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For a software company with less than $60 million in annual revenue, losses every quarter and a market where it is under siege from upstart competition, Pivotal Corp. is attracting plenty of attention from potential buyers.
Pivotal on Tuesday rejected the latest bid made for it, by Chinadotcom Corp. Earlier Tuesday, Hong Kong-based Chinadotcom, through its subsidiary, CDC Software, became the third company to make a bid for Pivotal in the past six weeks, announcing Tuesday an offer of $2 cash or $2.14 combined cash and stock for each outstanding share of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Pivotal.
Pivotals board of directors, however, rejected the deal, saying it was “non-binding” and had too many conditions attached to it, which in the end would not render it superior to Oak Investment Partners original deal.
Oak Investment Partners in October made the first bid for Pivotal, offering up to $1.81 per share in cash. It would combine Pivotal with fellow CRM software developer Talisma Corp. once the deal closed. Onyx Software Corp. followed up that bid with an all-stock deal indexed to the price of Onyxs shares. At close of trading today, that deal would be worth approximately $2 per share. Pivotals board has since rejected that deal and is recommending to shareholders that they vote for the Oak deal at the shareholders meeting this Friday.
CDC develops ERP software, specifically for the export manufacturing sector. The company would seek to add and integrate Pivotals CRM software with those offerings and add its business analytics software to Pivotals CRM applications. CDC and Pivotal already have a go-to market partnership in place for the Asia-Pacific market.
CDC would also provide $20 million in bridge financing as part of the deal and would retain Pivotals management team. But none of that was apparently good enough to sway Pivotals board, setting the stage for a shareholders vote on Friday.´