Each month, we present you with a selection of M&A transactions that allow you to decipher industry trends. Here are the transactions we have selected for June:
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Robinhood, an American trading platform, acquires Bitstamp, one of Europe’s leading cryptocurrency exchange platforms, headquartered in Luxembourg, for €187 million. This acquisition enables Robinhood to diversify its cryptocurrency-related offering and open up to the European market. In 2016, Bitstamp had become the first cryptocurrency exchange platform to be licensed as a financial institution in Luxembourg, where it employs around 60 people.
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Indosuez, a subsidiary of the French banking group Crédit Agricole, finalizes the acquisition of Degroof Petercam, Belgium’s largest private investment bank. Also present in Luxembourg, Degroof Petercam has over €75 billion in assets under management. Indosuez now controls 65% of the capital, and CLdN Cobelfret, a Belgian-Luxembourg logistics group and long-standing shareholder, holds almost 20%.
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EQT, a Swedish investment fund, acquires CluePoints, a Belgian company specializing in the detection of errors and fraud in clinical trials. Based in Louvain-la-Neuve, CluePoints generated sales of €16 million in 2022 for its Belgian entity, and is valued at over €500 million through this transaction. EQT becomes the majority shareholder by acquiring the shares of the American fund Summit Partners. Certain shareholders, including Wallonie Entreprendre, Invest.BW and the Theodorus fund, took advantage of this transaction to exit the capital. This is the largest M&A deal in Wallonia this year.
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Gedeon Richter, Europe’s second-largest women’s medicine group based in Hungary, has acquired two entities of Mithra, a bankrupt Belgian company in the same sector, for €175 million. The acquired entities, Neuralis and Estetra, are responsible for activities linked to the production and marketing of estetrol, an active ingredient used in the Estelle contraceptive pill, and those linked to Donesta, an experimental drug against the adverse effects of menopause.
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Schréder, the Belgian group and world leader in intelligent outdoor lighting solutions, acquires Ligman Lighting USA, a major player in the North American lighting market. Schréder, founded in Liège in 1907, has been present on the American market since 1992, and today operates in over 70 countries worldwide.
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Mistral AI announces a new €600 million round of financing. The French competitor to ChatGPT has raised its third round of funding in less than a year (over €1 billion raised) and is now valued at almost €6 billion. Previous investors (General Catalyst, Lightspeed Ventures, Bpifrance) have gone back into the pot, accompanied by new entrants (Nvidia, Samsung, Cisco, IBM, Eurazeo, Korelya among others).
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Metz-based materials handling equipment rental specialistManuloc acquires Axialease, a French leasing company specializing in the IT, capital goods and medical markets. Axialease, based in the Paris region, offers financial leasing solutions for smartphones and tablets, and has sales of €90 million in 2023. With this acquisition, Manuloc, which has sales of €430 million and is backed by its minority shareholder CM-CIC Investissement, is diversifying its activities by taking advantage of Axialease’s expertise in financial leasing.
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TA Associates and Montagu Private Equity, two investment funds, join forces to acquire Harvest, a French software publisher for wealth management professionals, previously owned by the Five Arrows fund. Harvest generates sales of around €70 million and employs over 500 people. The transaction would have been carried out on the basis of a 20x Ebitda multiple, i.e. around €500 million.
Sources: S&P Capital IQ Pro, Capital Finance, Paperjam, L’Echo, Les Echos
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