It's done. The deal that had been in the offing since the summer of 2020 has now been completed. Italy's leading investment company Clessidra SGR has acquired the majority shares in Botter SpA for the investment fund Clessidra Capital Partners 3.
Clessidra SGR is one of the subsidiaries of the listed investment holding company Italmobiliare owned by the Pesenti family. Italmobiliare and Capital Dynamics are already investors in the Clessidra Capital Partners 3 fund and they also participated in the purchase of the Botter shares. Clessidra announced that Botter would support the transaction through reinvestments. The IDeA Taste of Italy fund, which had bought into the bottling company in 2017 with a 22.5 percent stake, gave up its shares in full.
"Botter marks Clessidra's first entry into the wine sector, a global market already worth over €300 billion and which has shown strong resilience over the course of the health emergency, particularly in relation to the food retail sector. Botter's growth is favoured - beyond its natural development capacity in foreign markets - by the fact that the company represents a perfect platform for a strategy of targeted acquisitions aimed at creating an Italian leader in the sector. The strategic objective we share with the Botter family and Botter's CEO Massimo Romani is based on a new distribution model of the product, based not only on affordable prices, but also on quality and the ability to better understand consumer tastes and trends," commented Andrea Ottaviano, Clessidra's Managing Director for Private Equity.
The Botter family is happy about the agreement with Clessidra because the investment company chose their company as a foundation for a project of mergers in the wine sector. When asked, Annalisa Botter also revealed the share of the company that remains in the hands of the family. "The family keeps 42 percent of the company, but it is particularly important that it remains operative in the company and thus secures the continuity in the management," she said.
The financial paper Milano Finanza reports that the deal is said to be worth around €300 million, according to industry indiscretions.
Botter had closed 2020 with a turnover of €230 million (an increase of six percent compared to 2019), positioning itself as the third strongest wine company in Italy. It will be exciting to see which other wine companies Clessidra selects to create an Italian leader in the global wine sector. vc
