Gresham sells IESA to Electrocomponents for £88m

Kenny Wastell
24 May 2018

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Gresham Private Equity has sold its stake in manufacturing services provider Integrated Engineering Stores Associates (IESA) to trade buyer Electrocomponents in a deal valued at ТЃ88m.

According to a statement, IESA has increased its revenues by around 300% since Gresham's initial investment. The business bolted on Active Industrial Supply, a Stoke-based supply-chain management service, in March 2017.

Following the deal, IESA's management team will continue to lead the company, which will operate as an independent unit under its new trade owners.

Gresham was invested in IESA via its pre-crisis 2006-vintage fourth fund, the last vehicle raised by the GP before it announced in 2014 that it was to stop fundraising activity and focus on returning cash to investors, effectively entering into wind-down mode.

Unquote was awaiting a response to a request for comment from the GP at the time of publication.

Previous funding
Gresham invested £23m for a majority stake in IESA as part of the company's management buyout in May 2012.

Company
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Warrington, IESA provides services related to procurement and sourcing, transaction processing, and inventory and store management to manufacturing clients. It has also developed cloud-based procurement platform MyMRO, which integrates 27,000 vendors onto one marketplace.

According to publicly available documents, IESA generated a turnover of £178.5m in the year ending in March 2016, the year prior to its acquisition of Active Industrial, with an operating profit of £3.6m.

People
Gresham Private Equity – Simon Inchley (CEO).
Integrated Engineering Stores Associates – Glenn Timms (CEO).

Advisers
Vendor – GCA Altium, Phil Adams, Tom Battersby, Durgesh Panchani (corporate finance).