Knowles to acquire Audience

The transaction will expand Knowles’ existing expertise in intelligent audio and signal processing solutions through Audience’s engineering team and patent portfolio. The transaction values Audience at an enterprise value of approximately USD 85 million, net of Audience’s cash balance of USD 44 million as of March 31, 2015. “We are excited to acquire Audience’s world-leading engineering talent focused on audio processing solutions for mobile devices,” said Jeffrey Niew, President and CEO of Knowles. “This acquisition will benefit our customers and shareholders by broadening our intelligent audio offerings, and will uniquely position us to deliver end-to-end solutions for acoustics – from microphones to signal processing to speakers. These solutions will deliver better performance for our customers and drive higher dollar content as we create new applications for the mobile consumer market. In addition, we expect to realize annualized cost synergies of approximately USD 25 million and expect the transaction to be accretive by Q4 of 2016.” "Audience and Knowles have pioneered the revolution in connected device audio capabilities," said Peter Santos, President and CEO of Audience. "The combination of the audio and sensory intelligence of Audience and the acoustic expertise and scale of Knowles creates a truly unique audio and sensory systems company. We are delighted to see our teams come together, in a way that maximizes shareholder value, stimulates innovation by our employees and delivers a new class of compelling solutions to our customers."