LeCroy shares up over 55% after company agrees to Teledyne takeover

Teledyne Technologies (TDY), a provider of electronic subsystems and instrumentation, said this morning that it will acquire LeCroy Corporation (LCRY) for $291M, including stock options, stock appreciation rights and net debt at March 31. Teledyne will pay $14.30 per share for LeCroy, a supplier of oscilloscopes, protocol analyzers and signal integrity test solutions. LeCroy has approximately 500 employees worldwide and had sales of about $178.1M for the fiscal year ended July 2, 2011. LeCroy may be required to pay Teledyne a termination fee equal to $10.5M and to pay Teledyne’s expenses up to $1M if the merger is terminated. Stifel Nicolaus Weisel is acting as exclusive financial advisor to LeCroy, while Needham & Company is acting as exclusive financial advisor to Teledyne. Teledyne CEO Dr. Robert Mehrabian says LeCroy will broaden the company's portfolio of analytical instrumentation businesses, while LeCroy CEO Thomas Reslewic believes Teledyne can help the company accelerate its high-end oscilloscope programs to deliver real-time bandwidth well beyond 100GHz. The transaction has been unanimously approved by both boards of directors, and LeCroy directors and officers, including founder Walter LeCroy, agreed to vote their shares in favor of the deal. LeCroy is up $5.06, or 55.41%, to $14.20 in mid-morning trading. Meanwhile, Teledyne is up 30c, or 0.50%, to $60.14.