- Iranian refugee Aram Mirkazemi, CEO of Altium, is set to receive $652 million after the company’s $9 billion takeover offer.
- Altium dominates the circuit board design market, with $400 million in annual revenue.
- Renesas Electronics Corporation to acquire Altium, pending shareholder approval.
An Iranian man named Aram Mirkazemi came to Australia without knowing English. Now, he’s about to get a lot of money because the company he runs, Altium, got an offer to be bought for $9 billion.
Aram is the boss at Altium, a company that makes software for designing circuit boards. These boards help connect electronic parts together. Even though this might not seem very exciting to some people, it makes a lot of money.
Altium recently said yes to a deal with a Japanese company called Renesas Electronics Corporation. Renesas will buy all of Altium, and the shareholders of Altium, including Aram, will get $68.50 for each share they own. This deal values Altium at $9.1 billion.
Aram is going to get a huge amount of money from this deal — $652 million, to be exact. That’s because he owns a lot of shares in Altium, about 9.5 million of them.
Aram’s story is pretty amazing. He came to Australia 32 years ago as a refugee from Iran when he was just 18. He couldn’t speak English at all back then. He didn’t get a good education because things were chaotic in Iran after a big change in the government. But Aram didn’t give up. He tried really hard, even when university was tough for him.
He made some important friends while playing soccer, and one of them introduced him to Nick Martin, who started Altium. Aram worked at Altium when it became a public company in 1999, but he left for a while because he didn’t get along with Nick Martin. He started his own company called Morfik. Later, he went back to Altium in 2010 and pushed for it to become a software service.
Now, Altium makes about $400 million in revenue every year, according to a report from 2023. That’s a lot of money!
Besides Aram, the deal will also make a lot of money for the chairman, Sam Weiss, and the president, Sergey Kostinsky. Sam will get about $130.5 million, and Sergey will get about $164.6 million.
The deal isn’t final yet. Altium’s shareholders still have to agree to it. But both companies are saying good things about it. Sam Weiss thinks it’s a great deal for Altium’s investors. Renesas’s CEO, Hidetoshi Shibata, believes that adding Altium to their company will make it easier for all kinds of businesses to build and grow their systems.
Overall, it’s a big deal that could change a lot of things for Altium and its people.
