IBM's Historic Trade: A Great Success For Swedish Owners

Yesterday, the US computer giant, IBM, announced that it had already concluded its biggest deal by acquiring the Red Hat software company.

The transaction amounts to 34 billion dollars, or 310 billion SEK. IBM pays $ 190 per share, or SEK 1,735, or 62% more than the price in effect at Friday's closing.

Today, Red Hat has twelve Swedish owners. Everyone owns less than 0.5% of the society. Nevertheless, the acquisition of disks by IBM becomes a very good business for Swedish owners.

In one night, the value of the five largest Swedish owners increased by SEK 818.5 million in total due to the generous bid bonus.

Swedbank holds 760,000 shares in Red Hat. The market value at closing before the acquisition on Friday was SEK 809.9 million. IBM's bid now valued the record at 1.3 billion SEK.

The second largest Swedish owner of Red Hat is, according to Bloomberg, the AP funds. Last September, the second, third, fourth and seventh AP Funds held shares in Red Hat. During the transaction, the value of the stake increased by just over 178 million SEK, to reach 462 million SEK.

Even Lannebo Fonder and the financial company Öhmangruppen have reason to rejoice. At the end of June, Lannebo held a value of SEK 95.9 million. After the transaction, the value reached 156 million SEK. The participation of the Öhmang Group increased by SEK 42.4 million to SEK 109.7 million.

Even SPP Fonder is one of the five largest Swedish owners of Red Hat. When the agreement with IBM was clear, the value of SPP's assets increased by SEK 24.2 million to SEK 62.8 million.

Red Hat specializes in systems developed for the Linux operating system. According to IBM, this agreement means that it is becoming a leader in open cloud services software. The hope is probably that the Red Hat deal will catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud services only.

The agreement is expected to be concluded in the second half of next year.