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Satnews Daily
July 7th, 2014

KVH Industries + Videotel—Acquiring Minds Wish To Know (Business)


[SatNews] KVH Industries, Inc., (Nasdaq: KVHI) has acquired Videotel, a producer of high-quality training films and e-Learning services for the commercial maritime industry. 

Servicing more than 11,000 vessels, Videotel is a market leader in the provision of maritime training services, offering video, animation, e-Learning computer-based training (CBT), and interactive distance learning courses. The £28.7 million (US$48.9 million) transaction is anticipated to be accretive to KVH earnings per share in 2014.  The company financed the transaction from its cash on hand and proceeds from a new credit facility. The audited financial statements of the acquired Videotel group companies showed annual combined revenues in 2013 of £14.0 million, of which approximately 93 percent was derived from multi-year subscription-based services.  During 2013, Videotel’s combined gross profit margin was approximately 73 percent.

“The acquisition of Videotel is an important addition to our portfolio of services targeting the needs of commercial seafarers and supports our strategic vision of extending our maritime broadband service to include delivering premium content to vessels,” said Martin Kits van Heyningen, KVH’s chief executive officer.  “We already offer maritime companies crew connectivity through our mini-VSAT Broadband network, including Internet café, Voice over IP phone calls, and crew entertainment services via our IP-MobileCast service.  With this acquisition, we will now also offer an extensive library of seafarer training courses and related training services.”

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP acted as legal counsel to KVH.

Please visit http://minivsat.com/ for more information about KVH’s mini-VSAT Broadband satellite communications solution and http://videotel.com/ for more details regarding Videotel.