Seagate, the info storage firm, has announced its intent to amass Intevac, a tough drive tools producer, in an all-cash deal price $119 million.
Seagate stated on Thursday that it’ll pay $4 per share in a young supply for Intevac, which is publicly traded. Seagate will initially buy a minimal of “at the least one share greater than 50%” of Intevac’s issued and excellent shares, after which execute a “second step” merger to amass the corporate’s remaining shares.
Intevac’s board of administrators and largest shareholders unanimously authorized the transaction. Seagate expects it to shut in late March or early April, topic to customary closing circumstances.
Santa Clara-based Intevac, based in 1991 as a spin-off from tech agency Varian Associates, manufactures skinny movie deposition techniques. It IPO’d in 1995, and has expanded its footprint over time to territories together with China, Malaysia, and Singapore.
On its web site, Intavec says its merchandise assist laborious drive disk media manufacturing and the improve of present laborious drive techniques. One of many applied sciences that the agency touts as its most popular answer, heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, improves the “writeability” and storage density of laborious drives by making use of warmth vitality.
It’s not powerful to see how this matches squarely into Seagate’s laborious drive disk enterprise. In December, Seagate announced its first HAMR-based laborious drive after a two-decade hiatus from the tech, and the corporate plans to ship HAMR-based drives to a number of clients, together with a “main cloud supplier,” this yr.
A number of of Seagate’s rivals, together with Western Digital and Toshiba, are additionally engaged on HAMR-based drives, spurred by the rising worldwide demand for storage. HAMR-based drives typically have a price benefit over incumbent solid-state applied sciences, making them particularly engaging to public cloud distributors.
Intavec’s market cap was around $91.17 million as of Thursday. In its most up-to-date fiscal quarter (Q3 2024), the agency notched $28.5 million in income, up 59% year-over-year, however posted a $2.17 million internet loss.
Intavec late final yr said it was exploring “strategic choices” and present process a restructuring that the corporate anticipated would “materially strengthen its profitability.” A kind of strategic choices was an exit from the general public markets, it appears.
Intavec is Seagate’s first major acquisition because the firm purchased Kioxia, a provider of flash reminiscence and solid-state drives, in 2017. Seagate has made 11 acquisitions in its 46-year historical past, according to financial database Tracxn, totaling round $18 billion.
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