BREAKING: Best Buy To Acquire Napster For $121 Million
This story was written by Joseph Weisenthal.
Napster (NSDQ: NAPS) has fallen into the arms of an unlikely buyer: Best Buy. The big-box electronics giant will pay $121 million or $2.65 per share. Shares of Napster closed at $1.36 on Friday, so this is nearly a double for those die-hards that have held on for the long ride down. Sale chatter had picked up in recent months, in part because the company's share price was approaching the cash it had in the bank --and in fact, Best Buy is only paying $54 million, once you net out Napster's cash and short-term investments. Release.
In the announcement, Best Buy says it will use the Napster platform to build out its digital delivery platform and build "recurring relationships" with its customers. Conceptually, it has shades of the smartly nixed Blockbuster-Circuit City tieup from earlier this yearbut the deal is so small for Best Buy that it doesn't carry too much risk.
More to come
By Joseph Weisenthal