Private-Equity Firms Plan Share Sale for Nordic Payments Processor

Two Boston-based buyout firms plan to sell shares in Nordic payments processor Nets A/S, seeking to repeat their successful listing of a British peer last year.

Nets said in a statement on Thursday that it plans to sell shares on the Nasdaq Copenhagen exchange. The shares are likely to start trading in four or five weeks, according to a spokesman. Nets wants to raise 5.5 billion Danish kroner ($824 million) from the sale, in addition to the as-yet undisclosed amount of stock that the company's shareholders want to sell.

Advent International Corp. and Bain Capital LLC bought Nets in 2014, investing a combined 5.2 billion kroner in the Denmark-based firm.

Advent and Bain own 87% of Nets, and Denmark's ATP Private Equity Partners owns 5%. Nets' management and employees also own shares.

The share sale of Worldpay Group PLC on the London Stock Exchange last October earned Bain and Advent a combined profit of about £ 3.2 billion ($4.2 billion) in cash and stock, people familiar with the transaction said at the time. The private-equity firms invested about £ 700 million to acquire Worldpay in 2010.

Private-equity firms have bought a number of payments processing companies in recent years, usually acquiring them from banks seeking to raise cash by selling assets. Nets was previously owned by a group of regional banks including Denmark's Danske Bank and Norway's DNB.

Worldpay was bought from Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Advent and Bain also teamed up last year to buy an Italian payments processing business from a group of banks for €2.15 billion ($2.4 billion).

Private-equity firms aim to cut costs while boosting sales and profits at the companies they buy—often by combining them with competitors— before selling the businesses to other investors within five years.

"When we made our initial investment, we envisioned a future listing when Nets was ready," James Brocklebank, a managing partner at Advent, said in a statement.

Bain and Advent sold about £ 1.2 billion of Worldpay stock in its initial public offering and retained a combined stake in the company then worth about £ 2.3 billion, people familiar with the situation said at the time. The firms had already received a £ 400 million dividend from Worldpay in 2013.

Worldpay was the largest ever U.K. flotation of a private equity-owned company. Its shares have risen 25% since.

Nets employs about 2,400 people and processed 7.3 billion card transactions in 2015, 16% more than in 2013, the company said in a statement. Revenue increased 5.7% to 3.6 billion kroner in the first half of 2016 from the same period a year before and adjusted net profit increased 3.8% to 603 million kroner.

Dominic Chopping contributed to this article.

Write to Simon Clark at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 01, 2016 08:05 ET (12:05 GMT)

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