Cleary Gottlieb is representing VeriSign, Inc. in the sale of certain of its messaging businesses to Syniverse Holdings, Inc. for approximately $175 million in cash. The agreement was signed on August 24.
The businesses provide short message service and MMS delivery across various networks, managed infrastructure services for wireless service providers, end-to-end MMS infrastructure and applications to Tier-1 and Tier-2 mobile operators and messaging services through a standard rated messaging aggregation platform.
The sale is part of VeriSign’s divestiture plan, which calls for the disposal of a number of non-core businesses in its portfolio in order to focus on VeriSign’s key competencies. Cleary Gottlieb teams in the Washington and New York offices are assisting VeriSign in all the contemplated divestitures.
VeriSign is a NASDAQ-listed company with a market capitalization of approximately $7 billion. VeriSign operates infrastructure services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day across the world’s voice, video and data networks. After completion of is divestiture program, VeriSign’s core businesses will include Naming Services, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate Services, and Identity and Authentication services.