 "Symantec To Benefit From Intel-McAfee Deal: UBS")
UBS said that Symantec should benefit from Intel Corp’s acquisition of McAfee, and upgraded the stock to ‘buy’ from ’neutral’. The deal should aid Symantec’s organic business as smaller rival McAfee will likely become less aggressive on pricing, UBS said.
It cut its rating on McAfee by a notch to ’neutral’. “Enterprise will increasingly choose Symantec as a safe-haven with McAfee’s M&A uncertainty and M&A distractions could see McAfee take their eye off the execution ball,” the brokerage said.
“With two deals in the security space already announced this week, we expect a robust second-half M&A landscape,” UBS said. “Collision between hardware/software is a common theme and we expect more combinations going forward,” it added.
Intel announced a $7.7 billion bid for McAfee, after Hewlett-Packard this week bought Fortify Software, which sells compliance and anti-attack software to companies, for an undisclosed sum. Symantec itself has been on the acquisition trail. In June, it bought PGP Corp and GuardianEdge, two privately held companies focusing on email and data encryption, for an undisclosed sum. This month, it closed its deal to buy Verisign Inc’s payment authentication unit for about $1.3 billion.
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