I’ve covered many of Cisco’s acquisitions over the last 7 years and I’ve never seen one like Tandberg.
Today Cisco revealed that they have 84 percent of the voting shares of Tandberg committed to the deal, which normally would be more than enough to complete any acquisition, in any other jurisdiction, anywhere in the World, but not Norway.
Apparently, Cisco needs to have 90 percent of the voting shares in order to close the deal.
This is a deal that was first announced on October 1st with a $3 Billion bid by Cisco for the video conferencing vendor. Six weeks later, after running into some shareholder resistance, Cisco did the unthinkable and upped the bid by an additional $400 million bringing the total bid to $3.4 Billion.
At the time of $3.4 Billion bid, Cisco also extended the deal offer to December 1st, which if you check your calendar was yesterday.
The deal offer has now been extended (again) until December 3rd.