Seagate, the data storage company, has announced its intent to acquire Intevac, a hard drive equipment producer, in an all-cash deal worth $119 million.
Seagate said on Thursday that it’ll pay $4 per share in a tender offer for Intevac, which is publicly traded. Seagate will initially purchase a minimum of “at least one share more than 50%” of Intevac’s issued and outstanding shares, and then execute a “second step” merger to acquire the company’s remaining shares.
Intevac’s board of directors and largest shareholders unanimously approved the transaction. Seagate expects it to close in late March or early April, subject to customary closing conditions.
Santa Clara-based Intevac, founded in 1991 as a spin-off from tech firm Varian Associates, manufactures thin film deposition systems. It IPO’d in 1995, and has expanded its footprint over the years to territories including China, Malaysia, and Singapore.
On its website, Intavec says its products support hard drive disk media production and the upgrade of existing hard drive systems. One of the technologies that the firm touts as its preferred solution, heat-assisted magnetic recording, or HAMR, improves the “writeability” and storage density of hard drives by applying heat energy.
It’s not tough to see how this fits squarely into Seagate’s hard drive disk business. In December, Seagate announced its first HAMR-based hard drive after a two-decade hiatus from the tech, and the company plans to ship HAMR-based drives to several customers, including a “leading cloud provider,” this year.
Several of Seagate’s rivals, including Western Digital and Toshiba, are also working on HAMR-based drives, spurred by the growing worldwide demand for storage. HAMR-based drives generally have a cost advantage over incumbent solid-state technologies, making them especially attractive to public cloud vendors.
Intavec’s market cap was around $91.17 million as of Thursday. In its most recent fiscal quarter (Q3 2024), the firm notched $28.5 million in revenue, up 59% year-over-year, but posted a $2.17 million net loss.
Intavec late last year said it was exploring “strategic options” and undergoing a restructuring that the company anticipated would “materially strengthen its profitability.” One of those strategic options was an exit from the public markets, it seems.
Intavec is Seagate’s first major acquisition since the company bought Kioxia, a supplier of flash memory and solid-state drives, in 2017. Seagate has made 11 acquisitions in its 46-year history, according to financial database Tracxn, totaling around $18 billion.
