Avast completes AVG acquisition, will operate as single company from October 3

Almost three months after announcing its plans to acquire software security rival AVG for $1.3 billion, Avast has finally revealed that the deal is complete and the duo will operate as a single entity from this coming Monday, October 3.

Avast CEO Vince Steckler will now run the combined company and will oversee “more than $700 million” in revenue for 2016, according to a company statement.

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“The combined company now has over 400 million users, more than 40 percent of the world’s consumer PCs outside of China, and the largest consumer security installed base in the world,” said Steckler. “If they were a country, we would have the third largest population in the world. The U.S. is now our number one market, with 58 million users. We truly have global reach and are proud to be the most popular choice for security in the world.”

Both companies’ origins can be traced back to the old Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s / early 1990s, and they each emerged as major players in the mobile and desktop antivirus security software market. When Avast announced its plans to acquire AVG back in July, it said it was to “gain scale, technological depth, and geographical breadth.”

Though the transaction had already been given the go-ahead by the boards of both companies at the time, given that AVG is a publicly traded firm (on the New York Stock Exchange), it needed shareholder approval, which it now has. Indeed, Avast now holds around 87.3 percent of AVG’s outstanding shares, and it has opened another offering period to give the remaining AVG shareholders a chance to tender their shares — this will close on October 14.

The new combined entity will see AVG delisted from the NYSE to become a fully private firm, while AVG’s CEO, Gary Kovacs, will be leaving the company.

“We now have the technical breadth to provide superior protection for our customers,” continued Steckler. “For example, our combined threat labs will have teams dedicated to emerging threats affecting consumers. These include social engineering threats, which are commonly used to target IoT devices, and ransomware, which we are fighting with machine learning technology. We believe we are now better equipped than ever to outsmart those who want to do harm to people online.”