II‐VI Incorporated intends to acquire CoAdna Holdings in a cash transaction valued at approximately $85 million at closing. The business is to be integrated in II-VI’s Photonics segment.
Founded in 2000, CoAdna specialises in the global provision of wavelength selective switches (WSS) based on its patented LightFlow liquid crystal platform and II-VI’s micro-optics. The WSS modules have a long history of successful field deployments, having been integrated over the years alongside II-VI’s optical amplifiers, optical channel monitors and other II-VI components on reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) line cards designed by II-VI, CoAdna and their customers. The transaction price includes the acquisition of CoAdna’s approximately $40 million in cash, and it is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018. This is subject to the approval of CoAdna’s shareholders, regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
Serving as legal counsel to II-VI is Sherrard German & Kelly P.C., K&L Gates LLP, whilst Appleby. Cowen acted as financial advisor to II-VI. The combined portfolio of both companies’ products for ROADM line cards will include fixed- and flex-band 1xN WSS, tunable mux/demux, dual-chip pump lasers, passive components, arrayed-EDFAs, high-resolution optical channel monitors and optical time domain reflectometers. CoAdna will contribute to the joint product portfolio its OvS platform that features a distributed cross connect architecture for data centre networking.
Sunny Sun, president, photonics segment at II-VI commented: ‘CoAdna and II-VI have been great business partners for many years, leveraging each other’s complementary products and technologies to serve the optical transport market. We are eager to realise our synergies to grow the WSS business over our strong sales channels and shorten the time to market for our new products. With our manufacturing scale, unmatched vertical integration and broad product portfolio, we are well positioned for the growth in ROADM demand driven by metro network upgrades, new data centre interconnect architectures and the emerging 5G wireless infrastructure.’
II‐VI also recently introduced to its portfolio a new CTM 1450 high resolution optical channel monitor for ROADMs (see II-VI Incorporated reveals new high resolution optical channel monitor for flexible grid ROADMs).
This is the latest in a line of industry acquisitions, including the purchases of Accelerated Connections and Interoute by GTT Communications (see GTT creates ‘disruptive competitor’ in Canada with Accelerated Connections acquisition and GTT gains 72,000km European fibre network in €1.9 billion Interoute acquisition); and the agreement between Lumentum Holdings and Oclaro, where the former will acquire all of the outstanding common stock of the latter (see Lumentum acquires outstanding Oclaro common stock in $1.8 billion agreement).
