Under the terms of the agreement, HAHT will issue approximately 8.9 million shares for all iMediation's outstanding stock, inclusive of the stock from arcadiaOne, which was recently purchased by iMediation. The acquired companies' customers include Hasbro, L'Oréal, Philips and Virgin.
Tom Thomas, president and CEO of HAHT Commerce, said he believes the acquisition will strengthen the company's competitive position. It extends the product and brand information management and channel management components of our product roadmap, increases our European presence, and increases the size of our customer base, specifically in the consumer products industries.
According to Sheryl Kingstone, senior analyst of the Yankee Group, HAHT's acquisitions of iMediation and arcadiaOne fill in crucial pieces of HAHT's demand chain management plan, to the benefit of consumer products companies with strong brand identification. The management of product and brand information is a huge issue for companies that have spent millions on their brand. For every product under that brand umbrella, there are dozens of product attributes, including definitions, specifications, images, marketing messages and prices. These companies may have hundreds or thousands of products and multiple individuals may maintain each bit of product information, so the task of organizing and maintaining all this information is critical to the company.
For example, Minolta's Business Products Group markets its entire product line to 400 North American business product dealers. Our brand image is extremely important to us, said Kristen Jarin, enterprise web services manager of Minolta. We are excited that HAHT chose [iMediation and arcadiaOne] because the functionality really strengthens their product set for consumer products companies like Minolta.
The merging of these companies also adds APAX Partners, General Electric Capital, Intel Capital, Reuters Investments, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Equity Funding and Deutsche Bank AG to HAHT's list of investors. Existing investors include Adobe Ventures, Aurora Funds, BankAmerica Capital Investors, CIBC Capital Partners, Granite Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Sippl Macdonald Ventures and Southeast Interactive Technology Funds.
