SPII

Value Added

Ethica Corporate Finance has a consolidated relationship with SPII’s majority shareholders, Italian Private Equity investor Wise SGR, and started working with them on potential exit options for their portfolio company two years ago.
Ethica worked at preparing the company for the sale and at gathering direct market intelligence to ensure the company would hit the market with the right timing, so to allow to maximize process success chances and shareholders’ expectations. This was done also by building a shortlist of potential trade and financial buyers, with whom Ethica informally started anonymous and continued dialogues to get a concrete sense of their appetite for such an asset.
This market scouting resulted in the decision to wait for 2014 results to be fully closed before hitting the market, which proved to be a very smart and successful move: the company had meanwhile fully recovered from the impacts of the economic turmoil and the rail market was again gaining momentum after a few years of flat performances.
The shareholders identified Schaltbau as the best partner for the future for the company, also thanks to the long dated and consolidated business relationship the company has with the German group for almost 50 years now, with SPII being a distributor of some of Schaltbau’s products in Italy. The acquisition will allow Schaltbau to consolidate its position in Italy and enlarge its product offering to better serve large train manufacturers; at the same time SPII will be able to benefit from Schaltbau international presence to increase penetration in key overseas markets.