The CTRM Blog

Word on the street is that the OLF acquisition of Solarc has now closed…

UPDATE:

New York – December 01, 2011 – OpenLink Financial, LLC (OpenLink), a leading provider of energy, commodities, trading, and risk management (E/CTRM) solutions, which support the entire transaction lifecycle, has completed the deal to acquire SolArc, a vanguard in commodity management solutions for companies operating across the commodity supply chain, with a particular strength in physical bulk commodities.

Triple Point announced today that they had acquired Australian mining software producer QMASTOR.  As we had discussed previously in the blog, Triple Point has been pursuing shares of the publicly traded QMASTOR for several months.

It certainly looks like a pretty good deal for Triple Point.  For a price of around $25 million (assuming close to 100% of QMASTOR’s stock was purchased), the company will add somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 million in revenues in FY2011 and significantly expand Triple Point’s presence in the Australian market, which accounts for 82% of QMASTOR’s revenues.  On the product side, QMASTOR’s solutions appear to fit well with Triple Point’s growing focus on total value chain management, that is tracking commodities (and transactions) from production to consumption.

An UtiliPoint IssueAlert
Patrick Reames, Managing Director, CommodityPoint

The announcement last week that OpenLink Financial (OLF), one of the world’s largest CTRM solutions providers, had entered into an agreement to acquire their sometime rival (depending on the industry segment) SolArc has created quite a stir in the market. Though we’ve seen a couple of CTRM vendors change hands at the investor level in the last couple of months, including Hellman and Friedman buying into OLF, this new announcement reflects the largest acquisition of one vendor by another in this space for many years, and is a combining of two of the top five CTRM solution providers.

A friend of the blog sent me a link to a Moody’s press release covering the agency’s ratings of OpenLink Financial’s credit status in light of their acquisition by Hellman & Friedman.  Peppered throughout the discussion are references to OLF’s acquisition of Solarc with the note that the deal is expected to close by the end of the year.  I’ve got to say, I’m a bit surprised by this one.  While I had heard rumors that Solarc, along with several other vendors in this space has been for sale, I really didn’t expect that OLF would be the acquiring party.

Triple Point Technology is continuing with it’s strategy of increasing the company’s footprint via acquisition with their ongoing attempt to buy Australian mining software producer QMastor.  Triple Point’s initial unsolicited offer for the company in June was soundly rejected by the company’s board; however, a revised offer of $.31 per share (vs. $.24 initial offer) appears to be enough to win support of QMastor’s board and a solid majority of the company’s stockholders.  According to an article that appeared on the Computerworld Australia website, the total deal would be valued at $26.2M, slightly more than 2 times QMastor’s most recently reported annual review of $12.8M.  Triple Point’s offer is good until Oct. 7^th and is contingent upon them acquiring 90% of the outstanding shares (Bloomberg is reporting they have already picked-up a little over 5% of the shares via open market purchases since June).  Could we soon see CommodityXL for Mining? (Note: Though the quoted financials are expressed in Australian Dollars, the USD and AUD trade near parity.)