News

Plantronics Buys Polycom for $2bn

Unified Comms
Plantronics has announced today that they are in talks to acquire Polycom in a cash and stock transaction valued at $2.0 billion. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to close by the end of the third calendar quarter of 2018.

The acquisition catapults Plantronics into a global front runner for voice and video collaboration and significantly broadens their portfolio. Plantronics will have on of the broadest portfolio's of complementary products and services across the global communications and collaboration ecosystem.

Today's news will further accelerate Plantronics vision of an enterprise that is able to leverage powerful analytics, video and audio touchpoints to ignite all new communications and collaboration experiences. According to Joe Burton, President and Chief Executive Officer, Plantronics, "With the addition of Polycom's solutions across video, audio and collaboration we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of communications and collaboration touch points and services to our customers and channel partners. This will put Plantronics in an ideal position to solve for today's enterprise collaboration requirements while capitalizing on market opportunities associated with the evolving, intelligent enterprise.”

“Polycom has returned to growth by focusing on building strong ecosystem partnerships and delivering innovative, smart solutions for our customers and partners," said Mary T. McDowell, Chief Executive Officer, Polycom. "Bringing Plantronics and Polycom together will broaden the breadth of solutions available to customers and partners and create a consistent end-user experience across many collaboration applications and devices. As one company, Plantronics and Polycom will make it even easier for all customers to solve big-business problems through human-to-human connections.”

Polycom is privately held and has been an innovator in personal collaboration, group collaboration, and services (including customer care, managed and professional services, and cloud services for interoperability, management, and analytics). For CY2017, Polycom had GAAP revenue of $1.1 billion, Non-GAAP gross margin of 56.6%, Non-GAAP operating income of $183.1 million and Non-GAAP operating margin of 16.0%.