French private equity firm Astrance Capital entered in exclusive talks with Vincenzo Zucchi spa’s shareholders in order to acquire control of the well known Italian home linen group. Talks will be ongoing till the deposit of a complete filing for a debt restructuring agreement with the Court of Busto Arsizio (Varese) (download here the press release).
The Milan-listed group had filed for bankrupcty proceeding to the Court of Busto Arsizio last Spring (see here a previous post by BeBeez) and the Court had accepted the file on April 24th, giving the company a 120 days’ period in order to deposit a complete file for a debt restructuring agreement. Last August the Court allowed the group 60 days more.
Astrance Capital (who already bought the Descamps brand from Zucchi in 2011) actually offered to subscribe a 10 million euros capital increase in GB Holding, Zucchi’s parent company.
Today Zucchi’s shareholders capital is controlled by the goalkeeper from Juventus football team, Gigi Buffon (56%) and by three banks (Unicredit4.7%, Intesa Sanpaolo 3.4% e Banca Popolare di Milano 2.5%) which are also the group’s major senior lenders.
A few days ago Zucchi announced the sale of its subsidiary Mascioni to Spanish private equity firm Phi Asset Management Partners for a 150k euro price tag (download here the press release).
Last Friday October 9th, when exclusive talks with Astrance Capital were announced, the stock reached a +6% at the Milan Stock Exchange and closed with a 2.74% gain at 0.05 euro with a cmarket capitalization of 25.7 million euros.
Zucchi reached 151 million euros in consolidated revenues in 2013 with one million of negative ebitda. FY 2014statements are still not available, but the nine months 2014 closed with 94 millions in revenues (-9.2% sfrom nine months 2013) and 8.665 millions of negative ebitda (from -8.99 millions).
At the end of March Q1 2015 statements showed that Zucchi had reached 32-595 million euros in revenues (from 32.703 millions) with 2.19 millions of negative ebitda (from -3.687 millions). Zucchi’s net financial debt dropped to 87.9 million euros from 97.95 millions at the end of 2014, due to a lower use of working capital lines and a drop in inventories.
