Rhipe (RHP) $2.09

A trading halt yesterday had rumour swirling that Rhipe was the latest Aussie tech company to be caught up in M&A (following Altium (ALU) & Iress (IRE) in recent weeks). The software and cloud sales business needed some time to prepare for the announcement of a “control transaction,” giving themselves until market open tomorrow. The muted buyer is thought to be Norway’s Crayon (CRAYN.OL) which raised a substantial amount of money earlier in the week, specifically for an acquisition. Crayon is a very similar business out of Northern Europe and the acquisition would make sense for them,  we would expect a decent premium to be paid given the likely synergies. We will await further news here which will be clearly positive for portfolio performance in the short term. Given the continued focus in software and the huge opportunities these sorts of companies have,  we are looking to other companies to make sure the portfolio still has exposure in the space.