Thursday, 10 July 2008

nCipher soars on Thales bid

This morning Thales was revealed as the bidder for nCipher with a 300p cash offer valuing them at £50.7m. Yesterday, shares in nCipher soared by 73% to 260p after they put out an RNS announcement.

Bluntly, this is a pretty amazing price - last achieved in the dot.com heights and c140% more than its pre-bid price. I am reminded that, on top of this, nCipher returned around £40m to shareholders over a year back too.

One note of caution though - nCipher has been here before. Back in early 2006 it received a similar 300p bid from SafeNet which was later abandoned (I won't go into the complex reasons here)

But I can think of at least one HotViews reader who will be pleased today and even happier when the cash is finally banked!

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