Sponsored by TCI International Inc.
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16 Sep 21. Curtiss-Wright Announces $400m Increase in Share Repurchase Authorization to $550m, and Expansion of 2021 Share Repurchase Program.
Declares Dividend Of $0.18 Per Share For Common Stock. Curtiss-Wright Corporation (NYSE: CW) today announced that its Board of Directors has authorized an additional $400m for future share repurchases, increasing the total available authorization to $550m.
“Curtiss-Wright remains committed to a healthy and balanced capital allocation strategy to support our top- and bottom-line growth and to drive the greatest long-term returns to our shareholders”
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Of this new authorization, the Company will immediately begin the repurchase of $200m in additional shares via a 10b5-1 program, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year. This will be conducted in concurrence with the existing $50 m share repurchase program being executed this year, which is now expected to result in total 2021 share repurchases of $250m.
For 2022 and 2023, the Company expects to minimally repurchase $50m in shares per year via a 10b5-1 program, which is anticipated to more than offset potential dilution from compensation plans.
“Curtiss-Wright remains committed to a healthy and balanced capital allocation strategy to support our top- and bottom-line growth and to drive the greatest long-term returns to our shareholders,” said Lynn M. Bamford, President and CEO of Curtiss-Wright Corporation. “Since 2016, we have demonstrated this commitment by returning in excess of $630m via share repurchase activities, while continuing to reinvest in our business and supplement our organic growth with strategic acquisitions. In addition, our continued dedication to share repurchase, along with our dividend increase announced earlier this year, reflects our Board of Directors’ confidence in the Company’s strong financial position and our ability to deliver solid earnings growth and free cash flow.”
The Company also announced that the Board of Directors declared a dividend of eighteen cents ($0.18) per share on Curtiss-Wright Common Stock, payable October 14, 2021 to stockholders of record as of September 30, 2021. (Source: BUSINESS WIRE)
06 Sep 21. CPI Has A Definitive Agreement For The Acquisition Of L3 ESSCO. Communications & Power Industries LLC (CPI) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire L3 ESSCO, Inc. (ESSCO) from an affiliate of L3Harris Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: LHX).
ESSCO is a leading manufacturer of metal space frame ground radomes that support a variety of applications, including air defense, weather radar, air traffic control, and satellite telemetry and tracking. ESSCO also designs and manufactures specialty radomes and composite structures.
ESSCO complements CPI’s existing radome business, CPI Radant Technologies Division, as well as the high-precision, large structure fabrication capabilities of CPI’s Satcom & Antenna Technologies Division. The acquisition will combine ESSCO’s proven capabilities in ground radomes with CPI’s expertise in airborne and shipboard radomes, broadening CPI’s existing product offering to include larger, sophisticated radomes and structures manufactured from alternative materials. Additionally, the transaction will enable CPI to offer customers a more diverse product portfolio using ESSCO’s new radomes and advanced materials technology.
“CPI and ESSCO are an excellent fit. CPI offers a wealth of experience, knowledge and resources that have been focused on airborne and shipboard radomes for commercial and government customers. ESSCO brings new materials, processes and capabilities, primarily for ground-based defense and government programs, that complement CPI’s existing offerings. The combination of our organizations will enable both businesses to grow and will enhance the portfolio of products and services we are able to offer customers for communications, radar and electronic warfare applications,” said Andy Ivers, president and chief operating officer of CPI.
The acquisition is expected to close before the end of the calendar year 2021, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. (Source: Satnews)
13 Sep 21. Babcock, the international aerospace, defence and security company, has entered into a definitive agreement with Equitix Investment Management Limited for the sale of its 15.4% shareholding in AirTanker Holdings Limited (AirTanker Holdings) for a cash consideration of £126m, including the repayment of shareholder loans of £31.1m1, subject to any routine closing adjustments and before transaction costs.
AirTanker Holdings is an asset joint venture with Airbus, Thales and Rolls-Royce, owning fourteen A330 Voyager aircraft to support air-to-air refuelling, air transport and ancillary services for UK Ministry of Defence. Babcock retains its 23.5% shareholding in AirTanker Services Limited, which operates these aircraft.
AirTanker Holdings is part of Babcock’s Aviation sector and is accounted for by Babcock as an associate. For the year ended 31 March 2021, Babcock’s share of associate income, included within the Group’s loss, was £(1.1) m2 and AirTanker Holdings had gross assets of £2.7 bn.
The sale is part of Babcock’s ongoing targeted disposal programme, which aims to generate at least £400m of proceeds. Proceeds from this transaction will be used to reduce net debt.
The deal is expected to complete by the end of this financial year, and is subject to regulatory approvals given the industry AirTanker Holdings operates in. There is no merger control condition. Remaining AirTanker shareholders have pre-emption rights over the Babcock shares.
The agreement constitutes a class 2 transaction for the purposes of the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s Listing Rules, and as such does not require Babcock shareholders’ approval.
Babcock CEO David Lockwood said: “This the third disposal we have announced as part of our ongoing programme to streamline the Group and, should all complete, ensures we will meet our target of generating at least £400 m of disposal proceeds this financial year. We are pleased to continue to maintain an interest in AirTanker through our work with AirTanker Services.”
- Net debt reduction on receipt of proceeds will be £95 m as shareholder loans are already included within the Group’s net debt.
- The results for the Group for the year ended 31 March 2021 included the impacts of the Contract Profitability and Balance Sheet review (CPBS). Excluding the one-off CPBS adjustments, Babcock’s share of associate income after tax from AirTanker Holdings was £2.8m.
06 Apr 21. VITEC Acquires Exterity to Create Global IPTV and Digital Signage Powerhouse. VITEC, a worldwide leader in IP video streaming solutions, today announced the strategic acquisition of Exterity Limited, the award-winning, market-leading provider of integrated IPTV, digital signage and user engagement technologies. The move signals VITEC’s intention to accelerate growth and strengthen its leadership position, with natural technology and customer synergies between the two companies that will enable VITEC to extend its reach into new geographies, market verticals and partners.
“Exterity is a respected IPTV and Digital Signage leader around the globe,” said Philippe Wetzel, CEO, VITEC. “They have developed a robust IP video platform for both hardware and software that has been very successful, particularly in the Enterprise and Accommodation markets across Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
Exterity’s engineering excellence, global geographic distribution and complementary business focus was the primary motivation for VITEC to make this acquisition. The combined entity will be the leading IPTV and Digital Signage provider for Corporate, Government, Military, Venues, Hospitality, and Broadcast customers.”
Commenting on the reasons behind the acquisition, Exterity CEO Colin Farquhar, who will remain a central part of the leadership team of the combined company, said: “In bringing together VITEC and Exterity, we will be able to offer a wider range of best-in-class products, solutions and services to our customers. VITEC’s product portfolio, market strength, and company culture are the perfect fit for this next chapter in our IPTV growth, and I have complete confidence that we will be able to grow stronger together as more and more businesses deploy IP video streaming solutions across their enterprises. Exterity has established a large and loyal customer and partner base, with a number of organisations specifying solutions for global projects. Bringing together VITEC and Exterity enables us to take advantage of our combined technologies so that our customers will have a broader choice of market-leading IP video solutions to suit their needs.”
The combined engineering teams will develop a strategy to migrate the existing IPTV and Digital Signage portfolio into a converged platform to offer a wider range of solutions to customers. VITEC will now have almost 200 engineers across their global development centres, which will immediately begin working together to leverage the software and hardware expertise of the embedded teams. VITEC is connecting with Exterity’s broad network of integrators and partners to provide more information about the combined capabilities of the companies and to ensure their continuity of business strategy and deployments. VITEC will continue to support Exterity customers without interruption.
About VITEC
VITEC is a leading worldwide end-to-end video streaming solutions provider for broadcast, military and government, corporate, sports and entertainment venues. Combining broadcasting with live streaming capabilities, VITEC’s H.265 (HEVC) and H.264 offering is the most extensive in the market with encoding and decoding appliances, IPTV solutions for desktops and mobile devices, and PCI cards with SDK for integration projects. VITEC’s intuitive digital video solutions can be tailored to each customer’s unique market needs, delivering easy-to-use technology that ensures high-quality, low-latency HD video, capturing live and recorded events for seamless distribution in a multitude of formats anytime, anywhere, to any device.
Since 1988, VITEC has been a pioneer in the design and manufacture of hardware and software for video encoding, decoding, transcoding, recording, conversion, archiving, and streaming over IP. In keeping with the company’s tradition of innovation, VITEC is the first company to bring bandwidth efficient HEVC compression technology into the field with portable streaming appliances.
About Exterity
Since 2001, Exterity has been designing, developing and manufacturing technically innovative products that deliver networked video and digital signage over IP to some of the leading organisations across the globe. Exterity solutions enable the distribution of HD quality TV and video over enterprise IP networks to an unlimited number of end points, supporting large volumes of content and receiving devices without compromising system performance or availability.
Headquartered in Scotland UK, we extend our global reach through our offices in London, New York, Paris, Johannesburg, Dubai, Riyadh, Singapore and Sydney. Localised knowledge and expertise are enhanced through the Exterity StreamForce program of credible, technically innovative partners, plus an extensive network of in-country resellers and distributors. In 2020, Exterity was awarded a prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade, for its outstanding growth in exports over the previous three years.
13 Sep 21. Rolls-Royce and Babcock separately announced that they had agreed to sell their minority stakes in the AirTanker Holdings joint venture to Equitix Investment Management. AirTanker operates a fleet of Voyager aircraft that provide services including air-to-air refuelling to UK Ministry of Defence. Rolls said it had agreed to sell its 23.1 per cent stake in AirTanker for £189m cash, with Babcock’s 15.4 per cent stake sold for £126m. (Source: FT.com)
16 Sep 21. GigaIO Raises $14.7m in Oversubscribed Series B Funding. Impact Venture Capital led funding round to fuel development of application-defined composable infrastructure market through accelerated sales and marketing efforts. Leader in Next-Generation Architecture for Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing Expands Position and Democratization of Supercomputing. GigaIO, the creator of next-generation data center rack-scale architecture for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, today announced the completion of a Series B round of funding totaling $14.7m. Impact Venture Capital led the funding round, which was oversubscribed by 50% and included participation from Mark IV Capital, Lagomaj Capital, SK Hynix, and Four Palms Ventures. GigaIO has fundamentally changed the HPC and AI landscape by creating the world’s only enterprise-class, universal composable fabric―an open standards solution with limitless flexibility, cloudlike agility, and an added layer of security. This enables faster time to achieve results as workloads run as if they were using components inside one server but harness the power of many nodes, all communicating within one seamless universal fabric.
Through the new funding, GigaIO will aggressively expand its market and channel development by recruiting more partners and expanding channel programs. GigaIO will devote more resources to customer development and partner development programs – aimed at accelerating sales and marketing efforts.
GigaIO’s Universal Composable Fabric, FabreXtm, orchestrates workloads by configuring any HPC and AI resource on the fly and integrating networking, storage, memory, and specialized accelerators into a single-system cluster fabric. By increasing the flexibility and agility of HPC and AI environments, GigaIO’s solution significantly reduces costs through increased utilization and minimized server requirements, saving on cooling, power, and footprint. GigaIO is disrupting the HPC and AI space by democratizing access to expensive specialized resources such as accelerators by sharing them across users and workloads, and by making it simple to implement for IT managers.
“We have a tremendous technology and a development team with incredible expertise gained through years of working on some of the highest performing interconnects at companies such as Cray, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Emulex, and QLogic,” said Alan Benjamin, President and CEO of GigaIO. “Today, by completing this funding round, we are better positioned to get the technology into the hands of more customers and channel partners and to increase traction among commercial and other customers.”
Benjamin continues, “Due to the pandemic, hardware testing has been difficult. Since the start of the year however, we’ve been able to get equipment into facilities and the results have been fantastic for us,” he said. “Our customers are thrilled with the results and impressed by what they can do with the technology, and to be blunt, they’re amazed that we’re getting results that the industry has been striving to achieve for more than a decade. With strong demand for a universal composable fabric, we’ve seen tremendous support from the investment community. The oversubscription provides a solid runway for future investments,” said Benjamin.
PCIe Gen 4, a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard that moves data at high bandwidth and low latency between multiple components, is the technology computers, data centers, and the wireless industry rely on to enable the next generation of mobile and desktop applications. The same technology will also enable the efficient use of accelerators, including moving data out of storage and into accelerators more quickly. With PCIe Gen 5 and CXL, GigaIO will be able to extend to make use of pools of memory to create a shareable, commonplace composable element.
Jack Crawford, Founding General Partner at Impact Venture Capital, adds, ” We are excited to lead this funding round, including a co-investment from SK Hynix, and believe that GigaIO’s game-changing technology and team will continue to revolutionize the way that organizations manage data.” “We believe that the company is a catalyst for the next generation of data and storage performance and represents an ideal artificial intelligence startup that we seek to partner with and invest in.”
“Our further investment in GigaIO is rooted in our confidence that the power of HPC and AI can solve critical challenges at every level,” said Felix Williams, Founder and Managing Director of Lagomaj Capital. “The GigaIO team is working to enable the next generation of computational infrastructure, and we are proud to call them partners.”
“We are thrilled to partner with Alan and the entire GigaIO team on their journey to establish a new model for data center infrastructure,” said Michael Beaudoin, Director of Private Equities at Mark IV Capital. “By leveraging the power of a universal composable fabric, GigaIO is delivering a powerful solution, making HPC and AI more accessible to its customers.”
GigaIO was incorporated in 2012 by Joey Maitra, then employed elsewhere, but was mostly an idea on a napkin until Alan Benjamin joined the company in 2017 and raised the first seed round of investment, followed by a Series A round in 2018 led by Mark IV Capital. The first product line was launched in 2019, and the company is now taking on the democratizing of HPC and AI through its universal fabric interconnect, FabreXTM.
For more information about GigaIO, visit https://gigaio.com/.
About GigaIO
Headquartered in Carlsbad, California, GigaIO democratizes AI and HPC architectures by delivering the elasticity of the cloud at a fraction of the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). With its universal dynamic infrastructure fabric, FabreX™, and its innovative open architecture using industry-standard PCI Express/soon CXL technology, GigaIO breaks the constraints of the server box, liberating resources to shorten time to results. Data centers can scale up or scale out the performance of their systems, enabling their existing investment to flex as workloads and business change over time (Source: BUSINESS WIRE)
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TCI International, Inc., is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SPX Corporation. TCI provides turn-key solutions for spectrum management and monitoring, direction finding, geolocation and communications intelligence to civilian, government, military and intelligence agencies as well as antennas for communications and high-power radio broadcasting. TCI is headquartered in Fremont, California, USA. For more information, visit www.tcibr.com.
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