LogMeIn Chooses to Go Private

Under the current lockdown circumstances, it is no surprise that tools supporting remote and virtual workplace are doing well. One such player is remote access service LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM). The company recently announced its fourth quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

LogMeIn’s Financials

For the fourth quarter, LogMeIn’s revenues grew 4% over the year to $322.9 million, ahead of the market’s estimates by 0.9%. Non GAAP earnings of $1.43 per share were also better than the market’s forecast of $1.40 per share, but dropped from $1.47 per share reported a year ago.

The company ended the year with revenues of $1.262 billion and adjusted net income of $5.15 per share.

LogMeIn does not provide an outlook, but the market expects it to end the current year with revenues of $1.31 billion with an EPS of $5.02. The Street forecast revenues of $320.73 million for the first quarter with an EPS of $1.21.

The recent coronavirus crisis has resulted in a spike in the company’s usage statistics. According to a recently released report, LogMeIn disclosed that the use of remote-access tools including LogMeIn Pro and GoToMyPC rose by 300% in the past week and its unified-communications platform GoToConnect saw a 93% increase in voice calls. LogMeIn’s video-conference and meetings tools were also being used upto 10 times higher than pre-crisis levels.

LogMeIn’s Product Expansion

LogMeIn continues to gain market reach through product enhancements. Recently, it announced a significant expansion to its customer engagement suite Bold360. Powered by AI, Bold360 provides improved customer experiences by leveraging both chatbots and human agents. LogMeIn believes that customers expect the agents they interact with to be informed of their specific needs and to be able to provide immediate answers. However, that may not always be the case, resulting in frustration among customers.

To help address this concern, Bold360’s new features help aggregate information from various systems to provide agents with access to actionable insights so that they can improve performance and increase efficiency. Bold360 now comes with a Dynamic Customer Information Card that provides agents with real-time visibility into the customer’s activity, such as their shopping cart so they can deliver more relevant responses and solutions. It also provides visibility into key metrics to help drive agent performance. Also, to assist the agents, the service now has a Visitor Blocking feature that allows agents to stop communication with customers who conduct themselves improperly.

LogMeIn’s Acquisition

The biggest news of late for LogMeIn has been that of its acquisition. Last December, the company announced that it was going to be acquired by private equity firm Francisco Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation for an estimated $4.3 billion. The acquisition came as a surprise to the analysts who were quite hopeful of LogMeIn building out a complete Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) offering. Over the past few years, it had built GoToMeeting and GoToRoom as part of this move. The acquisition is expected to be completed by mid-2020.

Its stock is currently trading at $83.28 with a market cap of $4 billion. It had touched a 52-week high of $86.63 earlier this year. Despite the turbulence, the stock is still trading higher than the 52-week low of $62.02 it had fallen to in October last year.