HP is planning an European expansion

Jul 27, 2007 07:02 GMT  ·  By

The computer hardware manufacturing American company HP has plans to expand on the European market by acquiring the French company Bull. Right now, Bull is one of the few remaining French IT companies that are operating on their own, not being part of a bigger corporation. Bull's business rests on two separate avenues: first they work on servers and related computer systems; and second, they develop and operate a suite of integration software, based on open source projects.

The French Web site Capital cited by the news site InfoWorld said the negotiations between Bull and HP are now in the final stages and that HP will offer almost one billion dollars for the French company. This piece of news does not come exactly as a big surprise, as HP seems to have set off an expansion campaign buying smaller IT companies. The French company has a strong position on the European market, being centered mostly on high performance and high-end computer systems and just like HP, most of the Bull products are based on the Intel Itanium processor. There are speculations that the next move from HP will be the acquisition of the SGI company as well, according to the Web based news site The register, "helping to put the Itanium "ecosystem" out of its misery".

One interesting fact is that Bull comes with some strings attached, but if they are for the good or worse that remains to be seen. The French government has some shares in the company as well, around 10 percent, while 78 percent of the shares are on the open market. When the speculations about the ongoing negotiations between HP and Bull hit the market, the Bull shares instantly jumped 8 percent.

A French report says that HP is being advised on this new acquisition by the financial consulting firm Morgan Stanley that will help "seal the deal" for a closing fee.