Lionel Assant, co-chief investment officer and head of Europe at Blackstone, has underlined that the private equity fund will take a patient approach to the breakup of Adevinta due to a slowdown in European M&A activity amid ongoing political uncertainty.
Blackstone and Permira led a consortium that took the Norway-based marketplaces operator private just over a year ago.
Asked about “exit challenges” by Private Equity International, Assant said that the industry needed to be more “creative,” adding: “For example, we’ve sold divisions of businesses — Adevinta and Schenck, for instance … Ultimately, you’re going to have to be slightly more creative to create a level of DPI [distributed to paid-in capital].”
“The good news is we don’t need to sell at every moment — we need to sell when we think the value creation plan is behind us and we can get a fair value.”
The “divisions” that Assant referred to are Adevinta’s JVs in Austria and Ireland (Willhaben and Distilled, respectively). It exited the latter in November last year and announced a deal to offload the former earlier this year.
Meanwhile, an IPO for Germany-based auto marketplace Mobile.de is reportedly under consideration, and Adevinta may also be planning to dispose of its Spain-based marketplaces, including real estate marketplace Fotocasa and auto marketplace Coches.net (not to be confused with Coches.com, which is owned by Santander Group).
Assant commented that the current high level of political uncertainty had made deal-making more difficult: “People tend to conflate uncertainty with difficulty to buy assets at the right price … the seller may have high price expectations, which is why the [European] M&A market is not as buoyant right now.”
Adevinta completed a debt refinancing deal last month, enabling it to pay a dividend.
