Following Yahoo's recent acquisition of Kimo.com (
Information about the purchase was reportedly leaked to local Chinese-language media by one of SeedNet's board members.
SeedNet's market value is likely to rise to around NT$20 billion. Therefore, GigaMedia's merging price might be at least NT$10 billion. Because of the high price of such an acquisition, the paper said that both companies may decide to swap shares in order to finalize the deal, possibly as soon as the first quarter of next year.
Nevertheless, some of SeedNet's board members were said to be unhappy with the price. Although both sides entered discussions on several occasions, a lack of consensus could put the plan on hold, the report said. SeedNet has more than 500,000 dial-up Internet users, including some 5,000 corporate users.
The Institute for Information Industry (
Since domestic Internet users are primarily concerned about the dial-up speed over subscriber rates when choosing an Internet service provider, institute analysts say that if GigaMedia can acquire Seednet, it will help GigaMedia to attract more customers.
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