Shareholders will certainly approve this deal. There is no Ciena-like smoking gun here. After the shareholder vote, it will be a matter of a day or so for ASND to disappear -either Monday or even Friday!
As far as the quarter, it will be big - expect about $8.8 billion in revs, $0.25 or more in earnings. Remember, LU gets to count the last week of ASND in its quarterly earnings. Given back-end weighting, this amounts to the equivalent of two average weeks revenues, but only one week of expenses - equals a penny of "accretion" in the quarter.
Also expect a stream of press releases timed to support the combined LU/ASND entity. For example, TNT-II (called TKO internally), rumored Nexabit acquisition, $5 billion Saudi contract, 7R/E contracts, etc..
As for Nexabit, the technology sounds impressive (checkout the current Red Herring 100tech companies to watch issue). These guys have a great hardware design - the question is: When will LU, ASND or Nexabit reach a stable, compatible implementation of BGP4 routing software? There are a ton of engineers at LU and ASND working on this, and there is a lot of confidence, but its not here yet.
Juniper wasn't in the cards in this timeframe - LU didn't want to pay $4-5 billion (they really are confident they will get the recipe right on their own). |
