Ingenico SA early Monday plans to announce its reaction to a nonbinding stock offer to buy the payment-terminal maker in a deal whose value could approach 1.34 billion euros (US$1.9 billion). The France-based company would not say who made the bid.
Bloomberg Businessweek on Dec. 17 said the potential buyer is Danaher Corp., a diversified technology company based in Washington, D.C., citing “a person familiar with the matter.” PaymentsSource could not confirm that report at deadline.
In a Dec. 17 statement, Ingenico said it received an offer of 28 euros per share. Ingenico’s stock value on the Euronext Paris exchange closed Dec. 16 at 27.59 euros per share. The company had 48.6 million shares outstanding at the end of trading that day, minus 1.4 million Treasury shares.
“The ongoing discussions may or may not lead to a transaction,” Ingenico said in the statement, which noted the company will issue a news release before the start of trading in Paris on Dec. 20, following a board meeting.
Word of a company interested in acquiring the world’s top terminal maker based on annual revenue comes on the heals of VeriFone Systems Inc.’s planned acquisition of Hypercom Corp., the second- and third-leading terminal makers respectively (
“It’s a very exciting market,” Wedbush Securities analyst Gil Luria said of the recent rise in consolidation activity and interest in the terminal market.
Like other analysts, Luria could only speculate on who the potential buyer might be.
EBay Inc.’s PayPal Inc. online payments unit has been making strides to move into brick-and-mortar merchant acceptance, so possible company interest in buying a terminal company “is an intriguing thought,” Luria says.
“PayPal is the leading online payment network, and if it wants a physical presence, it’s a way to control the terminal and to move into a physical network,” he says. “It’s a very novel thought that stretches the boundaries of what they do.”
A PayPal spokesperson declined to comment, saying the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.
VeriFone announced a deal in September with Bling Nation Ltd. under which the terminal maker plans to use its reseller network and payments gateway to extend point-of-sale acceptance to PayPal and to Bling’s rewards-based contactless tags (
And PayPal in October struck an agreement with VeriFone to enable VeriFone PayWare Mobile users that have Apple Inc.’s iPhones to accept PayPal funds by bumping their phones with PayPal’s users’ iPhones (
George Sutton, managing director of Craig Hallun Capital Group of Minneapolis, speculates the offer for Ingenico possibly came from a European entity because unsolicited, nonbinding offers tend to be more of a European strategy than a U.S. one.
“These kinds of unsolicited, nonbinding offers are not something we take nearly as serious as binding or solicited offers,” he says. “It’s more of a wait and see in terms of what it means.”
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