I don't see any other bidders on the horizon. At all. Even if...

I don't see any other bidders on the horizon. At all. Even if there was, Crayon has the right to match the offer. They probably do not have the cash for that by my reckoning.

DDR is a non-starter since their cloud business is an afterthought to their hardware distribution. I cannot see them wanting to move into Asia - at least not yet but a good hardware distributor in Asia would be a welcome addition. They are happy in ANZ for now (and I am a happy DDR holder).

DTL makes the most sense on the local side, but I am struggling to see them bidding. They work in a different part of the market, and the conflict between the reseller market that rhipe distributes to versus the more Direct/Enterprise market of DTL may be a reason why they do not bid. If they want to move into Japan and Korea then this would be a good way to do so, but JBS (rhipe Japan JV partner) is the Japanese equivalent to DTL here.

The most likely bidder would be Arrow ECS (NYSE:ARW), which already has an equivalent business in ANZ. It is however very new & small business locally, rhipe is far larger them them in ANZ market for Cloud software. They only really cover NA, EMEA & ANZ. Buy making a bid for rhipe, they would instantly bring their ANZ business to a competitive size, while expanding into Asia where they have no presence now.

While I agree with TAM's assessment generally, the lack of competing bids so far does not bode well for holders. If there is nothing this week, then I think there is unlikely to be further bidders coming forward.