Comdata, the leading Italian company for outsourcing of contact center, help desk, back office, credit management and document management services which was bought last December by funds managed by Carlyle (see here a previous post by BeBeez), signed an agreement for acquiring Grupo Digitex, a Spanish specialist in the same contact center sector with a wide presence in Latin America, MF Milano Finanza writes today.
The seller is Altra Investments, a private equity operator focused on investments in Colombia and Perù with headquarters in Bogotà and Lima. Altra had invested in Digitex in 2005 and since then has been developing the company business in South America, which is the reason why Marco De Benedetti, Carlyle’s managing partner in Italy, was so interested in buying the company. Actually this is quite a good opportunity for Comdata to grow its business overseas.
Founded in 1989, Digitex reached about 170 million euros in revenues in 2014 and is active in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Chile and obviously Spain. On the other hand Comdata reached 298 million euros in revennues in 2014 with 40 millions in ebitda.
Running for Comdata last Autumn were Apax Partners and Pai Partners too (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Both private equtiy operators were also running for Spanish Grupo Konecta too, which is a leader in the same contact center sector in Spain. At the end the winner was Pai Partners who finally agreed to buy a 40% stake in grupo Konecta for a 130 million euros investment. At the same time the fund negotiated for Konecta a 195 million euros refinancing which included a 30 million euros revolving favility and a 30 million euros capex facility. The facility lines were arranged by the underwriters BnpParibas, Natixis, Credit Agricole and Unicredit.
Some of those banks were the same banks who also financed Comdata’s deal: Bpm, Bnp Paribas, Credit Agricole, Intesa Sanpaolo, SocGen and Unicredit. In that case the acquisition financing had a 170 million euros size or 4x Comdata’s expected ebitda for 2015 versus a 300-350 million euros enterprise value or 7-7.5x FY 2015’s ebitda.
