KKR, CD&R Near Deal to Buy Cloudera
May 31 2021 - 9:45PM
Dow Jones News
By Miriam Gottfried and Cara Lombardo
Private-equity firms KKR & Co. and Clayton Dubilier &
Rice LLC are nearing a deal to buy Cloudera Inc. and take the
software company private, according to people familiar with the
matter.
A deal for the data-cloud company could be finalized by Tuesday,
assuming the talks don't fall apart at the last minute, the people
said. The exact terms couldn't be learned, but the company has a
market value of nearly $4 billion.
Founded in 2008 by a group of engineers from Alphabet Inc.'s
Google, Facebook Inc., Oracle Corp. and Yahoo Inc., Cloudera was an
early player in the open-source software framework Hadoop, which
enables large amounts of data to be processed quickly. But it
struggled to shift to the now-dominant public cloud, where it faces
steep competition from much larger firms including Amazon.com
Inc.'s Amazon Web Services.
Cloudera's shares have had a rocky run since their public-market
debut in 2017. They are trading below their initial public offering
price and are down roughly 8% so far this year after closing Friday
at $12.86.
Still, recent results have shown improvement in the company's
business. Cloudera in March reported revenue of $869 million for
its fiscal year ended Jan. 31, an increase of 9%, and an operating
margin of 17% compared with a negative one a year earlier. It is
scheduled to report first-quarter results this week.
Activist investor Carl Icahn owns roughly 18% of the company and
in 2019 received two board seats as part of a settlement. The
company also tapped Robert Bearden as chief executive to replace
Tom Reilly, who stepped down. Mr. Bearden was already a Cloudera
director and is co-founder of Hortonworks Inc., an open-source
company Cloudera bought in 2019.
Private-equity firms including KKR and CD&R have been
increasingly snapping up software companies, attracted by their
predictable and growing cash flows. Last summer, KKR sold Epicor
Software Corp. to a group led by CD&R for about $4.7 billion
including debt.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 31, 2021 21:35 ET (01:35 GMT)
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