Oakley Capital Corporate Finance has advised on the sale of cloud services provider e-know.net to Nasstar to create a significant new quoted cloud hosting and applications business.
Nasstar has announced the proposed acquisition of Denara, the holding company of e-know.net, for an equity consideration of GBP13m. Oakley is advising Denara on the transaction.
e-know.net provides a comprehensive cloud services package, offering hosted desktop and hosted exchange services, with the ability to host a wide variety of software applications on behalf of clients, as well as providing hosted telephony and managed data network services. e-know.net has high recurring revenues and has been growing strongly over recent years, with revenue expected to grow by 18 per cent in 2013.
The consideration is to be satisfied GBP9m in cash and GBP4m in new shares in Nasstar, at an issue price of 5 pence per Nasstar share. Nasstar is funding the cash consideration through a placing of new shares for a total of GBP10.5m. The transaction constitutes a reverse takeover under the AIM Rules and following the Nasstar general meeting scheduled for 9 January 2014, the enlarged group will be admitted to trading on AIM on 10 January 2014.
The combined sales, technical and operational resources available to the enlarged Nasstar group more effectively positions the businesses to capitalise on the accelerating growth being experienced in the hosted desktop and managed applications market. Lord Daresbury will continue to chair the enlarged Nasstar group, with David Redwood, Nigel Redwood and Niki Redwood from e-know.net becoming deputy chairman, CEO and CFO, respectively.
The Oakley team advising Denara is led by Chris Brooks, director, Chris Godsmark, managing partner, and Oksana Stowe, senior associate.
Brooks says: “The enlarged Nasstar group will be the UK’s leading independent managed desktop provider and is well placed to build on e-know.net’s impressive growth record, as well as benefiting from cost synergies arising from the combination. The enlarged Nasstar group is also an effective platform from which to take advantage of the consolidation potential of a fragmented market. ”
The deal is the third for Oakley in the past few weeks. A short while ago Oakley advised Equistone Partners Europe on its investment in managed networks and hosting provider MDNX, which simultaneously acquired Easynet. Prior to that Oakley sold Intechnology plc’s managed services business for GBP65m in cash to Redcentric plc.
