Vitruvian signed the agreement to buy the BitDefender stake for $180 million at 4 a.m. on Friday, December 1.
This is the biggest deal involving an IT company in Romania and one of the biggest involving a local entrepreneurial company.
Axxess Capital, a firm run by Romanian Horia Manda, first bought into BitDefender ten years ago – 7% for $7 million, and then bought more up to over 30%. Axxess hired Deutsche Bank to assist in the deal in February.
The Vitruvian-Axxess deal finally puts a real price on BitDefender, Florin Talpes, founder and CEO of the company told ZF. “The $600 million valuation, a market value resulted from a transaction is no longer an estimate, no longer an opinion. It is a real price,” he said.
The stake of the Talpes family in BitDefender, one of the few entrepreneurial businesses in the local EUR4 billion software and IT services industry to have exported its own products, is valued at $360 million in the wake of the deal.
BitDefender, which has more than 500 million users worldwide and competes with giants like Norton and Kaspersky, has annual revenue of EUR150 million and operating income of EUR25 million to EUR30 million, ZF has found. The company, which does not provide data about global revenue, expects 30% growth thereof in 2017.
Asked about what indicators were considered in the valuation of BitDefender, Talpes did not answer and only said the “current value indicates the starting point for the next phase of Bitdefender’s development”, which might include acquisitions.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)