Avast has announced its plan to buy AVG for $1.3 billion at $25 per share, in an all-cash deal. Both companies are in security providing Antivirus and Internet Security suites for consumers and business.
Both Avast and AVG operates from Czech Republic and have maintained a similar and loyal user base for many years: about 200M each. However there is one slight difference between these companies. While Avast is a private company, AVG is a public traded company and it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
According to Avast, they have signed an agreement with AVG to buy all shares of AVG’s stock, which AVG’s board is recommending their shareholders accept. The deal is still in the preliminary stages, requiring approval from AVG’s shareholders, as well as that of government regulators. Overall, the process will take few months to finalize.
The process does not allow us to talk a lot about how we would operate after combining, etc. so I can just say a little. I do think this combination is great for our users. We will have over 250 million PC/Mac users enabling us to gather even more threat data to improve the protection to our users. In mobile, our combined 160 million mobile users will be used to improve protection as well as to provide an important stepping stone into the Internet of things. Additionally, we will be gaining some exciting mobile technology designed to protect families on line. In SMB, we will be better able to support our business users with a larger geographic footprint, better technical support, and the best technologies from our two companies.
Currently, there is not much information on how it would affect the end users. Nevertheless, our guess is that Avast will ask/force AVG users to migrate to their products.
