Ambitious San Jose, California small form factor disk drive manufacturer Conner Peripherals Inc wants to live up more fully to its name by offering the full gamut of storage devices, and following its agreement with Intel Corp to make solid state stores using Flash memory, the company is plunging into the tape drive business by offering $11.25 a share for the broadest-based shop in the business, Archive Corp, Costa Mesa, California. Archive brings with it a string of subsidiaries including Cipher Data Products, Maynard, Ardat and Irwin. The agreed offer is at the letter of intent stage, and values Archive, which had sales of about $300m in its fiscal year to October 2, at $150.75m on a primary basis, up to $210m including shares that are subject to options or warrants. Archive also agreed to cancel its proposed public share offering. Conner did $112.6m net on turnover of $1,618m in the nine months to end-September. The parties expect to sign the definitive agreement in about two weeks and in the event Conner terminates the letter of intent or does not enter into a definitive agreement, it has agreed to buy about 1.9m new Archive shares at $6.75 a share. Archive shares rose $3.875 to $10.625 when the market opened on Friday; Conner’s were unchanged at $18.50.
