Getting your player ready...
NEW YORK — Cisco Systems tapped its immense cash hoard and announced a deal Thursday to buy Norway’s Tandberg ASA for $3 billion in a bid to dominate the global market for videoconferencing equipment. Cisco is paying twice the value of the entire global annual market for videoconferencing equipment, at about $1.5 billion a year.
But the fact that Tandberg is a Norwegian company allows Cisco to use an asset that’s otherwise not very useful: the $35 billion cash that has been piling up in its overseas subsidiaries. Cisco is avoiding the U.S. taxes it would have to pay to bring the money home. The all-cash deal is Cisco’s first acquisition of an overseas public company, chief executive John Chambers said. The Associated Press
