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18 Jun 16. UK aerospace and defence specialist Cobham, which earlier this month announced plans to raise more than £500m through a rights issue, has reported a strong take-up, having received acceptances for more than 97 per cent of the new shares offered through the fundraising.
The group, which has had to warned on profits twice in the last 12 months, said funds raised through the rights issue would put it on a “sound financial footing” and reduce its debt.
The rights issue, through which existing shareholders were offered one share for every two held at a price of 89p a share, was fully underwritten by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Jefferies International. (Source: FT.com)
14 Jun 16. Symantec Acquires Blue Coat To Redefine Cybersecurity. Symantec and Blue Coat, announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Symantec will acquire Blue Coat for approximately $4.651bn in cash. The transaction has been approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies and is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2016. Greg Clark, Chief Executive Officer of Blue Coat, will be appointed Chief Executive Officer of Symantec and join the Symantec Board upon closing of the transaction.
Blue Coat is the market share leader and share gainer in Web Security with a widely recognized portfolio of integrated technologies serving as a trusted platform to deliver Cloud Generation Security to more than 15,000 customers worldwide. For Blue Coat’s fiscal year ending April 30, 2016, GAAP revenue was $598 million and non-GAAP revenue was $755m, with 17 per cent year-over-year growth, supported by new products and new customers. For the same time period, the company had non-GAAP operating margins of 22 per cent and cash flow from operations of $135m. Also for this time period, GAAP operating margins were -42 per cent.
With the acquisition of Blue Coat, Symantec will enhance its leadership position to define the future of cybersecurity and set the pace for innovation industrywide. The combined company will:
Protect customers against more cyber threats, with best-in-breed protection, detection and remediation across endpoint, email, web, network and servers. This transaction will combine Symantec’s leading threat telemetry with Blue Coat’s networks and cloud security offerings to provide differentiated security solutions across hundreds of millions of endpoints and servers, and billions of email and web transactions.
Help enterprises securely embrace the cloud. Symantec will be able to deliver security for the cloud generation of users, data and apps, for the cloud, from the cloud and to the cloud. The company’s leading data loss prevention capabilities will be applied at the web proxy and to over 12,000 cloud applications.
Bring together a formidable scale of investment in cyber R&D and threat research. These investments span over 3,000 engineers and researchers, as well as nine Threat Response Centers.
“With this transaction, we will have the scale, portfolio and resources necessary to usher in a new era of innovation designed to help protect large customers and individual consumers against insider threats and sophisticated cybercriminals. Together, we will be best positioned to address the ever-evolving threat landscape, the massive changes introduced by the shift to mobile and cloud, and the challenges created by regulatory and privacy concerns,” said Dan Schulman, Chairman of Symantec.
“Greg and the entire Blue Coat leadership team have done an exceptional job of strengthening, growing and scaling their business. In addition to a proven track record of delivering scale and profitable growth, Greg brings significant leadership experience, deep securi