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Investor consortium to acquire McAfee for $14B
The long and winding history of cybersecurity software company McAfee took another interesting twist today when an investor consortium consisting of six investment firms announced that they were purchasing the company for $14 billion.
That purchase amount is based on a stock price of $26 per share, which the company said represented a 22.6% premium on the stock’s closing price last Thursday. It’s worth noting that stock closed up 20% on Friday, giving it a market cap slightly over $11 billion as of the close of markets on Friday.
The consortium consists ofAdvent International, Permira Advisers, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIC Private Limited and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.Advent and Permira led today’s acquisition, according to the company.
With McAfee, the investment group gets a consumer security company that has existed in various forms since 1987. The company sold its enterprise arm earlier this year to Symphony Technology Group for $4 billion…
The investor group companies will each be providing financial and operational resources. How that will work isn’t completely clear. The company will certainly have a lot of bosses to deal with. It’s worth noting that McAfee built in a “go shop” provision into the deal, a fairly common practice that gives it45 daysto find a better price. While that is an unlikely outcome, the provision provides shareholders with some proof the company got the best deal it could for them…
The company has a complex history, starting life in the 1980s selling firewall software. It eventually went public before being purchased by Intel for $7.7 billion in 2010 and going private again. In 2014, the company changed names to Intel Security before Intel sold a majority stake to TPG in 2017 for $4.2 billion and changed the name back to McAfee.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/08/investor-consortium-to-acquire-mcafee-for-14-billion/