ECI returns to M&A prowl

ECI Telecom may be trolling for more acquisitions soon. The company recently announced plans to raise cash through common stock offerings to fund, among other things, potential acquisitions.

In regulatory filings last week, the Israeli-based optical and broadband access equipment vendor said it may periodically sell up to 5 million more shares of its common stock at a maximum price of $9.64 per share, which could yield as much as $48.2 million. At mid-day Tuesday, the company's common stock was priced at $7.70 per share.

ECI would use net proceeds from any stock sales to fund "general corporate purposes, including working capital, capital expenditures and possible acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets," the company said in its filing.

When ECI swung to profitability in the second quarter of 2004, the company indicated it would look for M&A opportunities. Toward the end of that year, the company struck a distribution partnership with core router vendor Chiaro Networks (a partnership that ended in limbo after ECI passed on acquiring the struggling startup and eventually absorbed its intellectual property in lieu of a loan repayment). And in May of the following year, ECI acquired edge router vendor Laurel Networks for $88 million in cash.

Three months after announcing the Laurel acquisition, ECI announced its first customer for the Laurel gear: South Dakota's SDN Communications. In this year's first quarter, the Laurel gear contributed about 1% of the company's $162 million in total revenue, but ECI expects the acquisition to be accretive starting in mid-2007.

ECI currently owns 43% of voice-over-IP equipment vendor Veraz, which was formed from the merger of NexVerse and a former ECI business unit.

In February, ECI announced it was ending its partnership with Nortel Networks because the relationship didn't yield enough U.S. sales. At the time, Nortel said ECI's broadband access gear was not well-suited to North American access loops, which are typically longer than those found in Europe.

The majority of ECI's revenue comes from Europe, where it boasts customers including British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. But the vendor is also active in Israel and Asia.

At the Globalcomm trade show in Chicago last week, ECI introduced the newest version of its XDM multiservice transport platform to the North American market.