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News Alert: ORBCOMM being acquired by private equity firm in $1.1B deal

Sale price is $11.50 per share, about 150% more than closing price Wednesday

Photo: Jim Allen/FreightWaves

ORBCOMM (NASDAQ: ORBC), a leading provider of ELDs and other Internet of Things (IoT) technology, is being acquired by private equity company GI Partners. 

The price for ORBCOMM is $11.50 per share. That is a significant premium over the closing price Wednesday on the Nasdaq of $7.57 per share. The company’s 52-week high is $9.25 per share, recorded on Jan. 21. The roughly 52% premium over the current share price is in the ballpark of the 50% premium over the 90-day volume-weighted average share price. 

The total value of the deal was put at $1.1 billion, including debt. Last October, ORBCOMM completed a debt refinancing for $250 million in new debt. 

On the company’s fourth-quarter 2020 conference call, held in February, CEO Marc Eisenberg said the company was “not really considering M&A this year. In the out years, maybe, but just not this year.” The question was posed by an analyst regarding the possibility of ORBCOMM making acquisitions, not being acquired. 


GI is San Francisco-based. It described itself as having raised $26 million and investing primarily in health care, IT and software.

FreightWaves will have more coverage on this story later Thursday.

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John Kingston

John has an almost 40-year career covering commodities, most of the time at S&P Global Platts. He created the Dated Brent benchmark, now the world’s most important crude oil marker. He was Director of Oil, Director of News, the editor in chief of Platts Oilgram News and the “talking head” for Platts on numerous media outlets, including CNBC, Fox Business and Canada’s BNN. He covered metals before joining Platts and then spent a year running Platts’ metals business as well. He was awarded the International Association of Energy Economics Award for Excellence in Written Journalism in 2015. In 2010, he won two Corporate Achievement Awards from McGraw-Hill, an extremely rare accomplishment, one for steering coverage of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and the other for the launch of a public affairs television show, Platts Energy Week.