LEWISTON — Canadian security tech firm OpenText announced plans Monday to buy Boston-based Carbonite Inc. for $1.42 billion, with CEO Mark J. Barrenechea telling investors “a lot of things attracted us.”
“Fifteen-hundred employees and world-class talent in security, data protection and cloud operations at scale — their talent is amazing,” Barrenchea said on a conference call Monday morning.
“We’re expecting to grow Carbonite low single-digit in our model. We’re coming into the acquisition with a strong model for growth.”
It is unclear what Monday’s news means for Carbonite’s Lewiston call center on Mollison Way.
A Carbonite spokeswoman deferred questions to OpenText, which did not respond to several messages for comment.
In his call, Barrenchea listed Lewiston among Carbonite’s key U.S. locations.
Carbonite picked the city for a new call center in 2011, moving jobs here from India. It received the city of Lewiston’s Economic Achievement Award in 2012 and local chamber of commerce’s annual Business Leadership Award in 2013.
By January 2018, the company had almost 180 employees here, down from a high of more than 350 just a few years earlier. At the time, Carbonite was filling lower-skilled jobs in Jamaica as employees left the local call center.
The sale is expected to close in the next 90 days. The purchase price includes taking on Carbonite’s debt.
The transaction of $23 per share is a 25% premium to the close of trading Friday. Bloomberg first reported the deal earlier Monday, and that Carbonite was mulling a sale in early September.
Carbonite’s shares are down 27% this year, after a sharp fall in July when it cut its annual revenue forecast and announced Chief Executive Officer Mohamad Ali had decided to step down. That followed another selloff in February amid investor concerns about the debt it was taking on to fund its $618 million, all-cash takeover of Webroot Inc. in February.
Carbonite’s share price increased 24.7% in trading Monday in New York, while OpenText shares rose almost 2.4%.
The company — named after the fictional substance used to freeze Han Solo in Star Wars — offers data backup, disaster recovery and other services to people and businesses, deriving most of its revenue from subscription fees, according to its website.
Canada’s OpenText Corp. was also weighing a takeover bid for rival software firm Micro Focus International, according to people familiar with the matter.
OpenText makes software used for searching corporate intranets and managing documents. In 2017, it acquired Dell Technologies Inc.’s enterprise content division for $1.6 billion.
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. acted as financial adviser to Carbonite.
Information from Bloomberg was used in this report.
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