Renesas agreed to acquire Altium, a maker of printed circuit board design software headquartered in San Diego and listed in Australia, for A$68.50 per share in cash, an equity value of about A$9.1 billion. The deal closed at the end of July 2024 (August 1 in Japan). The deal Renesas agreed on February 15, 2024 to pay A$68.50 a share in cash, about 34% above Altium's previous close. That gave an equity value of about A$9.1 billion and an enterprise value of about A$8.8 billion. It was done as an Australian scheme of arrangement, which needed shareholder and court approval. Renesas paid with bank loans and cash on hand. The deal closed on August 1, 2024, Japan time. What Altium does Altium, based in San Diego and listed in Sydney, makes Altium Designer, widely used software for designing printed circuit boards, plus the cloud platform Altium 365. It had revenue of about $263 million in the year to June 2023, with a 36.5% EBITDA margin. In 2021 it turned down a $3.9 billion bid from Autodesk as too low. Why Renesas wanted it Renesas grew into a major chip supplier partly by buying US chipmakers Intersil (2017) and IDT (2019). Altium was its first big software deal. Renesas wants engineers to pick its chips inside the design tools they already use, and to shorten the time from design to product.
