Motorola Solutions to buy Avigilon video-surveillance, analytics company in all-cash deal worth about $1 billion

Motorola Solutions today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Avigilon—a Vancouver-based provider of video-surveillance and video-analytics solutions—in an all-cash transaction that is worth about $1 billion.

Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown said company officials are “pretty enthusiastic” about the acquisition, for several reasons.

“First of all, video surveillance and analytics is growing—it’s growing rapidly,” Brown said today during the company’s quarterly conference call. “Second, the total addressable market is well in excess of $10 billion or $11 billion, and then some. And third, video continues to be a growing requirement of public-safety customers and critical-infrastructure customers that want a solution and would like Motorola to provide it.

“The thing that’s especially attractive to me is that this is not a commodity business. As you’ve seen with the other actions we’ve taken with the portfolio over time, I’m not interested in commodity businesses; I’m not interested in commodity margins. I like a market leader with an end-to-end platform orientation, and we believe this end-to-end video-surveillance suite of cameras, analytics, video management and video storage is particularly strong.”

Avigilon’s sales traditionally have been focused on the enterprise sector, but Motorola Solutions also plans to introduce the video solution to the critical-communications marketplace, Brown said.

“The thing I especially love is the channel synergies,” he said. “We can take this portfolio into global public safety, because they’ve been enterprise-centric to date, largely. We can take this into U.S. military. We can take this into U.S. federal. We can take this into our large direct sales force that serves enterprises and the commercial markets. So, it’s got very attractive channel synergies.

“Lastly, quite frankly—much like in mission-critical communications—I think there is a growing aversion to having a Chinese provider do critical video surveillance and security. I think that trend will lend itself well to us, as well.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Motorola Solutions will acquire all of Avigilon’s outstanding shares for CAD$27.00 per share, according to a Motorola Solutions press release. The enterprise value of the transaction is approximately US$1.0 billion, including Avigilon’s net debt.

Motorola Solutions expects to close the transaction during the second quarter of this year, “subject to customary regulatory, shareholder and court approvals,” according to Motorola Solutions. The deal has the unanimous support of the Avigilon board, according to Motorola Solutions.

When the transaction is completed, Motorola Solutions plans to run Avigilon “self-contained, as a separate subsidiary inside of Motorola Solutions,” according to Brown.

“We’re very pleased with the structure of the organization, the talent quality, the patent portfolio, the distribution channels, and we want to very mindful that—appropriately managed going forward—this will continue on a very successful track that they’ve demonstrated of execution,” Brown said.

“I think this is about building an end-to-end platform, adding another leg to the stool for public safety over existing distribution channels and brand by Motorola Solutions and giving them more scale to accelerate their growth.”

Alexander Fernandes, Avigilon’s founder, chief executive officer and chairman of the board, expressed optimism about the deal.

“We’re very pleased to be joining Motorola Solutions, as their vision and strategy aligns fully with our own,” Fernandes said in a prepared statement. “This combination will bring new opportunities to Avigilon, allowing us to accelerate our innovation and provide even more value to our customers.”

Buying Avigilon is expected to be the second acquisition that Motorola Solutions will complete this year. A previously announced deal to purchase the Plant/CML 911 business from Airbus DS Communications—initially expected to be finalized by the end of last year—is now scheduled to close during the first quarter of this year.

Gino Bonanotte, Motorola Solutions’ executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO), said that neither acquisition is expected to have a material impact on this year’s earnings, but both are expected to be accretive in 2019.