U.S. electronics company Avnet Inc. agreed to buy Premier Farnell PLC for £691 million ($907 million), trumping a previous bid for the maker of the $5 Raspberry Pi computer.
Switzerland’s Daetwyler Holding AG had last month agreed to buy the British company for £615 million. Premier Farnell on Thursday withdrew its recommendation of the Daetwyler offer.
Avnet said buying Premier Farnell would strengthen its digital capabilities in areas such as offering services for design engineering customers to do technical research online.
The deal is the latest in a string of purchases of British companies to be agreed upon after the pound’s fall against other currencies following Britain voting to leave the EU in a referendum on June 23. Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Technology Corp. last week agreed to buy U.K. semiconductor giant ARM Holdings PLC for £24.3 billion, while earlier this month AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., part of China’s Dalian Wanda Group Co., said it would pay U.K. private equity group Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. £500 million for Europe’s largest cinema chain, Odeon & UCI Cinemas Group.
Analysts at Peel Hunt said buying Premier Farnell “makes strategic sense for Avnet, giving it access to customers at the earliest stages of the design and manufacturing process, and highlights perhaps the attractiveness of U.K. assets when sterling is depreciated.”
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