Spok Holdings has announced that its Board of Directors unanimously determined that the unsolicited and non-binding proposal from B. Riley Financial to acquire Spok for $12 per share in cash undervalues Spok and pursuing this transaction at this time was not in the best interest of the Company and its shareholders, the company reported on Wednesday.
“The Board of Directors is confident in Spok’s strategic direction and executive leadership, even as the capital markets and our healthcare customers are experiencing historic dislocations due to the COVID-19 national emergency,” said Royce G. Yudkoff, Chairman of the Spok Board. “We have determined that this unsolicited, conditional and incomplete proposal from B. Riley grossly undervalues Spok.”
The Spok Board noted that a strategic transaction with B. Riley would not be warranted due to the novel coronavirus pandemic in addition to the disruptions to the debt and equity markets, restrictions on travel and the inability to conduct due diligence on any proposed transaction.
In addition, the company recently launched Spok Go. The board commented that the new solution, and its broad market potential for critical in-hospital communications, has the potential to aid the nation’s health care system that is under extraordinary stress.
The Spok Board of Directors will carefully evaluate any good faith proposals from financially capable parties that fairly values Spok and the potential for stockholder value represented by the Company’s long-term investment in its enterprise, cloud-based Spok Go platform.
In addition to the Board’s decision, Spok also recently appointed Christine Cournoyer to its Board of Directors, former chairperson and CEO of N-of-One, in March 2020. Cournoyer has led the transformation of N-of-One from a patient concierge business to a leading molecular decision-support company. She helped develop a HIPAA compliant platform running in the cloud that scaled to interpret hundreds of thousands of molecular diagnostics tests.
Cournoyer led a strategic process for N-of-One, resulting in a successful sale to QIAGEN N.V., a Netherlands-based leading provider of Sample to Insight solutions, in 2019. Cournoyer is presently a strategic advisor to digital health companies and is on the Board of Directors of CareDx, Inc., a leading precision medicine company providing solutions for transplant patients.
The appointment of Cournoyer to the Spok Board of Directors is part of a focused national search instituted by the Board to find the best-qualified candidates in healthcare information technology as the company will continue to introduce its new cloud-based Spok Go platform for critical in-hospital communications.
About Spok
Spok, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Spok Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: SPOK), headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, is proud to be a global leader in healthcare communications. We deliver clinical information to care teams when and where it matters most to improve patient outcomes. Top hospitals rely on the Spok Care Connect® and Spok Go® platforms to enhance workflows for clinicians, support administrative compliance, and provide a better experience for patients. Our customers send over 100 million messages each month through their Spok® solutions. Spok is making care collaboration easier.