News
Thales completes the acquisition of Imperva
December 2023 by Marc Jacob
Thales announces that it has completed the acquisition of Imperva, earlier than expected (previously foreseen at the beginning of 2024). This is a key milestone for Thales, creating a global leader in cybersecurity, with more than 5,800 cybersecurity experts across 68 countries and €2.4bn in cybersecurity revenue expected in 2024, including civil and defence activities, with double-digit growth expected thereafter. This transaction will generate significant value creation for Thales’ shareholders in line with the targets communicated in July 2023, when announcing the acquisition. In addition, the profile of Thales’ Digital Identity and Security (DIS) activity will be significantly enhanced with new financial targets by 2027 (2024-2027 organic sales growth of +6 to +7% and 2027 EBIT margin at 16.5%).
Together, Thales and Imperva will help customers address cybersecurity challenges that have increased rapidly in frequency, severity, and complexity, with the most comprehensive solutions for the broadest range of application, data security, and identity use cases. These three market segments combined are forecasted to grow significantly in the coming years. According to analysts’ forecast, worldwide end-user spending is projected to total around $20 billion in 2024.
With the addition of Imperva, Thales’ expanded cybersecurity portfolio now offers a highly complementary combination of solutions to help customers secure applications, data and identities across their entire digital ecosystem:
Application Security: Unified protection for every application and API in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid model. The market leading product suite includes Web Application Firewall (WAF), Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) Protection, Advanced Bot Protection, Application Programming Interface (API) Security, a developer-friendly Content Delivery Network (CDN), and Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP).
Data Security: Protection and control of access to sensitive data anywhere whether at rest, in motion or in use. The product suite includes the CipherTrust Data Security Platform, Imperva Data Security Fabric, as well as the Luna and payShield Hardware Security Modules, often used as the root of trust for cryptographic operations.
Identity & Access Management: seamless, secure and trusted access to applications and digital services for customers, employees and partners. The product suite includes the OneWelcome Identity Platform and SafeNet Trusted Access.
This is Thales’ ninth acquisition in the digital security area over the last nine years, and the second largest in the Group’s history after Gemalto, world leader in digital security. After the completed acquisitions of Tesserent, the leading player in cybersecurity in Australia, S21sec & Excellium, two major players in cybersecurity consulting, integration and managed services in Europe, and OneWelcome, a European leader in Customer Identity and Access Management, the integration of Imperva within Thales will position the Group’s cybersecurity business as one of the top 5 global leaders in cybersecurity.
Thales in North America
With 6,200 employees1 and €2.4 billion revenues2 in North America in 2022, and approximately 50% of the free float shares held by U.S. shareholders, Thales already has a strong presence in the region. The acquisition of Imperva increases Thales’ digital security workforce in North America by almost a third.
Each year, Thales invests €4 billion in R&D, of which €1 billion is self-financed3. The Group is fully committed to supporting Imperva’s customers and augmenting its solutions through accelerated innovations. As an innovator, Thales has a total of 20,000 patents in its portfolio, more than 50% of these involve key technologies related to AI, generative artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, big data, the cloud, augmented reality and quantum technologies.
