EQT selling facilities manager Apleona – or possible IPO?

Swedish buyout group EQT has initiated the sale of facilities manager Apleona, previously part of industrial services group Bilfinger, for a price thought to be up to €2 billion. 

A sale would also benefit previous owner the Mannheim-based Bilfinger to as much as 49% as a result of clauses built into the sale agreement to EQT, including advances on the acquisition price and future earnouts. With Bilfinger’s turnover of €4.3bn, this would be a significant bonus.

EQT, which is working with Deutsche Bank on the sale, recently sent out first information packages to prospective buyers such as CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield and JLL, as well as private equity groups, they said. A stock market listing in summer 2021, organised by Deutsche Bank and UBS, is also a possibility, say insiders.

The Stockholm-headquartered EQT bought the company at a valuation of €1.4 billion euros including debt in 2016 and last year had already started preparations for the structured sale via a bidding process, but put plans on ice because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apleona, with its headquarters in Neu Isenburg outside Frankfurt, employs roughly 20,000 staff in 30 countries and has annual sales of €2 billion. It counts BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, BASF, Adidas, Siemens and Lufthansa among its clients.

Apleona is expecting full-year EBITDA earnings of €135m, so a sale at €2bn would value it at about 16 times that, which would be a very generous multiple. Depending on valuation method, buyers are more likely to offer a significantly lower enterprise value (equity plus debt), perhaps closer to the 11-times multiple EQT itself paid when it bought Apleona as the “Building and Facility” division from Bilfinger for €1.2bn. EQT has since hived off parts of the acquisition, including British broker group GVA.

A question mark hovers over the potential long-term impact of the health crisis on Apleona's business, as companies may use less office space if they continue to allow many employees to work from home after the pandemic.