The acquisition of Norway’s Crayon by Switzerland’s SoftwareOne is complete. The latter announced this today.
The acquisition amount is thus 36 percent higher than Crayon’s stock market value was on Dec. 11. “The business combination sets the stage for any ownership scenario, and we will now focus our efforts on completing the transaction successfully and integration,” said Daniel von Stockar, chairman of SoftwareOne’s board of directors.
The new constellation of SoftwareOne and Crayon serves 70 countries and has about 13,000 employees. SoftwareOne speaks of a “compelling strategic rationale” for the acquisition. Because both parties address the market in similar ways and together have a deep relationship with hyperscalers, they could leverage the market well. This would work out well, especially for larger customers, because Crayon and SoftwareOne’s skills are highly complementary. Also, both parties want to better serve the SMB market by combining SoftwareOne’s digital sales hubs with Crayon’s channel platform.
Huge reach
Crayon Group Holding operates mainly in Scandinavia and distributes licenses for hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, among others. SoftwareOne, one of the largest resellers of Microsoft licenses, has annual sales of about 1 billion Swiss francs (and thus also about 1 billion euros). Meanwhile, Crayon is expected to achieve sales of 7.2 billion Norwegian kroner ($648 million) this year.
Read more: SoftwareOne’s acquisition of Crayon Group: a new software giant?
An announcement that the two parties are jointly listed may follow this month. Incidentally, there was a chance that SoftwareOne would be delisted by Bain Capital, but that potential billion-dollar deal was taken off the table in January. Until the beginning of March, however, insurgent shareholders tried to arrange the takeover.