Peregrine Buys Suite of Products From Tivoli Systems Of Austin for $105 Million
Active.com has been actively buying up smaller companies in an effort to corner the market for online participatory sports.
Earlier this month, the San Diego-based Internet company signed an agreement to buy Los Angeles-based eteamz.com, another Internet firm, for $11.6 million in stock in a deal that should close by the end of the month.
Matt Landa, Active.com’s chief commerce officer, said the latest purchase secures the firm’s dominant place in the online registration and participatory sports space.
Eteamz.com, a 2-year-old company, targets amateur sports league teams, providing them the tools for creating their own Web sites that can include schedules, scores, team rosters, photos and other team news. The site was ranked as the 13th most trafficked sports site by PC Data Online.
Eteamz has some 150,000 teams using its site and collects revenue from banner advertising.
Landa declined to reveal those figures or Active.com sales, but said transactions , primarily online event registrations , have increased from 300,000 last year to an estimated 1.2 million this year.
Active.com collects 5.5 percent of a registration fee, with the bulk of the fees coming from about 20,000 sports events, or about 90 percent of the online event registration market, he said.
Besides the online events registration, Active collects fees when people register for classes offered by parks and recreation departments.
Active’s latest buy follows on its purchase last month of Sierra Digital, a Sacramento-based maker of software for park and recreation agencies; and the purchase in January of League.Link, another Internet company that provides sports league management services.
Also in November, Active.com closed a $21 million second round of capital financing led by Deutsche Bank’s ABS Ventures, giving it the capital to go on its buying binge.
That round follows on an earlier, $15.5 million investment from Ticketmaster-Online City Search, and brings the total outside investment raised by Active.com to $52 million.
Landa says no further acquisitions are on the horizon, and the focus for the company is on reaching profitability next year.
In an effort to get there quicker, Active.com laid off 13 employees last month, the result of job overlaps in some areas. The company’s head count now is about 150 with just under 100 working at its La Jolla office and the rest at offices in Sacramento, Atlanta, and Westminster, Colo.
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Peregrine Systems Buys Tivoli: Peregrine Systems Inc., the San Diego maker for infrastructure management software, said it will purchase a suite of products from Tivoli Systems Inc. of Austin, Texas, for $105 million in cash and stock.
The price is composed of $45 million in cash and 3 million shares of Peregrine’s stock, which jumped 3 points on the news Dec. 11 to $23.75. Its 52-week range is $13.57 to $80.63.
Peregrine said it has worked with Tivoli, a subsidiary of IBM, for years. Tivoli makes software that manages computer networks and had sales of more than $1.5 billion last year.
Peregrine reported a net loss for its six months ended Sept. 30 at $177.9 million on sales of $237 million, compared to a loss of $7 million on sales of $109 million for the like period in 1999.
The loss included the expenditure of about $208 million for the half on acquisition costs.
Qualcomm Forms VC Fund: Qualcomm Inc. said it formed a $60 million capital investment fund aimed at South Korean startups with Hansol i Ventures, Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of Hansol.
The idea behind the fund is to help South Korean companies involved in the development and use of CDMA, or code division multiple access, Qualcomm’s wireless technology, to help increase its usage.
Qualcomm said it will be the largest investor in the fund, but did not reveal the amount. In addition to Hansol, other investors are the Korean Small and Medium Sized Business Administration and the Korean Teachers Pension Fund.
South Korea is one of the largest users of CDMA technology and generates a large amount of Qualcomm’s overseas sales but the company declined to reveal either the amount or percent of its total sales.
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OMM Still Set For IPO: OMM Inc., a San Diego-based developer and supplier of switches for fiber-optic communications networks, said a planned IPO it announced in mid-September is still on despite a volatile stock market.
Phil Chapman, OMM’s chief financial officer, said the company has been in discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning certain descriptions in its S-1 filing but is still set to issue about $100 million in stock “sometime soon.”
“The company is ready but the markets are questionable,” Chapman said about the actual issue date.
The lead underwriter for the stock, which will list on the Nasdaq, is Credit Suisse First Boston with participation from Chase H & Q;, CBC World Markets and Dain Rauscher Wessels.
AMI Sells Off 80 Percent: American Microsystems Inc. has only 18 employees at its headquarters in San Diego. But the company, a maker of application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, has 1,863 employees worldwide, including plants in Pocatello, Idaho; Dresden, Germany; and Manila.
Earlier this month, the owner of the high-tech manufacturer, GA-TEK, a Japanese entity, sold 80 percent of AMI to a partnership of Francisco Partners and Citicorp Venture Capital for $525 million.
GA-TEK will retain 20 percent, and a warrant to purchase an additional 10 percent.
As of Nov. 30, AMI reported annual sales of more than $370 million.
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MassHysteria Gets $1.8 Million: San Diego based-MassHysteria, a digital media integrator, received a $1.8 million investment from Stack Computer, a Costa Mesa data storage and integration company.
MassHysteria said it will use the money to expand it operations in San Jose and Vienna, Va., and purchase hardware for its current client base, which includes America Online, Microsoft and the National Basketball Association.
The company said it expects to reach $12 million in sales this year.
RF Industries Buys Bioconnect: RF Industries, Ltd., a San Diego-based manufacturer of radio frequency coaxial connectors and cable assemblies, said it purchased Bioconnect, Inc., a Lake Elsinore-based maker of interconnect products for the health care industry, for $400,000.
Bioconnect had sales of about $200,000 for the six months ended Nov. 30, and 12 employees.
Send high-tech finance news to mallen @sdbj.com.
