Stamps.com to be bought by Thoma Bravo in $6.6 billion deal
On Friday, Stamps.com and Thoma Bravo announced a $6.6 billion cash deal in which the online postage company agreed to be acquired by the private equity firm.
Video Transcript
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MYLES UDLAND: Let's take a look inside the YFi Interactive Touchscreen quickly here on this Friday morning, and let's start with the good old-fashioned people's index. The Dow Jones Industrial Average currently trading at what would be a closing record high on Friday. The close is at 34,786. That was after that better than expected June jobs report. And we can see on the left hand part of the screen, that is indeed Friday's trading action, because we are in the fifth trading session since then with the holiday shortened week. So we'll see how things shake out through today's session.
Dow is up more than 1%, but do want to flag that we are trading at what would be a closing record high, not an intraday high, we were above 35,000 at one point back in May, so we'll keep our eye on that. Take a look inside some of the trending tickers here on this Friday morning. We discussed Virgin Galactic earlier on in the program. Stock was up about 17% during Thursday's trading session. Sir Richard Branson set for that I guess suborbital flight, however we're going to call that, we're going to get a space expert to explain that for us at some point here.
Stock down 4% today. Really a huge run in Virgin Galactic shares over the last several months after the stock had, you know, certainly been part of that meme trade earlier this year. We'd seen some cooling off in the name through the spring and now pretty much back to those record highs as we start to see some action, I guess, on the core business here on the actual project of getting people up into space.
Let's flag Stamps.com quickly, because this is part of a merger Friday. I guess the team at Thoma Bravo couldn't wait for the weekend to announce that they have acquired Stamps.com in an all cash deal, valuing Stamps at $330 per share, and we see a little bit of a discount here to that sale price is, of course, the regulatory risk around whether it gets approved or not being priced in there. Good old fashioned merger arbitrage trade. But 330 per share is the take out price, a 67% premium to where Stamps closed on Thursday, and it's a 70% premium to where the stock had traded over the last couple of months.
It's been an interesting name to follow in this market for some time. We look at a longer term chart of Stamps, and it has certainly had a couple of lives here, including a 2019 period where you wondered just what is going on here with the business. And now after having traded really into the 50s and the 60s, now getting taken out at $330 per share just two years later, quite a result for the management team over there at Stamps.com, and congratulations to everybody who has a podcast, perhaps you will continue to get your sponsorship from that company.
