Macquarie Consortium Offers to Buy Swedish Construction IT Firm

Charles Daly and Anton Wilen, Bloomberg News

A construction worker crosses a road near cranes on residential apartment block building sites in the district of Hagastaden in Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday, June 1, 2021. The "red hot" housing market in Sweden is likely to slow down after the summer, according to the chief economist at the country's biggest bank, Svenska Handelsbanken AB. Photographer: Mikael Sjoberg/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- A consortium of investors including Macquarie Capital has made an offer to acquire all shares in Byggfakta Group Nordic HoldCo AB, a Swedish software company catering to the construction industry.

The group of investors, including TA Associates and Stirling Square Capital Partners, is offering 46 Swedish kronor ($4.5) in cash for each Byggfakta share, valuing all the shares in the company at about 10.1 billion kronor, according to a statement. Stirling Square and TA already own 67.4% of the shares and votes in the software group.

Taking Byggfakta private is a result of “companies with M&A driven strategies being perceived less favorably by investors,” the consortium said.

Stirling Square Partner Henrik Lif said the case has always been to build Byggfakta into a global market leader since his firm invested in the software group in 2017. However, the pace of buying companies and new product launches “has slowed down a bit since the listing and we think there are greater possibilities to accelerate the company’s growth strategy outside the stock market where we have easier access to capital,” he said by phone.

Lif added that the the stock market is valuing low leverage higher than using debt to buy companies. “The digitization of the construction market started late, but is now rapidly increasing,” he said. “So it’s important to be active on the acquisition side to be there when it happens.”

The offer represents premium of 31% compared to the closing price of Byggfakta’s shares in Stockholm on Thursday. The company’s independent bid committee has unanimously decided to recommend that shareholders accept the offer.

Byggfakta’s shares rose as much as 30% on Friday to just below the offer price of 56 kronor. However, the stock is still considerably lower than the initial public offering price of 75 kronor per share in October 2021.

“We wanted to present an offer price as generous as possible, and I think that we have done that,” Stirling Square’s Lif said.

Read More: Macquarie, Stirling Square, TA to Buy Byggfakta: M&A Snapshot

(Adds comments from bid consortium, share move)