WA business veteran Ross Norgard eyes $52 million payday on $1 billion Nearmap takeover approach

Perth business veteran Ross Norgard is heading into a $52 million payday on a potential $1 billion takeover of Perth-founded aerial imaging company Nearmap by a US private equity firm.

Mr Norgard, a long-time investor and director of Nearmap, is the target’s biggest individual shareholder with 24.6m shares, or 4.9 per cent of the company.

The Sydney-based group on Monday belatedly revealed a $1.05b non-binding takeover proposal from US firm Thoma Bravo., a tech-focused investor with more than $US100b ($141b) under management.

The $2.10-a-share cash offer is pitched at a premium of nearly 39 per cent to the stock’s close on Friday.

Nearmap has granted the suitor due diligence, fuelling a 25 per cent surge in Nearmap’s share price to $1.885. However, the stock remains well off its record high above $4 in mid-2019.

“The board of Nearmap determined the proposal received on July 6 to be credible and sufficient to initially grant non-exclusive due diligence access to Thoma Bravo,” the company said on Monday.

Nearmap provides high-quality 3D aerial imagery captured by fixed-wing airplanes covering areas where most of the population in Australia, the US and New Zealand live. The images are available via subscription to a diverse client base.

Mr Norgard, a former partner with Arthur Andersen in Perth before he jumped into corporate advisory work, was chairman of another technology hopeful, ipernica, when it bought the Nearmap business for less than $10m in 2008.

At one stage, he held 11 per cent of Nearmap, with the stake valued at more than $150m at the company’s 2019 market peak.

However, in a stock exchange announcement in December of that year, the company revealed 19.3m of Mr Norgard shares had been transferred to Mrs Jennifer Norgard, “pursuant to an order of the Family Court”.

Latest filings have Ms Norgard with 7.1m shares.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Garry Sherriff said the exclusive due diligence put pressure on Thoma Bravo to provide a potential binding offer while alerting other potential bidders.

“If no binding offer is proposed within the 7-day exclusivity, then the board, in our view, is likely to run a full sales process to flush out other potential offers and maximise a sale price,” Mr Sherriff said.

San Francisco-based Thoma Bravo is headed by founders and managing partners Carl Thoma and Orlando Bravo.

In recent years, the firm has been particularly busy, snapping up software and cybersecurity firms. Just two weeks ago, it deepened a bet on the latter sector, one of the big winners of the pandemic, by buying US company Ping Identity for $US2.4b.

Over the past 20 years, it has acquired or invested in more than 380 software and technology companies representing over $US190b of value.