Koch Industries to buy-up remaining 30 per cent stake in Infor in deal valuing the ERP specialist it at $11bn

Golden Gate Capital sells its 30 per cent stake in Infor to conglomerate Koch Industries

Koch Industries has scooped up the remaining 30 per cent of Infor, in a deal that values the ERP software vendor at around $11 billion - $13 billion taking into account preferred shares.

Infor will become a wholly owned subsidiary of conglomerate Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US with annual revenues of $110 billion. Koch has interests in an eclectic range of industries, including chemicals, plastics, energy, pipelines, cattle ranching, and electronics components.

Infor, meanwhile, has invested around $4 billion in product design and development over the past ten years in a shift from packaged software to industry-specific cloud services, which it calls CloudSuites. Infor's cloud is built on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means that the company hasn't had to build its own network of data centres.

The transaction should close before the end of June 2020.

Koch has been an investor in Infor since 2016, when it struck a $2 billion deal with Infor's private equity owners, Golden Gate Capital and Summit Partners. Summit had originally invested in Infor in 2003 and 2004, shortly after the company was formed, when Infor acquired two of Summit's portfolio companies. Summit sold its stake in Infor to Koch Equity and Golden Gate in 2018.

That followed on from a claimed $2 billion investment by Infor to deliver more than 400 new products, 1,700 ‘integrations' and 16,000 industry-specific features under its former CEO Charles Phillips, who stepped aside in 2019 to be replaced by CFO Kevin Samuelson.

Infor attracted a further $1.5 billion investment in January 2019 ahead of what was then expected to be an IPO either later in the year or in 2020, "subject to market conditions".