It’s official. Since last Friday, January 25th, Lion Rock Capital, the investment fund with headquarters in Hong Kong, is the new shareholder of Inter Italian soccer team, after having bought for 150 million euro the 31.05% stake of FC Internazionale Milano spa which has been owned since 2014 by the Indonesian entrepreneur Erick Thoir, through International Sports Capital HK Limited (see the press release here).
Founded in 2011 by Daniel Kar Keung Tseung, a Sino-American businessman, trained in the US at Princeton and Harvard, the fund invests mainly in the sports, e-commerce, food and medical sectors and in its portfolio already has a significant share of Suning Sports, in turn a subsidiary of the Zhang family‘s Suning group, which owns the rest of the capital of Inter.
Just over a year ago, Inter had refinanced with a 300 million euros bond the 208 million euro loan to Goldman Sachs, contracted in 2014 when Thohir entered the capital of the soccer team. For the rest, the bond served to repay a current credit line and to support the January 2018 soccer team purchase campaign (see here a previous post by BeBeez). The bond is secured by sponsorship contracts and revenues from TV rights of national and European competitions in which the Inter participates.
The company closed the 2017 financial year at the end of June 2018 with 220.7 million euros in adjusted revenues, while the first quarter of the new financial year (July-September 2018) closed with adjusted revenues increasing to 96.8 millions from 56.6 millions in the first quarter of last FY.
