Capita to offload software businesses in efforts to strengthen its balance sheet
Outsourcing firm Capita has agreed to sell its five software businesses for an enterprise value of £33m, as the group looks to strengthen its balance sheet and focus on its two core public service and experience divisions.
The London listed firm said it hopes to receive cash proceeds of £44m on completion of the sale including around £9m of cash within the sold businesses at the time of the transaction.
The collective businesses, CIBS, CHKS, Retain, WFM and Synaptic to AdvancedAdvT, made £35m last year and £3m in profit before tax.
It follows a move by Capita to sell its critical messaging services business PageOne and completion of the divestment of its resourcing and security watchdog businesses in May.
It comes as the group said it expects to take a £15m hit from a cyber attack against the firm which saw personal information leaked onto the dark web in March.
Jon Lewis, Capita’s chief executive officer, said: “We are pleased to have agreed the sale of these non-core software businesses to AdvancedAdvT following a competitive sale process.“
“The sale marks another step for our successful disposals programme which has enabled us to significantly strengthen the balance sheet and materially reduce our debt.”
He added: “We continue to target for the majority of the remaining businesses within our non-core Portfolio division to be sold during the first half of 2023, depending on general market conditions.”