Investment funds Blackstone, CVC and Brookfield are studying the acquisition of the multinational leasing and mobility company Ayvens, owned by the French financial institution Société Générale, which has boosted the share price of the company led by Tim Albertsen from 6.72 euros at the opening on Thursday to 7.7 euros, with a rise of 7.7%.
At the start of today’s trading on the Euronext index, Ayvens shares are up 3% (11.15 a.m.).
The information on the interest of these investment funds, first reported by Bloomberg, pushed the value of the company’s shares up to around 9% and it is expected that this Monday there will also be significant movements in Ayvens’ share price.
A fourth player interested in Ayvens, according to Bloomberg, is Japanese financial giant Sumitomo, the only one of the three that is a direct rival of the company because it also manages car fleets through one of its subsidiaries.
Sumitomo Mitsuo Auto Services ranks 13th in Fleet People’ s annual ranking of the largest global fleet managers, with around 600,000 vehicles in its portfolio.
But, paradoxically, Mitsui Auto Services has been a global partner since the middle of last year in the worldwide alliance formed by Arval, Ayvens’ direct organic rival, with Canada’s Element Fleet Management.
Ayvens, born after the acquisition of LeasePlan by ALD Automotive
It should be remembered that the current capital of Ayvens is 52.59% controlled by Société Générale, which manages 429.6 million shares of the company valued at 3,040 million euros, according to figures obtained by Fleet People through MarketScreener.
The second shareholder of Ayvens, according to the same sources seen directly by this publication, is the Dutch and Danish pension plan management fund Lincoln TopCo, which is none other than part of the consortium that led in 2015 the purchase of LeasePlan from the Volkswagen group and the German family Metzler, owner of the Metzler bank.
Lincoln TopCo manages 77.7 million Ayvens shares with an equity equivalent of 9.51%, valued at 550 million euros.
The third major shareholder is TDR Capital, which would later emerge as one of the capital funds in the LeasePlan structure from 2017, controlling more than 42% of the voting rights in the company. TDR controls 8% of Ayvens, some €465 million.
According to Ayvens‘ information, the former owners of LeasePlan together currently hold 30.75 % of Ayvens’ capital.
Ayvens would not be a ‘core’ division for SocGen
The emergence of these key players is relevant because Ayvens is formed by the merger of ALD Automotive and LeasePlan, two of the world’s leading leasing groups, after the former – in the hands of Société Générale – bought the latter in 2022 for €4.9 billion to add a global vehicle fleet of 3.3 million units.
Bloomberg noted that while Ayvens has always been a key business division for Société Générale’s former CEO, Frederic Oudéa, this is not the case for the current CEO, Slawomir Krupa, who has been at the helm of the financial institution since last year and is more focused on simplifying the French bank’s structures. In fact, he has already got rid of some of his own non-core subsidiaries.
The agency also pointed out that Ayvens was forced last year, in its first year of integration with LeasePlan, to ‘renounce’ ‘key’ performance targets because it was ‘surprised by the cost overruns of an IT overhaul at Leaseplan’.
According to figures recently presented to its investors and collected by Fleet People, Ayvens generated a net profit of 548.9 million euros in the first nine months of the current financial year, a sharp decline of 13.7% compared to the same period in 2023.
Ayvens hunde su beneficio un 38% en el tercer trimestre, con 148 millones
During the same period, the multinational has seen the costs of its contracts signed with customers soar by 60.8% up to September, with 6,037.7 million euros.
Ayvens is currently the leading leasing operator in Spain, with a fleet of 265,000 vehicles formed after the merger of ALD Automotive and LeasePlan.
It should be noted that, according to data collected by Fleet People, Ayvens’ shareholders also include the Spanish asset management companies Dunas Capital, with 0.18% of the capital (eight million euros), Cartesio Inversiones (0.107%, six million euros), HOROS (0.097%, six million euros) and Unicorp, with 0.077%, equivalent to four million euros.
The current market capitalisation of Ayvens is close to 6,000 million euros and its value as an asset and after the purchase of LeasePlan is estimated by the financial markets to be between 45,000 and 50,000 million euros.
