EMC Wants to Acquire Iomega for $178 million
But Iomega has refused the unsolicited proposal, inferior to the Great Wall former offer.
By Jean Jacques Maleval | March 10, 2008 at 4:50 pmIomega Corporation announced the receipt of an unsolicited non-binding indication of interest from EMC Corporation in which EMC indicated that it is prepared to offer to acquire the outstanding common stock of Iomega for $3.25 per share, assuming a total of approximately 54.8 million outstanding shares. Iomega’s board of directors met on March 9, 2008, and unanimously determined that the proposal from EMC would not reasonably constitute a superior proposal within the meaning of the share purchase agreement between Iomega, ExcelStor Great Wall Technology Limited, a Cayman Islands company, and Shenzhen ExcelStor Technology Limited, a PRC company, from Great Wall Technology Company Limited, a People’s Republic of China company, ExcelStor Group Limited, a Cayman Islands company, and ExcelStor Holdings Limited, a British Virgin Islands company (the "Selling Stockholders"). The Board reached its conclusion based upon valuation and the Board’s view that the proposed due diligence contingencies were overly broad.
As previously announced, Iomega and the Selling Stockholders executed a share purchase agreement, dated December 12, 2007, in connection with a business combination. Iomega and the Selling Stockholders are in the process of preparing the required filings for obtaining the necessary regulatory and stockholder approvals for the business combination.
Comments
What's going to do EMC with Iomega? Selling REV removable disk drives, external disk drives and NAS for the consumer and the SOHO market? Just trying to sell more backup software (Dantz) Restrospect with Iomega's platforms? No.
The only reason is that the storage giant wants to enter into these low-end markets as it is confirmed with its recent acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems (Mozy) in online backup services, Verid in consumer verification and authentication services and Pi in online personal data management system. And Iomega is a better brand name than EMC in this field. The two companies were working together in the development of
LifeLine, a low-end EMC storage array.
But apparently, EMC will be obliged to increase its offering as the current proposal of Chinese conglomerate Great Wall, via the acquisition of ExcelStor, is higher, according to Iomega.
Voracious EMC has completed 45 acquisitions since 2000.
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