Hoping perhaps to squeeze a few extra dollars from one of its two suitors, Amicas Inc. said it’s ready to accept a buyout offer from a rival information technology company but is still willing to talk with a Chicago-based private equity firm about a possible deal.
Boston-based Amicas (NSDQ:AMCS) late last year said it had agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm, Thoma Bravo LLC, for $5.35 a share, or about $217 million. That offer was trumped last week with a $6.05-a-share cash bid from Milwaukee-based Merge Healthcare Inc. (NSDQ:MRGE). Amicas executives initially cast doubt on Merge’s financial ability to pull off a deal, but after reviewing an updated offer over the weekend concluded “the Merge proposal constitutes a superior proposal.”
Thoma Bravo may not yet be left standing at the altar. In a statement announcing its positive re-assessment of the Merge offer, the Amicas board also said they would continue good-faith negotiations with Thoma through March 8 to strike a better deal. The board also said they have postponed a meeting set for March 4, when shareholders were to have voted whether to accept the Thoma Bravo offer.
Amicas, which provides image and data management tools for the healthcare industry, is being advised by Raymond James & Associates Inc. as investment banker, with additional legal services from Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo P.C. in Boston.
Neither Merge nor Thoma Bravo had immediate comment.
Separately Monday, Amicas said it can now offer 4 petabytes of imaging capacity to hospitals and other healthcare facilities. A petabyte is equal to 2 to the 15th power, or approximately 1.024 billion million (1,024,000,000,000,000) individual pieces of data.
By comparison, the largest hard drives typically are measured in terabytes, or 1,024 billion bits of binary data.