HP Enterprise to pay $1bn for Nimble storage firm

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has agreed to buy Nimble Storage in a deal valued at about $1bn (€943m), bolstering a higher-growth segment of the market for data storage.

The $12.50-a-share offer for Nimble was 45% more than Monday’s closing price. Hewlett Packard Enterprise said yesterday it will also assume, or pay out, about $200m of Nimble’s unvested equity awards at the closing of the deal.

CEO Meg Whitman, looking for ways to return to sales growth, is spending more on acquisitions after a multiyear effort to slim down her company.

She had already announced three purchases this year, and the deal for Nimble will extend Hewlett Packard’s reach into flash-storage data, which uses memory chips that are much faster than traditional hard disk-based storage. Ms Whitman, who split her company from its personal computer and printer businesses in late 2015, is trying to make Hewlett Packard Enterprise more flexible.

Last month, the printer side of the business announced it was shedding 500 jobs at its Co Kildare plant. The market for flash storage was estimated to be about $15bn in 2016, rising to $20bn by 2020, according to projections from International Data Corp.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which posted a 10% drop in revenue in the quarter to the end of January, is seeking faster-growing businesses to offset weak demand for older products and competition from cloud-based providers of storage.