Aureos Southern Africa Fund (ASAF) has acquired a 30 per cent equity stake in South African company Sandbox Holdings.
Aureos Southern Africa Fund (ASAF) has acquired a 30 per cent equity stake in South African company Sandbox Holdings. ASAF is an initiative of Aureos Capital, one of the leading private equity fund management companies specialising in investing in small to mid-cap businesses in emerging markets.
Sandbox is a provider of electronic building management and security services and business software in South Africa. It has two main operations:
Sitronix – which provides custom building control and security systems, which can integrate services such as fire alarms, access controls, CCTV, heating, lighting control, ventilation and air conditioning.
Sandbox – Projects which provides implementation and support for Microsoft business software solutions.
According to Ron den Besten, managing partner of Aureos Southern Africa Fund, the Sandbox deal matched the fund’s requirement for investing in businesses which have proven track records and that have the potential to expand across the continent.
Explains Ron den Besten: ‘We feel that Sandbox’s portfolio of products and services have a great deal of potential for growth.’
‘Microsoft ERP solutions are particularly suited to the medium sized business market across Africa and the building controls and security side of the business should benefit from the current expansion of the continent’s construction and real estate sectors.’
‘The company also has a very strong management team and all of our investment decisions tend to come down to how robust a management team is going to be in place.’
The structuring of the Sandbox investment has been designed to allow a further 20 per cent of the company to be allocated to black empowerment partners. This will allow Sandbox to access South African clients that have Black Economic Empowerment procurement requirements.
Sandbox is one of the leading South African supplier of Microsoft Enterprise Compliance Solutions and a Top3 supplier for Microsoft Enterprise Resource Planning Software.
Paul Wootten, Sandbox chief executive, comments: ‘The addition of Aureos to the shareholder base brings huge international business experience and a fully funded BEE equity participation scheme. We are looking forward to working with ASAF as we enter the next stage of our company’s growth.’
Aureos Capital is a unique private equity fund management company, domiciled in Mauritius, which specialises in providing expansion and buy-out capital to unlisted mid-cap businesses across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
It was formed in July 2001 to assume management of a range of funds originally sponsored by CDC Group and to raise and manage a new generation of private equity funds under the Aureos brand.
Today, Aureos employees are the largest shareholders in Aureos. Other shareholders include CDC Group, Norfund and FMO which are, respectively, the British, Norwegian and Dutch development finance institutions.
Since 2001, Aureos has increased its funds under management to over USD720m and extended to over 50 emerging markets covering Asia, Africa and Latin America, by establishing 14 regional private equity funds.
Investors in Aureos funds include institutional investors, bilateral and multilateral development finance institutions, fund of funds, family offices and foundations and high net worth individuals.
Aureos is in the process of raising funds for the USD100m Aureos Central Asia Fund, the USD300m Aureos Latin America Fund, and the USD400m Aureos Africa Fund.
