Good morning Eurohubsters, Craig McGlashan here with the final Dealflow of the week.
While the end of the year is approaching and the weather is getting cold, private equity dealflow stayed pretty warm this week. We have some new deals to report for you this morning, plus a look back at some of the bigger stories of the week.
Learning. IK Partners announced this morning that it had exited Studienkreis to GoStudent, an edtech unicorn.
Studienkreis, headquartered in Bochum, Germany, provides offline and digital tutoring services for primary and secondary school students. Established in 1974, the tutoring company has over 1,000 learning centres across the country.
Under IK’s ownership, Studienkreis expanded to Austria through the acquisition of LernQuadrat in 2018. In the last 12 months, the company made a number of strategic acquisitions, including Seneca Learning, Tus Media Group and Fox Education. The companies are headquartered in London, Granollers in Spain and Vienna, respectively.
That wasn’t the only education-linked deal of the week. Earlier, Brookfield took a minority stake in SBB’s public education portfolio.
In the cloud. FSN Capital VI announced it has signed an agreement to acquire a majority stake in ilionx, a Dutch IT services provider focused on customers in regulated industries and the public sector. Ilionx was previously owned by Egeria, an Amsterdam-based private equity firm that acquired ilionx in 2017.
Headquartered in Utrecht, ilionx offers digital strategy, cloud-oriented application development, data and AI solutions, hyper-automation services and managed services. The company has over 1,200 employees across thirteen locations in the Netherlands.
FSN Capital VI’s investment strategy will focus on continued organic growth as well as selected add-on acquisitions in the “large and highly fragmented Dutch IT services market”, according to a statement.
“We see ilionx as a very trustworthy IT partner for its customers with a strong backbone in highly competent employees, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit and customer-centric approach,” said Marcus Egelstig, partner at FSN Capital Partners, in the statement.
Read more about that deal here.
We also looked at the tech sector in an interview with Emmanuel Laillier, head of Tikehau Capital’s private equity business, earlier in the week.
Crystalised deal. SK Capital Partners and Edgewater Capital Partners bought Saint-Gobain’s crystals business, the firms announced. No financial terms were disclosed.
The business, which is based in Hiram, Ohio, has been rebranded as Luxium Solutions.
On the deal, Mario Toukan, managing director of SK Capital, said in a statement: “We believe Luxium’s leading scintillation technologies and unique ability to solve problems with applied material sciences, combined with a strong existing base of talent will transform the company into an independent leader in the industry that acts as a true value-add partner for the various sectors it serves.”
Saint-Gobain is a multinational corporation, founded in 1665 in Paris and headquartered on the outskirts of Paris.
Check out more on the deal here.
COIN-ing in. The Access Group, a portfolio firm of Hg and TA Associates, completed the acquisition of Construction Industry Solutions (COINS), a construction management software and services company.
COINS has been in operation for more than 40 years and is used by more than 100,000 construction professional worldwide. It has offices in New York in the US, Slough in the UK, Brisbane in Australia and Dubai.
London-headquartered Access provides business management software to UK mid-market organisations.
Hg is a private equity firm with offices in London, Munich, Paris, New York and San Francisco. It invests in software and services companies and has over $55 billion of funds under management.
TA Associates invests in business services, consumer, financial services, healthcare and technology industries. The private equity firm typically invests $100-$600 million in equity and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
Oil be back. The on and off again talks between US private equity firm Crossbridge Energy Partners and Russian energy firm Lukoil to buy the latter’s Sicily-based ISAB oil refinery are back on, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The firms are negotiating an agreement that would value the refinery at €1-€1.5 billion, according to people briefed on the matter spoken to by the FT. The deal would need the backing of Italy’s new nationalist government, the people added.
We’ve been writing a lot about energy lately, although much more on the sustainable side. Actis partner and head of infrastructure Lucy Heintz told PE Hub Europe’s Nina Lindholm that her firm sees renewable energy projects as “remarkably” resilient and essential building blocks, especially in the current volatile environment.
Read the full interview, including Actis’s plans for its renewable energy platform Rezolv, here.
Knocked for six. And finally, before we go in to the weekend, here’s some of those cricket and private equity crossover headlines I promised.
Serious kudos has to go to Jonathan Simnett of Hampleton Partners, who provided a flurry of suggestions.
My favourite two from Jonathan:
Cricket not a sticky wicket according to PE
And
PE now working hand in glove with cricket – will it be an outfield investment?
That’s it from me – I’ll be back with you on Monday.
Have a great weekend,
Craig
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