ICT Group Inc. has rejected an eight dollar per share bid from Aegis Ltd. In a brief statement, ICT said its board of directors had met and determined that it would not be in the best interest of the company to pursue the proposed transaction.
The company’s stock, which had jumped from $3.60 per share at close of business Friday to $5.91 per share, settled back at $4.44 per share at end-day Tuesday.
ICT provides a variety of outsourced customer care/retention, technical support and customer acquisition, and cross-selling/upselling offerings, as well as market research, database marketing, data entry/management, email response management, remittance processing, and other back-office business processing services. The company primarily serves financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, energy services, information technology, business and consumer products and services, and government markets.
The Cynic’s Take: CEO John J. Brennan alone controls more than 900,000 of the 15.9 million shares outstanding, a quantity potentially large enough to stave off a proxy fight, as noted by analyst Shlomo Rosenbaum of Stifel Nicolaus in a Reuters report. But Essar Group, which owns Aegis Ltd., is in an acquisition mode (it acquired PeopleSupport last year for $250 million). Hard to believe all the posturing on either side of this is finished...
