CoreHW accelerates growth - Panostaja invests in CoreHW by purchasing a majority shareholding

Sept. 19, 2017 – On Friday 15th September, CoreHW has signed an agreement on selling the shares in CoreHW to Panostaja Plc. After the transaction, Panostaja will own 63 percent of the new group to be formed through the transaction.

Panostaja is an investment company developing Finnish SMEs in the role of an active majority shareholder. After the CoreHW acquisition, Panostaja has a portfolio of eight majority holdings. Panostaja's shares (PNA1V) are quoted on the Nasdaq Helsinki Stock Exchange. In the 2016 financial year, the Group's net sales totaled MEUR 172.5.

The five founders of CoreHW will continue as company employees and important minority shareholders. Mr. Heikki Tenhunen from Panostaja will be appointed as the Chairman of the Board of the company. Mr. Tenhunen has more than 30 years management experience in the telecommunications and wireless semiconductor industries including management positions in Nokia, Renesas, Broadcom, and NXP.

The owners' plans for the future include creating a family of CoreHW products and further improving company's high-quality design services.

"We, the original founders, found the discussions with Panostaja very fruitful and saw the potential for faster company development with them from the beginning. CoreHW has been growing fast during the past two years. Today, we have 45 employees and over 3.5 MEUR annual revenue (2016). Our strong ambition is to become a world-class company which offers high-quality design services and has successful own products. To accelerate growth vision, we have signed an agreement with Panostaja Plc. The new capital and cooperation with Panostaja will help us to grow faster and invest more in own product development in the future and, especially, to serve our existing customers better", says CEO of CoreHW, Tomi-Pekka Takalo.

"Going forward, our business lines will be clearly divided into pure consulting / design services and product technology development. All our ongoing projects will continue as planned and the acquisition has no implications on our personnel. With this investment, CoreHW becomes stronger design services and development partner capable of responding faster to growing customer demands as well as introduce faster new interesting technologies and products to its international customers", Mr. Takalo says.

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