Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy supercomputer maker Cray in $1.30 billion deal

[May 17, 2019]   (Reuters) - Supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc said on Friday it would be bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co in a deal valued at about $1.30 billion, net of cash.

The $35 per share value represents a premium of 17.4% to Cray's last close.

HPE said it expects the deal to increase its footprint in federal business and academia, and sell supercomputing products to its commercial clients.

The deal, expected to close by the first quarter of HPE's fiscal year 2020, will add to its adjusted operating profit in the first full year after closing.

As part of the deal, HPE expects to incur one-time integration costs that will be absorbed within its fiscal year 2020 free cash flow outlook of $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion that remains unchanged.

Seattle-headquartered Cray has U.S.-based manufacturing operations and about 1,300 employees worldwide. It earned $456 million in revenue in its last fiscal year.

Cray's supercomputing systems can handle massive data sets, converged modeling, simulation, artificial intelligence, and analytics workloads.

(Reporting by Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

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