EXFO has achieved its takeover of French performance monitoring and analytics company Astellia for about $31.6 million.
EXFO said today that it has acquired 97.44% of Astellia’s share capital and at least 95.07% of voting rights, after a second phase of a public offer. Now EXFO plans a “mandatory squeeze-out” of the remaining shares and to de-list Astellia from the Euronext Paris Exchange.
EXFO set the acquisition of Astellia in motion last fall with a purchase of more than 33% of the company’s stock for about $10.2 million, then upped its equity through a series of deals with several large shareholders to acquire their equity in the company and getting support from the board of directors. The first phase of a public offer for outstanding Astellia shares put EXFO at 88.4% ownership, and the second phase drove that to more than 95%. The move combines EXFO’s expertise in fiber testing and monitoring with Astellia’s focus on analytics-based intelligence on network and service performance as well as marketing and customer care.
“By joining our strengths and technologies, we are creating unique capabilities to help operators keep pace with a quickly changing industry and ever-increasing consumer expectations,” said Germain Lamonde, EXFO’s founder and executive chairman. “With our combined scale, global market coverage, technologies, strong professional services and deep mobile expertise, EXFO and Astellia are well positioned for the next cycle of investments by mobile network operators. Our customers are transforming their networks to keep up with insatiable consumer demand for more bandwidth and better, faster mobile service.”Germain Lamonde, EXFO’s founder and executive chairman, said that
Astellia CEO Abdelkrim Benamar added that together, the two companies “are in a stronger position to help operators make the most of their 3G and 4G investments as well as deploy 5G, RAN and C-RAN infrastructures.”
Astellia has more than 400 employees, more than 120 customers and reported sales of more than 47 million in 2017.
