Johannesburg, 08 Mar 2012
New York Stock Exchange-listed Lexmark International has bought Luxembourg-based BDGB Enterprise, including its US subsidiary Brainware, for about $148 million (R1.1 billion).
Brainware's intelligent data capture platform, Brainware Distiller, extracts critical information from paper and electronic documents, validates the extracted data and passes it to customers' data management systems, enterprise resource planning and/or financial management systems.
“This high growth market is closely adjacent to both Lexmark's customer solutions and Perceptive Software's expanding enterprise content management and business process management businesses,” says Lexmark in a statement.
Brainware will join Perceptive Software, a standalone business unit within Lexmark.
“By bringing these closely aligned technologies together, Lexmark will further strengthen its unique, industry-leading end-to-end products, solutions and services with a broader range of software that enables customers to capture, manage and access information and business process workflows,” says Lexmark.
“Brainware's innovative intelligent data capture technology will be attractive to our customers across the globe,” says Paul Rooke, Lexmark's chairman and CEO.
Brainware CEO Carl Mergele will report directly to Scott Coons, Perceptive Software's president and CEO and Lexmark VP.
The acquisition is in line with Lexmark's strategy of pursuing acquisitions to support the growth of the company while returning more than 50% of free cash flow to shareholders, on average, through quarterly dividends and share repurchases.