlanet isn’t just running its business for cash. It spends heavily on sales and marketing (44% of revenue in 2009) to increase its profile and has put some money behind its recent push to expand geographically.

Two years ago, IronPlanet started investing in business outside of North America. The international unit, which generates roughly 10% of total sales, currently burns cash, while the legacy North America unit hums along at about 20% EBITDA margins. (Overall gross margins stand at an enviable 78%.) In looking ahead to forecast Wall Street’s reception for this online marketplace, we might point out that eBay shares have tacked on 110% over the past year, twice the gain of the Nasdaq during the same period.

More on Intersil-Techwell

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

We looked at Intersil’s purchase of Techwell on Thursday, primarily from the perspective of the senseless lawsuits that are swirling around the transaction. But fittingly for the largest acquisition of a US-based chip company since mid-2007, there’s a lot more that’s noteworthy about the deal. (Note: The equity value of the transaction is actually $450m, while the $370m figure in the announcement is the enterprise value.)

For starters, Intersil’s pickup of Techwell, which is expected to close in two months or so, is the sixth deal the chip company has inked in the past year and a half. (In another report, we noted some similarities in a pair of purchases that Intersil did back in 2008.) At $450m, the buy is the largest that Intersil has announced in a half-decade. The acquisition gets Intersil into two new markets: video security surveillance systems, where Techwell gets about 70% of its sales, and automotive displays, which accounts for the remaining 30%.

Also, the planned sale of Techwell represents the second exit at an above-market multiple in just three weeks for Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV). A late-stage investment firm, TCV owned chunks of both Techwell and RiskMetrics Group, which sold to MSCI Barra for $1.55bn at the beginning of March. TCV holds nearly 4.3 million shares of Techwell, according to the latest 13F filing with the SEC, meaning the firm stands to enjoy a $79m payday when the deal closes.

Ambulance chasing in tech M&A

Brenon Daly

Contact:  Brenon Daly

Here’s another sign that tech M&A is getting more active: plaintiffs lawyers have come slithering back into the process. Instead of chasing ambulances, these lawsuit-loving lawyers are now following deal flow. Their tactic: before the ink is even dry on an M&A announcement, threaten an investigation into possible fiduciary breeches by the board at the selling company. To most, the pesky threats are little more than extortion.

In recent weeks, plaintiffs lawyers have taken aim at Chordiant Software for agreeing to sell itself for $161.5m to Pegasystems. (Never mind that Chordiant shareholders are getting 50% more than another suitor offered for the faded CRM vendor just two months ago. And they’re getting it all in cash.) But even more absurd is the decision by a handful of law firms to target Techwell’s decision to sell itself to Intersil in a transaction that gives Techwell a $450m equity value, or an enterprise value of $370m.

Intersil’s bid (on an enterprise value basis) works out to a rather rich valuation of 5.9 times Techwell’s 2009 sales and 4.2x projected 2010 sales, according to Intersil. (We would note that’s roughly twice the valuation that the market currently gives Intersil.) Terms call for Intersil to hand over $18.50 in cash for each Techwell share, a price that represents a relatively rich 50% premium over the previous day’s closing price.

Moreover, Intersil’s bid roughly matches the highest point Techwell shares ever hit on their own, which came back in November 2006. The offer is twice the price at which Techwell went public in mid-2006 and roughly three times the level where shares were changing hands just a year ago. Yet that outperformance hasn’t stopped at least five different law firms from charging that Techwell may not have done right by its shareholders.

The ‘new normal’ in new offerings

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

Back in the third quarter of 2009, when the economy had pulled through the worst of the recession, we floated the idea that we looked likely to be entering a ‘new normal’ period for tech M&A. The term had been used to characterize a number of segments of the financial world, and we took it to mean that spending on deals wouldn’t be as low as it was earlier in the year, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as high as it once was, either.

In recent weeks, it has struck us that our new normal description could also extend to another market that has seemingly recovered from the knock it took in last year’s recession: IPOs. In many cases, the new issues that are coming to market are lighter raises and less richly valued than the ones that came before the US economy slumped into its worst decline since the Great Depression. Even companies that once planned to hit the public market but then had to withdraw and, eventually, re-file their paperwork have done so with their eyes on smaller exits.

Take Convio. When the company, which makes on-demand software for nonprofits, initially filed its S-1 back in August 2007, it planned to raise some $86m. It filed another set of IPO papers earlier this year, planning to raise $58m. The one-third cut in offer size comes despite the fact that Convio finished 2009 almost half again the size it was in 2007 ($63m in 2009 revenue, compared to $43m in 2007). GlassHouse Technologies and Fabrinet are two other examples of vendors that also cut the size of their offerings in their latest efforts to go public.

As for initial valuations, we seem to be entering a new normal phase for debutants, as well. For instance, Meru Networks set its expected price range of $13-$15 per share earlier this month. Assuming it prices at the high end of the range, the wireless LAN provider, which will have just 14.9 million shares outstanding after the offering, would start its life on the Nasdaq at a market cap of just $223m. That’s just 3x the $70m in revenue it recorded in 2009. In comparison, rival Aruba Networks trades at more than 5x trailing sales.

A nope from Novell

Brenon Daly

Contact: Brenon Daly

The only surprise about Novell turning down the unsolicited $2bn offer from Elliott Associates was the timing. In an unorthodox move, the software vendor said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to the hedge fund on Saturday morning, when most thoughts were turning to a full day of March Madness. (And what a maddening day it turned out to be, at least for people who filled out their brackets with top seeds: On Saturday, teams seeded No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 all got sent packing.)

In dismissing the bid, Novell’s board of directors said the offer from Elliott of $5.75 for each share ‘undervalues’ the company and its growth prospects. As an aside, we’re not exactly sure what growth Novell is referring to. The vendor has come up short of Wall Street revenue estimates for both quarters of its current fiscal year so far, and sales this fiscal year, which ends in October, will almost certainly come in below the $862m it recorded last fiscal year. Revenue in the following fiscal year is also likely to come in below last fiscal year, at least according to Wall Street projections.

Even without much top-line excitement, Novell does nonetheless have some valuable assets: A bankable $600m maintenance revenue stream, a decent Linux business and probably the fourth-largest portfolio of identity and access management technology. Of course, its most attractive property is its treasury, which is stuffed with a cool $1bn in cash and short-term investments.

And finally, we would note that Novell does have an experienced adviser in JP Morgan Securities as it explores options to enhance shareholder value. In just the past 10 months, JP Morgan has worked with two other long-in-the-tooth software companies that have been targeted in publicly contested M&A processes. Both Borland Software and MSC Software ended up getting sold, with Borland going for a whopping 50% higher than the initial bid.