Newspaper El Nacional reports unhappiness among some workers at Adevinta Spain in the wake of its takeover by a consortium led by Blackstone and Permira earlier this year, amid growing indications the Oslo-based company is preparing to break up its local subsidiary.
The newspaper quotes sources within the company as saying that the aim of Adevinta’s new owners is “to achieve a 100% return on the invested capital in the next five years” by “making each marketplace independent of the central structure to have the flexibility to sell each part in private transactions or take them public” — a theory that is very much in line with the AIM Group’s detailed analysis of the PE consortium’s strategy.
This would involve making real estate marketplace Fotocasa and auto marketplace Coches.net — not to be confused with rival Coches.com, which is owned by Santander Group — independent units, with El Nacional asserting that Fotocasa has already been renamed Adevinta Real Estate SLU.
El Nacional quotes unnamed Adevinta Spain employees complaining of a lack of information — and work — from management.
“… they wouldn’t give me any work to do. Of all the tasks I had, I spent weeks doing only 20% … and I wasn’t the only one, there were a lot of people in a similar situation to mine,” one said.
She went on to criticise a lack of empathy, the absence of communication and a poor attitude towards workers from management, which she asserted “were the distinguishing features of Adevinta” before it changed hands.
According to another, “They didn’t tell us anything, we didn’t know what was happening, and the feeling of uncertainty was enormous.”
However, the employees said their workload had increased significantly in recent weeks: “Management is asking us for many things, more than usual,” a third maintained, adding that this was with a view to “enlarging the different marketplaces in order to sell them at a large profit.”
