EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Avantas Networks Corporation. Avantas, a Montreal- based, pre-revenue company, is a supplier of leading-edge fiber-optic testing and optical network performance management equipment that supports a wide range of protocols and data transmission rates.
Avantas' field-ready and remote fiber test system (RFTS) product lines represent the only solutions on the market today that cover protocols like ATM, SONET, SDH, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and data transmission rates from OC-192, or 10 Gb/s, all the way down to DS0, or 64 kb/s, for the North American standard, and STM-64 down to E0 for the equivalent international standard. All of these functionalities are available on a single platform.
EXFO plans to take advantage of Avantas' highly experienced research and development team to penetrate the critical protocol-layer testing market and almost double its addressable market size. According to a report on the ATM, SONET and SDH test equipment market from Frost and Sullivan, the global protocol layer test equipment market is expected to increase from $1.6 billion in 2001 to $3.1 billion in 2005.
"During the past 16 years EXFO has developed core competencies in fiber- optic physical- and optical-layer testing," said Germain Lamonde, Chairman, President and CEO of EXFO. "The Avantas acquisition represents a natural evolution for us to enter the protocol-layer testing market and provide telecommunication carriers as well as system manufacturers with a fully integrated solution.
"Our revolutionary product will enable users to be far more efficient and cost-effective because they will simultaneously perform physical-, optical- and protocol-layer tests with a single box in their hands. This all-in-one solution has become very critical with the three layers increasingly overlapping in advanced, high-capacity DWDM network architectures."
The deal is expected to be neutral in fiscal 2002 on a net earnings per share basis, taking into account 10 months of Avantas' operations within EXFO's fiscal year. Net earnings exclude amortization of goodwill and the after-tax effect of amortization of intangible assets.