Oakley Capital carves out Ekon from Advent-backed Unit4

Alessia Argentieri
25 March 2019

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Oakley Capital Private Equity has acquired Spanish enterprise resource planning specialist Ekon from its parent company, Netherlands-based Unit4, which is backed by Advent International.

The equity for the deal will be drawn down from Oakley Capital Private Equity III, which held a final close in October 2017 on €800m.

Oakley Capital Investments' indirect contribution through its interest in Fund III will amount to approximately £20m, dependent on the capital structure at completion, which is subject to a demerger process to separate non-Ekon activities from Unit4 Business Software Ibérica.

The carve-out comes a few months after Advent's decision to abandon its sale of Unit4, which was kicked off in January 2018, when the private equity firm mandated Morgan Stanley and Evercore to conduct the process. The auction's final rounds, held in July 2018, saw Bain, KKR, Insight Venture Partners and Clearlake Capital Group take part in the bid, according to Unquote sister publication Mergermarket.

Unit4 was marketed based on €180m EBITDA. However, shortly after, Advent International decided to abandon the sale process, a person familiar with the situation confirmed to Unquote at the time.

Advent bought Unit4 in 2014 for €1.16bn and subsequently delisted the company from Euronext.

Ekon represents the first investment made by Oakley Capital in Spain and the second deal inked by its third fund in the software sector, following the acquisition of Switzerland-based website administration platform Plesk.

Company
Founded in 1963 and based in Barberà del Vallès, Ekon provides enterprise resource planning software to 1,000 SMEs in Spain. Its software suite includes solutions for finance, payroll and customer relationship management, as well as dedicated vertical modules for manufacturing, wholesale, health, retail and construction. The service is available in on-premises and hosted deployments, or via Ekon's cloud. The company generated revenues of €20m in 2018.

People
Oakley Capital Private Equity – Peter Dubens (managing partner).
Ekon – Juan Antonio Fernández (CEO).

Advisers
Equity – Uría Menéndez (legal).
Vendor – Arcano Partners (M&A); Garrigues (legal).