Bondo Advisors: “This is a very sweet time” for mergers and acquisitions in Spanish technology

On Bondo Advisors, the independent corporate consulting firm, consider that “this is a very sweet moment” for the activity of fusions and acquisitions (M&A) in the technology sector of Spain, which is made up of small and medium-sized companies that continue to grow both organically and inorganically, that is, thanks to buying other companies.

This is how he explains it Joshua Novick, one of his partners, in a conversation with OKDIARY in which he also affirms that the country’s technology sector attracts the interest of a lot of Spanish capital, but also foreign, at a time when corporate movements in Spain are booming. “There are Spanish companies that are achieving great funding rounds”, It indicates.

Bondo Advisors is a boutique of corporate advisory which is in charge of advising companies in their financing processes, from private equity until IPOs going through the venture capital. The firm was created a year and a half ago by founders of Antevenio, a Spanish content and marketing technology company that began trading on the Paris alternative market in 2007 and was absorbed by Rebold, belonging to the Rodés family holding ISP Digital, in September 2020.

After this experience, in which the team carried out ten acquisitions, they saw the opportunity to provide this service to other firms. The boutique was born in the middle pandemic, when “there were three or four months of stoppage in which nobody was going to buy companies”, but “when it was discovered that the world was not ending the market was encouraged”, explains Novick about the impact of the coronavirus on the activity of mergers and acquisitions. Now, he considers, operations have been reactivated “especially in the technology sector, where everyone wants to be” and where “there is an activity like never before”.

Small and medium-sized technology

Precisely, Bondo Advisors focuses on small and medium-sized companies related to technology, considering that “it is an area that is not well served by large banks”, in its opinion, more focused on large operations that provide higher commissions. It also points out that “the technology sector it has another problem and that is that there are few specialized people ”, compared to other more mature areas such as industry, retail or real estate.

Bondo Advisors advises both companies that want to buy like those who want sell, trying to “find that point of balance that is convenient for all parties”. And not only in the short term, but also in the long term, so “a large part” of his job “is to think about what is going to happen in three or four years” so that the management team, which may no longer have independence, “continues pushing ”.

IPOs

Bondo Advisors also acts as an advisor on IPOs. In the stock market debut of MioGroup, the company that former Real Madrid player Álvaro Arbeloa founded with his brothers, they took charge of the strategic approach towards investors, coordinating the different suppliers and helping with the valuation part. On the contrary, they advised Agile Content, a Spanish firm also listed on the BME Growth, in the takeover bid (OPA) on the Scandinavian Edgeware for 28 million euros.

In a year in which most of the debuts in the Spanish parquet is carried out by small companies, Novick believes that this trend will continue. Again, he believes that the technology sector has a great future within BME Growth, the market dedicated to growing companies. Without taking into account the Socimis, which are very numerous in it, a third of the listed firms are technological and “all but one are above their starting price”, reaching 250% of cost effectiveness. “I think there will be a lot of activity in this segment,” he concludes.