Sirius Real Estate has now completed the acquisition of Helix Investments Limited, the holding company of the BizSpace business, for circa €289m (£245m), based on an enterprise value of €448m (£380m).
BizSpace is a leading provider of regional flexible workspace, offering light industrial, workshop, studio and out of town office units to a wide range of businesses across the UK and the acquisition, therefore, provides Sirius with a unique opportunity to enter with immediate scale an under-served new market via a one-step acquisition of an established platform. It provides Sirius with a high-quality portfolio, offering significant organic growth potential in rental pricing in a UK market characterised by supply constraints. The BizSpace business is also highly complementary to Sirius’ existing platform, allowing for meaningful operational and financial synergies to drive value creation for Sirius shareholders.
The acquisition has been financed through a combination of the company’s existing cash resources and the issue and subsequent admission to trading on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges of 105,281,686 new Ordinary Shares of the Company, which raised gross proceeds of circa €161.5m (£137m). Sirius has also assumed BizSpace’s existing gross financial debt of c.€172m (£146m).
Commenting on the transaction, Andrew Coombs, Chief Executive Officer of Sirius Real Estate, said: "The completion of this acquisition marks a significant step forward in the continued evolution and growth of Sirius as a business. It provides us with our first expansion into a new geography via the acquisition of a significant portfolio of assets and an established operating platform, both of which we believe have huge potential. The success of our capital raise was also a very positive endorsement both of this transaction and our wider strategy for growth. We now look forward to working with the BizSpace team towards our overriding goal of growing FFO and generating sustainable and growing returns on behalf of shareholders."
