Kruk, the Warsaw-listed non performing loan manager and investor Polish group, announced its second acquisition in italy some days ago after having bought the La Spezia-based servicer Credit Base International in November 2016 (see here a previous post by BeBeez). Kruk actually signed an agreement to buy a 51% stake in Agecredit srl, a company based in Cesena and operating on the Italian third-party debt collection market with a committement to buy the whole 100% of the company in a few months (see here the press release).
Agecredit was founded in 1994 by entrepreneur Marco Pasini, who is now also chairman of Unirec, the Italian association of the thir-party debt collector companies. Agecredit generated 3.1 million euros in reveues in 2017 and counts 68 employees.
“We mark the next pillar of our development strategy – on the Italian market, several times bigger than in Poland, we will offer third party debt collection services”, Kruk’s founder and chairman Piotr Krupa said. Mr. Krupa estimates that the Italian third-party debt collection market might generate 700-800 million euros in revenues each year (see also a previous press release by Kruk).
From its entry in the Italian market at the end of 2015, Kruk group has been investing about 140 million euros, buying 10 differnt NPLs portfolios for about 2.7 billion euros GBV (see here a previous post by BeBeez and the press release about Kruk’s FY 2017 results ). The last announced NPLs transaction in Italy is dated June 2017, when Kruk bought from Deutsche Bank spa an unsecured consumer loan portfolio of 131.7 million euros GBV (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
