The $2.3B sale of Irvine-based smart TV maker Vizio to Walmart (NYSE: WMT) closed the day after Cyber Monday; whether the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail behemoth got itself a holiday deal remains to be seen.
The final sales price tops the $2B offered for Vizio in 2016 by Chinese tech firm LeEco, but the $11.50 per share paid by Walmart falls well short of the $21 per share IPO price of Vizio in 2021.
Vizio’s IPO, which raised some $260M in proceeds, was the second-largest public offering for an OC-based company in 2021 – the busiest year on record for OC companies going public – trailing only Rivian’s (NASDAQ: RIVN) blockbuster $13.7B listing.
The Walmart sale marks a big payout for Vizio founder William Wang, who a few months ago earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences during its 75th anniversary Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards. His stake in the company he founded in 2002 is worth more than $850M, according to regulatory filings.
“My life has been dedicated to bringing great technology to consumers in America,” Wang said at the time of the Emmy award. At Vizio, “we’ve challenged the status quo and have created new possibilities for the future of television.”
For more on the transaction, see Kevin Costelloe’s front-page story.
The Walmart-Vizio linkup is arguably the biggest local tech acquisition involving unlikely partners since 2019’s $1.4B purchase of high-flying Irvine cybersecurity firm Cylance by Canada’s BlackBerry (NYSE: BB), which at the time was trying to reinvent itself from old-school cellphone maker to internet security firm.
That deal hasn’t worked out as hoped by the buyer; BlackBerry is reportedly looking to offload its Cylance business, which is currently losing money, to focus more on Internet of Things and secure communications business areas.
A recent report in Reuters noted BlackBerry was “looking to redirect spending to high-growth areas from Cylance, which requires significant levels of investment and faces strong competition.”
BlackBerry’s signage at the top of the 400 Spectrum Center tower in Irvine was removed about a month ago; the firm had looked to sublease much of its space at Cylance’s former HQ in recent years.
Along with successful business exits, Vizio founder William Wang and Cylance founder Stuart McClure count another similarity: each survived well-known plane disasters.
Wang was a passenger on the Singapore Airlines flight 006 in 2000 in Taipei, which was involved in a runway crash that killed 83 of the 179 people onboard.
McClure in 1989 was a 19-year-old passenger on United Airlines flight 811 from Honolulu to Sydney, which saw a door burst mid-flight, resulting in the death of nine passengers.
Both execs have cited the tragedies for giving them a new purpose in life, which resulted in them starting new businesses.
The 1989 experience “was perhaps the first domino cascading into my lifelong mission to protect and prevent bad things from happening to people,” McClure has stated. “The experience and event that night told me that I needed to make my life matter.”
McClure is now involved in a number of AI and machine-learning ventures, including Newport Beach-based business accelerator NumberOneAI.