Melbourne-founded Tesserent acquired at a premium by French multinational Thales

Australia’s largest ASX-listed cybersecurity firm has been acquired by French multinational Thales under a deal which could deliver shareholders a 165 per cent premium.

Tesserent chief executive Kurt Hansen.

Australia’s largest ASX-listed cybersecurity firm has been acquired by a French multinational under a deal which, if approved, would deliver the company’s shareholders a 165 per cent premium.

Melbourne-founded cybersecurity business Tesserent backs a deal for it to be acquired by global technology giant Thales, which would pay shareholders a 13c per share premium.

Shares in the company, which closed at 4.9c on Monday, were up 145 per cent on Tuesday, closing at 12c per share.

Tesserent chief executive Kurt Hansen told The Australian the deal arrived after the company suffered a tough few years after first landing on the ASX in 2016.

“It struggled for the first few years until the new board of management came in and took the business into a much more rapid growth expansion phase,” he said.

“The small-cap market did as a small cap market does and it’s obviously been difficult with the certainty around our share price, so the board considered this a very good offer for our shareholders and we’ll take this to them in a few weeks.”

Over the past five years the company had acquired about 14 other businesses.

Tesserent had also become a major player in cyber security consulting for federal government agencies, and when asked if there was concern regarding the company now being in overseas hands, Mr Hansens said: “The majority of cybersecurity providers were, and the big four are also all multinationals.”

Thales chief executive Jeff Connolly.

Thales chief executive Jeff Connolly said he’d faced similar questions surrounding sovereignty regarding the deal.

“Particularly, in an area like cyber, I’m always puzzled by that question. People always get hung up on shareholding but what we’re talking about is having 500 people locally in Australia added on to the people that we already have,” he said.

Mr Connolly said he understood sovereignty as the ability to act locally and this deal would allow Thales to do that while being able to integrate the international expertise of its other cyber practitioners.

The local cyber security market, he said, was already quite “fragmented” and Thales was open to acquiring a number of smaller firms in the future should the decision make sense.

“Thales has about 4000 people globally operating in different centres around the world in cybersecurity and Thales wants to further expand,” Mr Connolly said.

“Let’s assume the deal gets approved. What we will have in place is the bigger possibility to accelerate our own attraction of more talent towards the organisation.”

Tesserent was limited in its ability to expand into different markets but that issue would be solved with the acquisition, Mr Connolly said.

“As a stand-alone, (Tesserent) has certain limits in its access testament, and the market will value it accordingly,” he said.

“From a Thales perspective, adding that on to what we already have, the accretive value is much higher because we’re bringing it into markets that it would find much more difficult or slower for Tesserent to get access to.”