De Agostini’s takeover bid on Dea Capital to remove it from Piazza Affari

Another dynasty of Italian capitalism withdraws from the Stock Exchange. After Della Valle, who tried unsuccessfully to delist Tod’s last summer; after the Agnellis, who left the holding company Exor listed only in Amsterdam; after the Benettons who are closing the operation on Atlantia in these days, the De Agostini family launches a takeover bid on Dea Capital with the aim, here too, of removing the company from Piazza Affari. This brings the farewells to Borsa Italiana-Euronext this year to twenty-one by as many companies and the reasons are more or less always the same: the listing costs are too high and outside the stock market we are more free to operate. Manfredi Catella tried to explain it last spring when he justified Coima Res’ farewell to the negotiations as “a necessary step for further growth”, and the De Agostini family is even more explicit in announcing the total takeover bid at 1, 5 euros per share on Dea Capital, for a total outlay of 128 million euros.

Greater managerial and organizational flexibility, as well as cost savings, are the reasons indicated in the note from Nova, the financial vehicle the Novara group is using to carry out the operation. In other words, as a non-listed company Dea Capital “will have greater operational and organizational flexibility and will be able to accelerate its investment and value creation strategy”. In short, reading the reasons that lead companies to retreat, it almost seems that being listed today is more of a sacrifice than a benefit, especially in cases such as Dea Capital where trading on the stock is now very limited. In the specific case, however, this has a lot to do with the business model.

Dea Capital, which the De Agostinis founded in 2006 to support a phase of diversification and international expansion that began in the late 1990s after its origins were linked to publishing, has long been a direct investor, a sort of large private equity firm. In recent years, however, Dea Capital has consolidated as an independent “alternative asset management” platform, which in cascade controls investment funds in which third-party investors participate, which is divided into two large sections: Dea Capital real estate sgr, focused on the real estate sector, and Dea Capital Alternative Funds, which invests in the most varied sectors.

The total assets managed through this platform reached 26 billion euros. A figure that gives an idea of ​​how much meat there is to cook around Novara. But it would be a mistake to assume, as the rumors circulating in recent times would suggest, that the De Agostini family is considering maneuvers on the shareholding structure, in practice to a sale of shares away from the prying eyes of the Stock Exchange. Group sources refer to the Sheet that the takeover bid and subsequent delisting of Dea Capital are motivated solely by the consideration that “the listing is no longer significant for the type of business” and that the group “remains strongly focused on development”.

After all, the way Dea Capital is organized today, it is clear that it is a system that hinges on a network of relationships with national and international institutional investors, including very liquid ones which makes the permanence in Piazza Affari useless, the main purpose of which is to obtain resources for growth. The reasoning is flawless but brings us back to the starting point. Why are so many companies delisting? The phenomenon is not only Italian, thanks to the contraction in prices which on price lists all over the world is facilitating the shopping of listed companies by private equity funds and is encouraging the buybacks of shares on the market by the controlling shareholders.

In the last twenty years, according to a study by the Milan Polytechnic and Intermonte, 448 companies have been listed on the Italian Stock Exchange and 336 have been delisted. The balance, therefore, is positive. But be careful, because if the calculation is done by taking the capitalization, i.e. the market value, as a parameter, it can be seen that there has been a progressive and substantial loss of weight of the Italian list compared to the global financial markets because to be listed in the last years they have mainly been small companies, which represents a positive sign of the dynamism of our local entrepreneurship but it is too early to tell if there is budding family capitalism that is growing.