Italy’s leading web agency Primi sui Motori‘s principal shareholders have given mandate to advisory firm K Finance for selling their stakes in the shareholding capital. MF-Milano Finanza writes today.
Primi sui Motori is listed at Aim Italia of Borsa Italiana and provides services that help businesses enhance their presence on the internet, making their operations efficient and profitable, and improving search engine positioning through Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
More in detail Primi sui Motori’s founder and ceo, Alessandro Reggiani, through his Syner.it Informatica srl (47,6% in company’s shareholding capital) and Italian private equity operator Equilybra Capital Partners spa (who went under 5% in the last few days form slighthely more than 13%) took the decision to sell their stakes following previous agreements included in the July 2012 Shareholders’ agreement (you may find a summary of the agreements in Document for admission to the Aim listing, Documento di ammissione alla quotazione, par. 13.4 pag. 88),
The agreement said that 6 months after the lock up period expired the two shareholders would have given an advisor a mandate to sell their stakes in the company. This would happen if in the meantime Equilybra didn’t have sold its stake. As soon as a new investor will buy Reggiani and Equilybra stakes, he will have to launch a takeover bid on the whole company (Italian law asks for that whenever a new shareholders gains control of a 30 pct stake or more in a company’s capital).
Reggiani might mantain a management role in the new structure and invest back a minority stake. But nothing has been decided yet. In the last few days K Finance has been meeting potential investors focusing on Italian and foreign industrial counterparts, especially from France, Germany, Japan and US. Non-binding offers are waited by the end of May,
In the meantime market already awarded Primi sui Motori a good premium. Company’s stock price gained 30 pct since the beginning of the year and about 64 pct since last November. Italian broker Intermonte recently assigned rating “buy” to the stock with a 40 euros target price from today’s 29 euros, while Integrae sim, who assigned a “buy” too, has a 37 euros target price.
Sector multiples are quite high going from 15x to 25x this year’s ebitda as they take into account perspective growth which might be quite disruptive as in Italy there are so many small and medium enterprises which are not digitalized yet. Primi sui Motori reached 11.5 million euros in revenues in 2013 (from 10.5 millions in 2012) with 0.6 millions ebitda (from 1.4 millions) and a net financial debt of 6.6 millions (from 5.9 millions). Taking into account three acquisitions made in 2013 (Crearevalore spa. 3ding Consulting srl and 2ThePoint PSM srl) , pro-forma consolidated revenues are 13.9 million euros.
In the last few day Primi sui Motori signed an important agreement with Italian Aim listed digital advertising sales house Triboo Media for creating a dedicated channel for SMEs on Leonardo.it web vertical news aggregator.
