Newbury
icro Focus “Another British tech company is to be bought by a rival across the Atlantic,” says Giulia Bottaro in The Telegraph. Canada’s OpenText’s accepted offer of £5.32 a share for Micro Focus values the Berkshire-based IT group at £5.1bn, including debt. It is a 98% premium to the share price last week, which has plummeted 87% over the last three years. The FTSE 250 company sells business software to thousands of firms, including Airbus, Hewlett Packard and Kellogg’s. It “never recovered from significant profit warnings in 2018 and 2019”, following Micro Focus’s acquisition of Hewlett Packard’s software segment for $8.8bn in 2017. Micro Focus has struggled to integrate it ever since. Revenue fell 7% to $1.3bn in the six months to the end of April from a year earlier, while profit rose to $35m from a $155m loss. Together, it and OpenText, one of the world’s biggest software providers, valued at $13bn, would be able to target a market worth $170bn.
