Harmonic's CEO........................................
Until today, the growth that the company has realized has always been internal. In the ten years of our existence, we have only made one acquisition and that was Harmonic Data Systems in Israel, which is a relatively small part of our revenue, not tremendously significant at this stage. Our strategy has pretty much been to grow from within and to be opportunistic, but of course, if the right company were to come along, we would think about acquiring it. We are in the process of acquiring a company called DiviCom, which is about the same size of Harmonic in terms of revenue. It is on the same order of magnitude, but slightly more profitable, and in fact, has about the same number of employees.
"We made an offer for DiviCom, which was accepted about one month ago, and we hope to merge the two operations in March. It is a very complimentary merger in that Harmonic`s strength is tremendous, and we believe that we are the leader in the fiber optic area for broadband. We have come to understand a lot about digital headends and digital encoding, and through that we got to know DiviCom and its people quite well. We realized that if we put the two companies together, we would create a `broadband powerhouse` in the future. This acquisition is a major step forward for the corporation. The first order of business is to make this merger a success because mergers are not always successful.
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