Blackstone sells Interplex's ICT unit to Taiwan's Bizlink for $850m

Blackstone has agreed to sell the information and communications technology arm of Interplex, its Singapore-based components maker, to Taiwan's Bizlink Holding for about $850m, according to Bloomberg.

The deal carries a further $50m earnout and should close in the second half of the year, Bizlink’s chief executive, Felix Teng, told a briefing in Taipei.

For Blackstone, it is a carve-out rather than a full exit. The firm is parting with the ICT business, which makes networking enclosures, servers, disk drives, wearables, and mobile devices, while keeping the rest of Interplex, whose components go into electric vehicles, autonomous driving, medical devices, and cloud computing.

Blackstone bought Interplex in 2022 from Baring Private Equity Asia, for an undisclosed sum, and has now found a strategic home for one of its slower-growth segments while holding on to the parts tied to faster-moving end markets.

Bizlink had been circling ICT for months, having lodged an offer earlier in the year after Blackstone signalled it was open to a sale.

Bizlink itself has been busy. The Nvidia supplier, which makes everything from drone interconnects to automotive power systems and medical imaging equipment, has grown by acquisition as much as organically, and its shares have risen 42% this year, lifting its market value to $13.3bn. Adding Interplex’s ICT lines pushes it deeper into networking and data-centre hardware, a corner buoyed by the spending boom around artificial intelligence.