The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

HP offers $300m for UK's Synstar

Services play

Free whitepaper – Blade learning lab and technical community

HP made a bid today to boost its IT services operations in Europe by acquiring UK outfit Synstar.

HP has offered up $300m in cash for Synstar, which is close to a 28 percent premium on the firm's Friday close of 78.25 pence share price on the London Stock Exchange. Synstar's shares jumped as much as 27 percent to 99.50 pence since the HP bid was announced.

HP is looking to pick up Synstar's 1,500 customers throughout Europe. The company has offices in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. It offers networking, data management, maintenance and business continuity services. Some of Synstar's customers include Audi, British Gas International, Allied Irish Bank and DuPont.

HP has been making a number of acquisitions over the past two years on both the services and software fronts.

Merrill Lynch has made the offer for Synstar on behalf of HP Global Investments BV - a subsidiary of HP. ®

Related stories

IT services: don't forget the little guys
9/11 fails to influence disaster recovery strategies survey
ICL does not abuse mainframe maintenance
Computacenter 'preps £250m Synstar bid'

Free whitepaper – PowerEdge M1000e, M600 and M605 spec sheet

Don’t Miss

DustbinDirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Ventblockers Horror beyond human imagination

SC09Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores

SC09 Jaguar munches Roadrunner

Ubuntu teaser Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't

Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter

Narrowcasting for the email classes