Antivirus company AVG has been acquired by competing antivirus vendor Avast for $1.3 billion (€1.2 billion). Both companies were founded in the Czech Republic and provide free antivirus products to consumers.
Avast pays $25 per share of AVG and hopes to grow its business with the acquisition as the company writes on its site, "Avast is pursuing this acquisition to gain scale, technological depth and geographical breadth so that the new organization can be in a position to take advantage of emerging growth opportunities in Internet Security as well as organizational efficiencies."
The company also hopes to make more advances in emerging technology such as the Internet of Things, where many small devices exchange data with each other but are often not properly secured.
Combining Avast's and AVG's numbers, they protect about 400 million devices of which 160 million are mobile.
