C’est Fait. Tandberg Television now belongs to Ericsson. It managed to attract 87.4% of the shares in its offer and decided to waives its condition of 90% acceptance, and now can be considered to be in the IPTV business.
Ericsson will now go ahead and pay out all of the offer in cash as long as the deal clears all local anti-trust hurdles. After a voluntary cash offer yields that high percentage of shares, Ericsson under Norwegian Law can acquire the rest with a mandatory share offer that cannot be refused.
Hopefully after the deal is complete Ericsson will give some bones to the strategic thinking behind that acquisition.
Meanwhile, in preparation for the deal Tandberg has sold off a small transmitter business based in Germany. Cohu a US manufacturer of semiconductor test handling equipment said that its subsidiary, Broadcast Microwave Services has purchased Tandberg Television AVS GmbH for $8.3 million in cash.
AVS, located near Frankfurt, Germany, designs digital transmitters, receivers and microwave communications systems and has annual sales of $7 million.