Oracle acquires $11m more Mellanox shares

Oracle bought the shares in last week's Nasdaq offering to keep its 9.7% stake in the Infiniband developer intact.

25 September 11 14:30, Tali Tsipori

Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) bought 345,000 shares in Mellanox Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq:MLNX; TASE:MLNX) for $11 million as part of the company's secondary offering. Mellanox raised a gross $110 million, including the underwriters' overallotment option, in an offering of 3.45 million shares at $31.75 per share.

Oracle bought the shares to keep its 9.7% stake in the Infiniband developer intact. Mellanox's largest shareholder is Fidelity Growth Company Fund, with an 11.7% holding, and Mellanox founder, chairman and CEO Eyal Waldman owns 4.8%, including immediately exercisable options. His holding is currently worth $56 million.

Oracle bought $64 million worth of Mellanox shares in 2010 and since then the share price has doubled.

Mellanox's secondary offering was the ninth offering by an Israeli company on Wall Street so far this year, which raised a gross $700 million altogether. All the offerings were secondary offerings, including a dual listing by Medgenics Ltd. (AIM:MEDG; AMEX: MDGN).

Mellanox's share price fell 1.4% on Friday to $30.26, giving a market cap of $1.07 billion, and fell 1.9% by mid-afternoon on the TASE today to NIS 114.30.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 25, 2011

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