HKI (Iasist)
Deal Summary
Catalyst advised Healthcare Knowledge International (HKI), a management buy-out in 2004 funded by Inflexion Private Equity, on the sale of its subsidiaries Iasist Spain and Iasist Portugal to UBM for £9 million.
Headquartered in Barcelona, Iasist is the leading provider of primary and secondary healthcare intelligence and hospital performance benchmarking in Spain and Portugal.
The Spanish healthcare market is structured differently to the UK's. Seventeen autonomous regional authorities are responsible for local healthcare delivery with central government maintaining a regulatory role. Iasist is contracted by all seventeen regions to collect hospital data and produce healthcare performance information to help hospitals to manage the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery. Iasist entered the Portuguese market in 2007 and is already the leading provider of healthcare intelligence.
Iasist will form part of UBM’s healthcare division, CMP Medica, which is a leading international provider of information and education services to healthcare professionals and patients.
What difference did we make?
Catalyst was appointed to help the shareholders appraise two unsolicited bids for HKI. After further discussions with these bidders we concluded that there was little substance to the offers. HKI agreed not to pursue these offers and thus saved a great deal of time and protected confidentiality.
Catalyst was then asked to manage a targeted sales process for HKI to a short listed group of four potential buyers. During this process it became clear to us that different buyers were valuing the group in different ways and that shareholder value would be maximised by selling the UK and Spanish businesses to separate buyers.
The shareholders agreed with our advice to approach three short listed strategic buyers to protect confidentiality and UBM were successful in this competitive auction process.
Our greatest challenge on this transaction was managing the different objectives of the shareholders - which included private equity, retiring managers and those managers staying with the business post sale - to achieve a price, deal structure and potential buyer which satisfied everyone.
