Global View Advisors Becomes Employee Owned

Irvine-based Global View Advisors, which values everything from stock options to the worth of a company, recently valued itself by converting into an employee-owned firm.
“This will empower our employees as if they were direct stakeholders,” said Managing Director Michael Haghighat, who founded the company in 2002.
While the deal size itself wasn’t disclosed, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan has some favorable tax benefits and is unusual among valuation firms, he said.
While Dave Harvey’s firm works on behalf of the private equity on the buy side (see separate article), Global View Advisors provides independent valuations to both buyers and sellers.
“We are retained by leading public companies to perform financial reporting valuation when they make acquisitions,” Haghighat said. “In some cases, we work with sellers to establish fairness opinions.”
Global View, which has 12 employees, is well known among Orange County’s publicly traded companies; its clients have included Broadcom, Beckman Coulter and Emulex.
It provided independent valuations on all Microsemi Corp.’s acquisitions from 2002 until 2018, including PMC-Sierra at $2.5 billion; chipmaker Microsemi itself was bought for $10 billion in 2018.
Global View valued Xio Group’s 2016 acquisition of J.D. Power for $1.1 billion and Jacobs Engineering Group’s $3.1 billion acquisition of CH2M.
It has also provided valuations on stock options for Masimo Corp. (Nasdaq: MASI) even before it became publicly traded in 2007. Since going public at $17 each, the stock of the Irvine-based medical device manufacturer has risen fifteenfold to around $250 and a $14 billion market cap.
—Peter J. Brennan