HP Now Controls 87 Percent of Autonomy

HP announced that it has purchased 213,421,299 Autonomy shares for 25.50 British Pounds each in cash.

In exchange for about $8.4 billion, HP now controls 87.34 percent of Autonomy's share capital. The company said that it still offers to buy all remaining shares.

According to HP, Autonomy has about 25,000 services customers and will help HP to become a "leader" in enterprise information management, an area which the company has struggled to compete with IBM in the past.

“We are committed to helping our customers solve their toughest IT challenges. The exploding growth of unstructured and structured data and unlocking its value is the single largest opportunity for consumers, businesses and governments,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, in a prepared statement. “Autonomy significantly increases our capabilities to manage and extract meaning from that data to drive insight, foresight and better decision making.”

The acquisition of Autonomy was originally announced as a near-$12 billion deal by Leo Apotheker, who was recently fired and replaced with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman. The addition of Autonomy has been a highly controversial move, especially since HP previously announced that it would kill its WebOS hardware business and may be considering to spin off its PC unit as well. Also, Oracle recently chimed in and said that Autonomy was offered to Oracle as well.

However, Oracle said that it declined to buy Autonomy and told Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch back in April that the company was already "extremely overpriced" at a market cap of $6 billion.