Vancouver-based Copperleaf Technologies has entered into an agreement that will see Industrial and Financial Systems (IFS) acquire all of its outstanding common shares and take the company off the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).
Copperleaf expects its Vancouver teams to “remain central to the future strategy of the combined organization.”
IFS will pay $12.00 CAD in cash per Copperleaf share, a premium of 18 percent on the $10.15 the stock was trading at market close on June 10, prior to the deal’s announcement. The total equity value of the deal is approximately $1 billion CAD.
Copperleaf added that the deal represents a 70 percent premium on its closing price of $7.06 on May 3, which was the last trading day before IFS submitted its proposal to purchase the company. The stock price’s steady rise prior to the deal announcement can be attributed to Copperleaf’s Q1 2024 earnings, which reported a 32 percent increase in its annual recurring revenue year-over-year.
The agreement is yet another example of a Canadian tech company opting to go private in the past year. While Copperleaf listed on the TSX in late 2021, joining the wave of Canadian tech companies opting to go public during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tide is now receding.
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Last month, Vancouver-based CloudMD, which began trading on the TSX in 2020, announced a $36 million go-private deal. In April, Montréal payments company Nuvei entered into a $6.4-billion agreement to be privatized by an American private equity firm following the many others that opted to do the same including MDF Commerce, TrueContext, Q4 Inc., BBTV Holdings, and Dialogue Health Technologies.
Founded in 2000, Copperleaf provides AI-powered asset investment planning and management (AIPM) software to enterprise clients, meant to help businesses make decisions on where to invest in their business and when. Copperleaf says its software is used in the electricity, natural gas, water, energy, pharmaceutical, and transportation industries.
Based in Linköping, Sweden, and with over 6,000 employees, IFS provides enterprise resource planning, asset, and service management software. Copperleaf says its AIPM solutions will complement IFS’s enterprise asset management focus, and that it expects IFS to invest in and develop Copperleaf’s Vancouver capabilities and that its teams will “remain central to the future strategy of the combined organization.”
The transaction is anticipated to close in the third quarter of 2024, when Copperleaf will be delisted from the TSX and cease to be a reporting issuer under Canadian securities laws.
Feature image courtesy Copperleaf via Linkedin.
