A week after taking another swing at buying ShoreTel, Mitel has backed off — at least for now — and has publicly withdrawn the offer. ShoreTel seems happy with that. They had raised their earlier bid up to $8.50 per share, but ShoreTel’s board continued to be unimpressed and had described the offer as ‘highly inadequate’.
Mitel had started off this process with an unsolicited offer in October for $8.10 per share, a figure ShoreTel was thorougly unimpressed with. ShoreTel feels its pending launch of new products holds huge potential, and that Mitel’s bid does not reflect that value. Adding another $0.40 didn’t change that point of view. After the higher bid, ShoreTel’s board took just two days to turn it down unanimously. Unable to get them to sit down and talk turkey, Mitel is pulling back again.
Might Mitel make yet another approach after making such little headway thus far? It’s possible, but I suspect they’ll shift their focus toward other potential targets. Canada’s Mitel is looking for more US scale in the cloud communications market after consolidating Aastra, but there are other ways to find it I suspect.
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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Unified Communications · VoIP
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