William Blair Doesn't See A Higher Competing Bid Interrupting Verizon-FleetMatics Deal
On Monday morning, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) agreed to purchase FleetMatics Group PLC (NYSE: FLTX) at $2.4 billion, or $60.00 a share, in cash following Verizon's Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) take-out last Monday for $4.83 billion.
The FleetMatics deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2016.
Blair Applauds The Deal For Verizon
As a result of recent shares' run-up in FleetMatics, William Blair's Bhavan Suri downgraded FleetMatics Group from Outperform to Market Perform with a price target of $60.00.
Although Suri believes Verizon's purchase price of Fleetmatics was "low," he does not see higher competing bids in the future, as only a limited set of companies would be interested in consuming a deal of FleetMatics' size.
In Suri's view, the strategic value for Verizon was "high given that it has already invested in two other telematics business in Telogis and Hughes Telematics."
Additionally, there are plenty of smaller telematics companies that could be acquired rather than starting a bidding war with Verizon of FleetMatics.
According to TipRanks, Bhavan Suri is one of the better analyst's covering FleetMatics, with a 61 percent success rate and a +7.0 percent average return.
At the time of writing, FleetMatics traded at $59.59, up 38.69 percent Monday.
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Latest Ratings for FLTX
Date | Firm | Action | From | To |
---|---|---|---|---|
Aug 2016 | Citigroup | Maintains | Neutral | |
Aug 2016 | Tigress Financial | Downgrades | Buy | Neutral |
Aug 2016 | Citigroup | Downgrades | Buy | Neutral |
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