HP just announced that it has completed its takeover of British enterprise data handler Autonomy under the terms specified last month. To wit: £25.50 each for 213,421,299 shares, totaling just over 87% of the company. That’s around $8.5 billion spent of the ~$10 billion offer that would have constituted a total buyout (Reuters says $12 billion).
The purchase price is seen by many as rather an overpayment, but the purchase was one of the keystones in Leo Apotheker’s plan to restructure the company. Apotheker, of course, left the company not long ago just a few weeks ago to make way for the new CEO, Meg Whitman, taking with him some $10 million in stock and bonuses.
Autonomy will operate as a “separate business unit,” though HP will be using their new asset to “accelerate our strategic vision” and “reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected” according to Apotheker, and “manage and extract meaning from that data to drive insight, foresight and better decision making” according to Whitman.
The news came at the end of the day and HP’s shares dipped in late trading, closing at $22.20, down $0.25 or 1.11%.