Entrust Datacard’s agreement to buy the UK’s nCipher Security from defence and aerospace multinational Thales is part of the company owner’s “generational wealth-building” approach, CEO Todd Wilkinson told Computer Business Review in a call this week.
US-based Entrust itself was bought by the billionaire German Quandt family’s Datacard Group for a reported $500 million (Bloomberg estimate) in 2013.
Backed by the family’s significant firepower – the family is one of Germany’s richest and a major BMW shareholder – the company has made a string of European acquisitions in the past 12 months, with nCipher just the latest British company to prove an attractive target. Continue reading