On March the 10th, 2015, Bain Capital acquired Bluecoat, ticker BCSI, for $2.4 billion. Today, they sold the same piece of shit company to the bagholders at SYMC for $4.65 billion.
According to the WSJ, Bain had “bolstered” Bluecoat with a few cloud acquisitions. Nevertheless, the mark up is sweet, given the time period by which Bain has been saddled with Bluecoat has been less than a year.
Management at Symantec, obviously feeling guilty for paying so much, defended the price tag.
Buying Blue Coat last year “would have been impossible,” operationally, as the company was in the process of divesting itself of Veritas, said Thomas Seifert, Symantec’s chief financial officer.
“If you look at what we’ve paid, it’s well within the range of what an IPO valuation would have been,” he said in a separate interview. “With this IPO path in mind, we think we paid fair value for what we’re receiving.”
This, of course, is total nonsense, as the cyber security space sucks and has traded down, hard, for the better part of the past two years. Look at FEYE for proof.
In the time that Bain acquired Bluecoat until now, industry leader, Palo Alto Networks’, share price has dropped by 25%, while Fireye traded down an astounding 69%.
Tip of the hat to the salesmen at Bain for getting this deal done.
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So why is Symantec so desperate to buy blucoat?
Enterprise. They don’t have to outgrow the other players in the enterprise space, but they certainly need to outgrow the retail crap that was their bread and butter for years.