The teasers on Telepass, a group specializing in automatic toll payment systems of which Altantia now controls 100%, were sent by advisors Goldman Sachs, Mediobanca and Banca Imi to sovereign wealth funds such as Adia, GIC and QIA, to largeCanadian pension funds and large private equity firms such as General Atlantic, Warburg Pincus, Partners Group, KKR, TPG, Advent and Bain Capital, Il Sole 24 Ore wrote, adding that interest in Telepass hs also been shown by large groups in the electronic payments sector such as Nexi, and perhaps also Sia, Paypal and Fleetcore or even Visa and Mastercard, or groups active in the data management and analysis such as Cerved and TomTom. Infrastructure funds such as Ardian are also said to be studying the Telepass deal (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
The new investor will probably enter Telepass capital with a minority stake, maybe a 30%, in view of a subsequent listing of Telepass, which today would be valued at around 2 billion euros, based on a multiple of 12-13x the expected ebitda for 2019, seen at around 150 million euros from the 111 millions of 2018, against operating revenues of 188 million euros, mainly consisting of the Telepass fees for 116 million euros, from Viacard membership fees for 21 millions of euros and Premium Options for 27 million euros (see Atlantia’s 2018 financial statements here).
As part of a corporate reorganization, Atlantia acquired in December 2016 100% of Telepass from Autostrade per l’Italia (96.15%) and Autostrade Tech (3.85%) with a valuation of 1.148 billion euro (see Atlantia 2016 financial statements here). That year the company had generated 158 million in revenues and 91.3 million in ebitda.
The scope of the Telepass group also includes Urban Next, a company incorporated under Swiss law that develops software and applications relating to urban mobility; K-Master which operates in the monitoring and management systems of the transport vehicles fleets through an IT platform and certain dedicated software applications; K-Master Broker (which changed its name to “Telepass Broker”) on May 30, 2018, which carries out the activity of insurance brokerage; and 75% of the investment in the company Infoblu previously held by Autostrade per l’Italia. Last February, Telepass joined the Italian startup that offers the Wash Out home car wash service (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
