San Diego’s Novatel Wireless (NASDAQ: [[ticker:NVTL]]), which provides high-speed wireless mobile hotspot devices, USB modems, and other wireless Internet access products, says today it is buying Enfora, a suburban Dallas provider of asset management technology.
Enfora says its intelligent asset-management systems use wireless technology and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to analyze information from distributed assets. Novatel, which agreed to pay at least $64.5 million in cash at closing, had roughly $183 million in available cash and no debt at the end of September. (Novatel reported a loss of $7.1 million on $75.6 million in revenue in the third quarter that ended Sept. 30, and is on pace to generate more than $352 million in revenue this year.)
The market for M2M communications revenue is expected to grow at an annual compound rate of more than 22 percent over the next four years, according to data from ABI Research.
Enfora, which was founded in 1999 and has global operations, posted $61.3 million in revenue during the 12-month period that ended in September. Enfora’s founding CEO, Mark Weinzierl, will join Novatel’s senior management team. Novatel, which plans to operate Enfora as a subsidiary, says it expects the acquisition will be immediately accretive to its earnings on a non-GAAP (generally accepted accounting practices) basis.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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