Media and marketing group Havas wants to go public in Amsterdam on December 16. It wants to use this new money to buy more specialist companies.
Late last month announced the subsidiary of the Vivendi group to seek a stock exchange listing in Amsterdam. Yesterday, Vivendi boss Yannick Bolloré organized a Capital Market Day. That is a day on which Havas executives tell the financial market why they should invest.
“Because we are good at mergers and acquisitions and get value for shareholders from them. We have never had to write off a euro on any acquisition,” said the Frenchman. He did speak from London, because that is slightly more important on the world market than Amsterdam.
The choice for a Dutch listing was made for a very practical reason. Customer Thales did not want its important supplier to fall prey to a hostile takeover. A construction via a Dutch foundation protects the French from this. Only friendly takeovers are possible.
Bolloré: “We disappeared from the stock exchange in 2017 and unexpectedly lost international visibility. The new listing should change that.”
Through acquisitions, Havas wants to gain a more competitive position vis-à-vis larger parties such as Dentsu, IPG, Publicis and WPP. “M&A is a differentiator for us and a driver of growth. In 2023 we will have made 23 acquisitions, fifty since 2017. These deliver an average of 1.5 percent annual turnover growth.”
The upcoming growth money will be used to either buy market positions where Havas is small or to buy expertise for future growth. The latter usually takes place in the domains of Tech, Creation, Data and Marketing. “We pay competitive prices and do our best to keep the founders on board. The primary search is for a cultural fit.” That sounds sympathetic, but once part of a group, those ex-entrepreneurs will have to dance to the financial targets of the new owners. This often leads to an exit at the end of the lock-up or earn-out period.
“We invest in talents, in people, not in AI. We do use it, but we see it as a tool and aid. Not as a goal.”
Havas is investing four hundred million euros in technology and mergers and acquisitions until the end of 2027.
Behind the scenes builds since the beginning of this year it has been working on something that meets the metaphor of an operating system. ‘Havas Converged’ is positioned as a digital tool for media buying, distribution, creation and analysis. The summit yesterday left out of the amount of manual work involved in moving data from one digital silo to another. That would invalidate the metaphor.
Havas undoubtedly hopes that its IPO goes better than the audio connection with which the Capital Markets Day was streamed.
The group has 23,000 employees in a hundred countries and a turnover of around three billion euros. Acquired companies must contribute forty to fifty million euros annually to net turnover in the medium term. Historically, that amount is forty million.
Source: www.emerce.nl
