Digi continues buying spree, picks up remote-monitor specialist Ctek

Digi International, a maker of internet-connected industrial and commercial devices, took another step in its acquisition strategy with the purchase of Ctek Inc., a maker of remote monitoring equipment.

Ctek's products include sensors and cameras that are used to keep track of the performance of critical equipment in the energy industry, including on oil rigs, and for systems as diverse as municipal lighting and farmland irrigation.

Digi executives said they will fold Ctek's offerings into the company's expanding internet-of-things portfolio, or products that have individual internet addresses and rely on the global data network to communicate.

Terms of the deal, announced earlier this week, weren't immediately disclosed. It's the latest deal by Hopkins-based Digi after raising $74 million in a stock issue earlier this year with an eye on boosting acquisitions.

Chief Executive Ron Konezny told investors in May that Digi aims to grow its revenue at a double-digit percentage rate in 2021, with profit growing even faster. "The acquisition pipeline has never been more robust, even if the market is often very competitive," he said then.

The company's annual revenue grew 9.9% in its fiscal year ended last September despite a sharp drop in sales during the early part of the pandemic for internet-of-things solutions.

As the pandemic abated and economy recovered, Digi's revenue was up nearly 19% in the first half of the company's current fiscal year, a period that ended March 31.

The company in March purchased Dallas-based Haxiot Inc., which makes low-power wide-area transmitters and related equipment that also has broad usage in the energy industry.

With Ctek, based in San Pedro, Calif., Digi also gets products known as supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems, which centralize information on the performance of a variety of industrial equipment. Ctek also makes wireless routers and controllers that are often distributed under the private label of other companies.