The Ferretti nautical group is heading towards the Italian Stock Exchange by the end of the year, MF Milano Finanza reported adding that the Chinese industrial shareholder Weichai is defining the team of banks that will manage the listing process.
Barclays, Bnp Paribas and UBS have already been identified as the global coordinators, while Banca Imi, Equita and Mediobanca are referred to as possible bookrunners. While the legal advisors are the Dentons and King & Wood Mallesons studios.
The structure of the offer is still to be decided. More in detail it is to be stated if it will only be a public sale offer or if it will also include a share of capital increase; if it will be an offer aimed only at institutional investors or even at retail investors and how much floating capital there will be, although the indications are at least 30-35%.
For Ferretti it would be a coming back to listing. The group had actually been delisted from Piazza Affari in January 2003 by the private equity firm Permira. The tender offer was launched at the end of Summer 2002 at 4.35 euros per share for a total of 674.3 million euros, equal to 2.7 times the 2011 turnover, financed 50% with debt. At the end of the deal, 70% was owned by Permira, while 20% belonged to the founder Norberto Ferretti and 10% to the managers of the first line. Subsequently in 2006 Permira had sold 60% of the group’s capital to Candover, remaining with a 10% stake.
However, the group had then come to the brink of default at the turn of the 2008 financial crisis, as were many other companies that had been the a target for leveraged buyouts in the pre-crisis golden years and which had not been able to bear the burden of debt. In 2012 the group was rescued by Weichai and under the Chinese industrial ownership repaid the debt and returned to the net profit in 2016.
Led by ceo Alberto Galassi, Ferretti achieved a production value of 623 million euros in 2017, with core profits up 11% to 59 millions and a net profit up 71% to 24 million euros. As for the evaluation, it will depend on the 2018 figures, which will be presented next Tuesday, April 16th in Milan.
Weichai owns an 86.4% stake in Ferretti while a 13.2% stake is owned by Piero Ferrari, the heir to the family of well-known racing cars. In an interview with Il Giornale in 2015, commenting on the financial statements for that year, Galassi recalled that when the Weichai group entered in 2012, it “paid 178 million euros for the acquisition, plus 116 million euros in financing, and now 80 million for a capital increase. When the Chinese arrived, Ferretti was in the 182 bis regime of the Bankruptcy Law. They repaid the suppliers 100%, something never seen before “.
