Fusion Corporate Partners are pleased to announce the sale of HedgeFund Intelligence Ltd (‘HFI’), the leading global publisher, event organiser and data provider to the high growth HedgeFund environment, to Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC for a maximum of £16.5M.
HedgeFund Intelligence publishes the influential monthly hedge fund newsletters EuroHedge, AsiaHedge and InvestHedge and, in April this year, launched Absolute Return, a monthly newsletter for the US hedge fund market. HedgeFund Intelligence has grown rapidly since it was founded in 1988 by Iain and Suzie Jenkins. Iain Jenkins was formerly investment editor of Sunday Business and European business correspondent of the Sunday Times. He will continue to run the business from London as managing director
Fusion was retained by the shareholders of HFI to respond to an ever increasing number of approaches and to work with them over a number of years to help build shareholder value. A persistent campaign by Euromoney and other global media players convinced the owners to consider a sale, but only at a premium price. This strategy was co-ordinated by Fusion and eventually lead to the successful sale.
The headline consideration is £16.5 million, with an initial consideration is £11 million and an Earnout till November 2004 of up to £5.5 million. In the year to November 30, 2002, HedgeFund Intelligence made an audited operating profit of £1.0 million on turnover of £2.4 million. For the seven months ended June 30, 2003, HedgeFund Intelligence made an unaudited operating profit of £775,000 on turnover of £2.1 million. The net assets at the date of acquisition were zero.
The pace of growth of the HedeFund Industry industry is showing every sign of accelerating with $8 billion being raised by new European funds in the first half of the year. Yet, until now, there has been no dominant source of information. HFI in 4 years had filled that void.
Paul Slight was the active Partner at Fusion responsible for the transaction and he can be reached via pslight@fusioncorp.co.uk
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