CVC Capital Partners, through its subsidiary Chopin Holdings sarl, sold a 14.87% stake in the capital of Cerved Information Solutions spa, Italy’s leading business information provider listed on the Italian Stock Exchange. The deal was structured as an accelerated bookbuilding process, which allowed Chopin to cash in 190 million euros from 29 million shares sold at a price of 6.55 euro per share (download here the press release).
The deal wad coordinated by JPMorgan as sole bookrunner (the bank was one of the Joint global coordinators and joint bookrunners in Cerved’s global offer in June 2014) with Latham & Watkins law firm as legal advisor to Chopin.
The sale happened last Tuesday September 8th after the market had closed and the offer has been totally covered in one hour’s time, MF-Milano finanza writes today. Buyers were open-end investment funds and hedge funds especially based in UK (60%) and US (30%).
The sale follows a previous sale happened last May, when Chopin sold a 16.41% stake of Cerved’s capital at the price of 6.35 euros per share for a total consideration of 203.2 million euros (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
CVC sold 39 million shares at a price of 5.1 euro each In an ipo in June 2014 for a total consideration of about 198 million euros (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Cerved’s share gained 32% since then while they recorded a 69% jump from minimum price recorded at the beginning of last January at 4 euros per share. The news of the sale by CVC pushed down the price yesterday bringing the stock to close at 6.75 euros with a 4.46% drop from Tuesday 8th.
CVC Capital Partners has been reducing its stake in Cerved from 55.7% after the ipo to 39,3% and now to 24.4% and will sell other stakes in the future in order to divest completely between 2016 and 2017.
Led by ceo Gianandrea De Bernardis, Cerved reached 331.3 million euros in revenues in 2014 (from 313.5 millions in 2013) with 160.1 millions of ebitda (from 151.5 millions) and a net financial debt of 487.6 millions (from 722.2 millions) (download here the 2014 FY Financial Statement).
In H1 2015 the group reached 177.6 million euros in revenues (up from 164 millions in H1 2014)i, 84.4 millions of ebitda (from 79.3 miillions) and a net financial debt of 542.7 millionsi. At the end of last July Cerved announced that the group had subscribed a new 600 million euros financement agreement (so-called “forward start”) with a pool of banks (Banca Imi, BnpParibas, Crédit Agricole, Mediobanca and Unicredit) in order to buyback the high yield bonds maturing in January 2016 (see here the press release).
