Private-Equity Firms Plan Share Sale for Nordic Payments Processor
September 01 2016 - 08:20AM
Dow Jones News
Two Boston-based buyout firms plan to sell shares in Nordic
payments processor Nets A/S, seeking to repeat their successful
listing of a British peer last year.
Nets said in a statement on Thursday that it plans to sell
shares on the Nasdaq Copenhagen exchange. The shares are likely to
start trading in four or five weeks, according to a spokesman. Nets
wants to raise 5.5 billion Danish kroner ($824 million) from the
sale, in addition to the as-yet undisclosed amount of stock that
the company's shareholders want to sell.
Advent International Corp. and Bain Capital LLC bought Nets in
2014, investing a combined 5.2 billion kroner in the Denmark-based
firm.
Advent and Bain own 87% of Nets, and Denmark's ATP Private
Equity Partners owns 5%. Nets' management and employees also own
shares.
The share sale of Worldpay Group PLC on the London Stock
Exchange last October earned Bain and Advent a combined profit of
about £ 3.2 billion ($4.2 billion) in cash and stock, people
familiar with the transaction said at the time. The private-equity
firms invested about £ 700 million to acquire Worldpay in 2010.
Private-equity firms have bought a number of payments processing
companies in recent years, usually acquiring them from banks
seeking to raise cash by selling assets. Nets was previously owned
by a group of regional banks including Denmark's Danske Bank and
Norway's DNB.
Worldpay was bought from Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC.
Advent and Bain also teamed up last year to buy an Italian payments
processing business from a group of banks for €2.15 billion ($2.4
billion).
Private-equity firms aim to cut costs while boosting sales and
profits at the companies they buy—often by combining them with
competitors— before selling the businesses to other investors
within five years.
"When we made our initial investment, we envisioned a future
listing when Nets was ready," James Brocklebank, a managing partner
at Advent, said in a statement.
Bain and Advent sold about £ 1.2 billion of Worldpay stock in
its initial public offering and retained a combined stake in the
company then worth about £ 2.3 billion, people familiar with the
situation said at the time. The firms had already received a £ 400
million dividend from Worldpay in 2013.
Worldpay was the largest ever U.K. flotation of a private
equity-owned company. Its shares have risen 25% since.
Nets employs about 2,400 people and processed 7.3 billion card
transactions in 2015, 16% more than in 2013, the company said in a
statement. Revenue increased 5.7% to 3.6 billion kroner in the
first half of 2016 from the same period a year before and adjusted
net profit increased 3.8% to 603 million kroner.
Dominic Chopping contributed to this article.
Write to Simon Clark at simon.clark@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 01, 2016 08:05 ET (12:05 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Royal Bank of Scotland (NYSE:RBS)
Historical Stock Chart
From Feb 2024 to Mar 2024
Royal Bank of Scotland (NYSE:RBS)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2023 to Mar 2024