NCC Group agrees £55m Accumuli acquisition

Online security consultant NCC Group has agreed the acquisition of AIM-listed rival Accumuli Group for £55m.

Fully listed information assurance services provider NCC has agreed a takeover of Accumuli whereby each Accumuli shareholder will receive 0.1218 new NCC shares and 5.97p cash per share.

This values each Accumuli share at roughly 32.8p, a 19.1% premium to the closing price on Monday and a 22.7% premium to the six-month average price.

NCC, which recently spent £14.9m on another acquisition and issued an impressive set of interim results, said the cash consideration will be funded from its revised banking facilities with Royal Bank of Scotland.

Managed security provider Accumuli's turnover jumped 18% to £16.6m last year and, in a trading update on Tuesday, management said that they expected revenue to hit £27m by the end of March after a strong second-half performance.

NCC chief executive Rob Cottonsaid: "Accumuli is notably aligned with us in the security space and brings valuable new capabilities and will enable us to expand our development teams.

"We have already been bidding jointly together on a number of projects, and with Accumuli as part of the group, we will be able to bid for complex projects in a sole capacity. The acquisition provides an opportunity to develop our core consulting business across a wider customer base."

In January NCC spent £14.9m buying the Belgium- and Luxembourg-based Open Registry group of domain services companies, which provide back-end registry operations to brand customers, registrar and trademark validation services.