Nice to Buy Merced for About $150 Million to Expand Range
December 04, 2011, 1:27 AM ESTBy Gwen Ackerman
(Updates with CFO comments starting in third paragraph.)
Dec. 2 (Bloomberg) -- Nice Systems Ltd., an Israeli company that provides analytical tools for recording service transactions, agreed to buy Merced Systems Inc. for about $150 million to expand its offerings.
The acquisition of Redwood Shores, California-based Merced gives Nice access to the U.S. company’s customer list, which includes Coca-Cola Co., Bell Canada and Dell Inc., Nice Chief Financial Officer Dafna Gruber said by phone.
“This was a relatively small company selling at $60 million a year with a very impressive list of customers and this was an opportunity for us,” Gruber said. “This was an aggregation move.”
Merced’s performance management product will be blended into Nice’s enterprise offering, which includes tools for fraud detection. The enterprise business accounted for about 60 percent of Ra’anana, Israel-based Nice’s revenue in 2010, with most sales coming from the U.S. and Europe. The acquisition will add about $55 million to revenue and 10 cents to earnings per share in 2012 under non-GAAP reporting standards, Nice said.
Nice’s shares have jumped 13 percent in the past 12 months in Tel Aviv trading compared with a 14 percent drop for the benchmark TA-25 index.
The company is seeking additional acquisitions and will have at least $350 million available after the Merced deal closes around February, Gruber said.
“We’ve done four acquisitions in the customer interaction business and still have plenty of ideas of what to do,” she said.
--Editors: Robert Valpuesta, Jerrold Colten.
To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net
