Oregon Business

By Jon Bell

Save for a month or two earlier this year and a couple big-name deals involving the likes of Mentor Graphics, SurveyMonkey and InFocus, the merger and acquisition front in Oregon has been relatively quiet in 2009.

But in October, the M&A tills began to ring with much more frequency, signaling, perhaps, the return of a little livelier scene.

“Things are picking up,” says Carmen Calzacorta, a shareholder and leader of the general business group at the Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt law firm in Portland. “The first quarter was definitely quiet, but people started talking again in the second quarter. What we’re seeing now may be the result of those conversations.”

The economic slowdown and the credit lockup likely thwarted plenty of deals in discussion late last year, Calzacorta says, and that made for a slow start to 2009. In addition, any firms that were making layoffs or otherwise struggling back in the first quarter were in no position to be acquiring much of anything.

What came to the surface in October was a range of transactions, from straight-ahead buys, like FLIR Systems’ $42 million purchase of Pennsylvania’s OmniTech Partners, to strategic partnerships and joint ventures, such as Asante Health System transferring its home health unit to the California company AccentCare.

Calzacorta notes that health care and technology continue to be “the darlings” in Oregon, and that because the state has very few big companies, businesses here are often more the seller than the buyer.

Along the same lines, even though some access to financing has been restored and renewed activity is expected to stick around, cash, rather than the debt that many Oregon companies rely on, is still king in the M&A world.

“It’s the companies who have access to cash who are going to continue to be the ones to make these kinds of deals,” she says.