Friday, January 23, 2009

VeriSign Buys Certicom

Mountain View-based VeriSign said Friday morning that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Certicom, a provider of public key encryption technology, in a deal worth approximately $40M, net of Certicom's cash and short term marketable securities. Certicom, which is publicly held on the TSX, had recently received an unsolicited, takeover bid from Research in Motion Limited. According to VeriSign, its offer--worth $73M before including cash in Certicom--reprented a 26 percent premium over Certicom's common stock price, and 40% over RIM's takeover bid. Certicom develops Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technology, used for public-key encryption.