Ramtron International Corp. (Colorado Springs, CO), a developer of ferroelectric random access memory products, announced its acquisition of Goal Semiconductor Inc. (Montreal, Canada), a manufacturer of digital-to-analog conversion products and programmable microcontrollers, in a cash and stock transaction valued at approximately $7.6 million. Ramtron believes that its business combination with Goal will enable the company to accelerate its product development plans for analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits and provide customers with an expanded portfolio of FRAM-enabled data acquisition, signal processing, and microcontroller devices.
Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, Ramtron paid approximately $2.0 million in cash and $5.6 million in Ramtron common stock to acquire all of the outstanding securities of Goal. For the stock portion of the consideration, Ramtron issued approximately 1,950,000 new common shares. As a result of the transaction, Ramtron now has approximately 24.4 million common shares outstanding. The transaction closed on August 29, 2005. The acquisition of Goal is expected to add approximately $1.2 million per year to Ramtron's operating expenses and to become accretive to Ramtron's earnings in 2006, as products resulting from the combination are commercialized.
Additionally, as a result of the acquisition, Ramtron now has a total of 107 full-time employees, up from 88. The company is also in the process of securing a $3 million term loan facility, which is anticipated to carry a term of 36 months and will accrue interest at the prime lending rate plus one percent.
"We believe that our path to revenue and earnings growth will be paved by the execution of an aggressive product development and commercialization plan," said Ramtron CEO Bill Staunton. "We expect that this acquisition, which is highly complementary to our current product strategy, will give us a five-year jump on our roadmap for integrated and application-specific product launches. As a result, we hope to accelerate the development and delivery of high-margin products targeted at the markets that we serve."
