Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers said it has agreed to acquire AssetNation, an online marketplace and solutions provider for surplus and salvage assets.

Ritchie Bros. has agreed to acquire 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of AssetNation in an all cash deal valued at approximately $64 million. The transaction is expected to close on or about May 15, 2012, and is subject to customary closing conditions. The transaction will be funded mainly by bank debt and is expected to have an immaterial impact on Ritchie Bros. financial results in 2012 and 2013. Pagemill Partners acted as sole financial advisor to Ritchie Bros. and Perkins Coie acted as legal advisor. AssetNation was purchased from Spire Capital Partners, a New York-based private equity firm.

Ritchie Bros. intends to continue to grow AssetNation’s core business as well as to leverage their e-commerce expertise and technology platform to develop and launch unique new services for equipment owners whose buying and selling preferences may not be met by the company’s live unreserved auctions.

AssetNation supports buyers and sellers of surplus and salvage assets. AssetNation is active in a number of industry verticals including energy, fleet and distribution, insurance and government. AssetNation is a privately held company headquartered in Houston, TX with offices in Pittsburgh, PA, Mexico City, MX, and London, UK.

“We are very excited to be welcoming AssetNation into the Ritchie Bros. family. Our values are aligned and we share the same passion for bringing fairness and transparency to the equipment market,” said Ritchie Bros. chief executive officer Peter Blake. “Our success in building the world’s largest equipment auction company through our flagship unreserved auctions has given us a unique understanding of the world’s equipment owners. We intend to leverage this market knowledge and the power of our brand not only to fuel the growth of AssetNation’s business, but also to develop additional solutions that will expand our addressable market and help us meet the diverse and evolving preferences of a segment of the equipment market that we have not traditionally reached with our unreserved auctions.”

“We believe that adding AssetNation’s best-in-class technology and deep e-commerce expertise and leveraging those strengths to develop exciting new services will allow us to build on our position as the world’s largest seller of used heavy equipment and trucks and to attract new customers,” added Blake. “We believe this initiative will increase shareholder value by enabling us to create compelling complementary solutions and effectively double our addressable market.”