The big ad holding cmpanies will be revealing their half time 2021 numbers soon so it’s no surprise when a missive from Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4 Capital pings in.
This time it’s to tell us that the digital-first group is trucking along nicely and has arranged new credit facilities via Credit Suisse, HSBC Bank and Barclays for a seven year €375 million senior secured term loan plus a five year £100 million revolving credit facility with Credit Suisse, HSBC, Barclays, JP Morgan and BNP Paribas.
These will give it £200m for “corporate purposes,” equivalent to a takeover fund of £400m as it pays half its “merger” targets in cash.
Substantial although hardly enough to buy, say, WPP (valued at £11bn, S4C is a still more than impressive £3.55bn.)
S4C says it’s in “the early stages of planning to expand its activities into a third practice area around technology services and to continue to broaden and deepen its content and data & digital media practices in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.”
Technology services could mean pretty much anything in today’s business world but, Sorrell being Sorrell, we should expect a biggish deal in the next few months. If an ad holding group came on the market you never know what might happen.
