Cisco Ups Offer for TANDBERG
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
The financial badminton match between Cisco and TANDBERG seems to be drawing to a close. Cisco has once again revised its offer (which is now up to around $3.4B) to purchase the videoconferencing leader, placing the birdie back in TANDBERG shareholders’ court. In addition to increasing the cash offer, Cisco has also offered to increase the interest payable on the offer price to a rate of 3.00% from its previous offer of 1.75%. According to a news release by Cisco, “this revised offer represents Cisco’s final price for this transaction.”
A total of more than 30% of shareholders have pre-accepted this offer based on the new price. These, combined with the previously announced acceptances, push the total to more than 40% acceptance of the sale. The rest of TANDBERG’s shareholders have until Dec. 1 to make a final decision.
Like many others in the AV industry, we’ll be watching from the sidelines, waiting for the birdie to fall.
To read Cisco’s full release, click here.
The video industry received another jolt today with the announcement that LifeSize® is being acquired by Logitech®. The interesting thing about this move is that Logitech is traditionally viewed as a consumer products provider, issuing a clear indication that many in the business world feel video communications is nearing the tipping point for wide-scale adoption. LifeSize recently announced it added connectivity to Skype , which is a clear tie into the low-end consumer market. It isn’t too far reaching to see Logitech try to expand its offerings, moving upstream into the SMB space to provide consumers and businesses with a natural progression from low-end, low quality PC-based video to a full line of LifeSize products. Stay tuned, Polycom is the lone independent player in the space , it will be interesting to see for how long. >