Forescout has approved an acquisition by investment companies Advent International and Crosspoint Capital Partners. The investors will deposit $1.9 billion (€1.7 billion) for the vendor of cybersecurity software.
The offer of Advent and Crosspoint amounts to 33 dollars per share. That’s a nice premium on top of the share price just before the announcement of the deal, when a share cost just under $28.
However, the Forescout share price has fluctuated over the past period, as other media have shown. In October, the company announced a turnover expectation of 90.6 million dollars to 91.6 million dollars, which is a lot lower than the initially anticipated turnover of 98.8 million dollars to 101.8 million dollars. The share then went down from 39 dollars to 24.57 dollars. A little later, Forescout even announced that it had been approached by investment companies for an acquisition, at the time by Corvex Management and Jericho Capital Asset Management.
Upcoming developments
So, the bid that was finally accepted turned out to be more attractive for Forescout. However, the company kept the door open for an even more attractive bid, as a so-called ‘go shop’ period of 30 days was included in the takeover agreement. During this period Forescout is allowed to look for alternative takeover offers from other investors.
According to the acquisition that is now on the table, Forescout will have “the flexibility to further invest” in the development of its cybersecurity solutions. With the additional financial resources, further investments can be made. CEO Michael DeSecare will stay on as managing director of the company. Advent and Crosspoint expect to complete the acquisition in the second quarter of this year, if the ‘go shop’ period does not attract other investors.
Security market
Recently there have been quite a few takeovers in the field of cyber security. At the end of last year, for example, it was announced that the investment company Thoma Bravo was acquiring Sophos for 3.9 billion dollars. Another major acquisition within the security world was made by VMware, which purchased Carbon Black for $2.1 billion.
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