Coca-Cola has called off plans to sell Costa Coffee to private equity after low valuations manifested from wannabe bidders.
Coca-Cola was said to be selling Costa for £2bn, a discount from the £3.9bn it paid for the business from Whitbread, its previous owner. Bidders included TDR Capital (which owns ASDA) and Bain Capital (which owns Gail's - which it bought for £200m - and Pizza Express).
Costa has faced competition from cheaper rivals like Greggs, and brands like Blank Street and Black Sheep Coffee.
James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola, admitted the Costa transaction had not delivered. Henrique Braun (California-born COO) will come in as new CEO from March 2026.
Motive Partners has taken a $100m stake in Electric Mind (henceforth "EM") described as a "a high-growth, AI-led services firm grounded in engineering excellence".
"EM"'s former name was Intelliware, and Electric Mind is a "rebranding for the age of AI", with a go-forward focus on growth in wealth and alternative investments.
The plan is to have a close collaboration, with leaders of both firms joining the company's Board.
Richard Lumb, Motive Industry Partner, will join the Board (former Group CEO of Financial Services at Accenture) as will Sreeram Visvanathan, Head of Motive Create (innovation and value creation engine within Motive Partners) and former CEO of IBM UK and Ireland.
To scale impact across financial services, the Investor-Operator-Innovator (IOI) model of Motive will be brought to bear bringing expertise, connectivity and operational support.
Hargreaves Lansdown has begun life as a private company this year, 2025.
The UK's largest direct-to-consumer investment platform agreed to be sold to a private equity consortium in August last year (following an initial approach in April) comprised of CVC Advisers, Nordic Capital and Platinum Ivy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The offer of 1,140 pence per share was a premium of 54% of the share price prior to the April approach and valued the firm at £5.44 billion pounds.
Richard Flint (ex Head of Sky Betting and Gaming, which he led through a period of growth), fulfils the role of Interim CEO, with Darren Worth as Interim CFO. The management are investing in a technology-led transformation to improve HL's propositioning.
Hargreaves Lansdown PLC was delisted from the London Stock Exchange on the 25 March 2025 and initially owned by Harp Bidco Limited, which was renamed in September 2025 to Hargreaves Lansdown Group Limited.
IPO Plans
As the UK market grapples with firms preferring to list on Nasdaq, or being taken private, Norwegian firm Visma, which provides accounting and payroll software to SMEs is looking to go public on the London market.
Ownership
Visma is 70% owned by Hg and co-investors, which include GIC and TPG.
A Multi Billion EUR Company with M&A as a Core Growth Driver
Visma has grown with 350 bolt-on acquisitions with 2.8 billion EUR revenues last year.
UK Software M&A was worth £13.2 billion last year, with deployments across 420 deals, a 27% rise from the previous year. Certainly there have been and still are economic headwinds, but according to a recent study by BearingPoint Capital, private equity appetite for such deals (Software and Software-as-a-Service) remains resilient. The UK is responsible for a third of all software buyouts in Europe. Technology due diligence, with cyber diligence as a related but often separated area, are becoming increasingly important.
FIS has announced it will purchase Global Payments' (GPN) issuer solutions business for $12bn, with GPN intending to buy WorldPay for $22.7bn
(Note: WorldPay is 45% owned by FIS and 55% owned by Chicago private equity firm GTCR).
GPN is essentially divesting (issuer solutions) and investing (WorldPay), with a net investment of $10.7bn.
GPN is run by Cameron Bready, who moved up from the CFO role, and was formerly of ITC Holdings Corp, electricity transmission company (publicly traded), where he focused on Finance and corporate development and prior to that was at Northeast utilities. He studied business in Atlanta. What remains in Global Payments following the divestment should be clearly understood - of course WorldPay will be a new integration.
Lots of analyst commentary has bubbled up around this deal with Mizuho commenting FIS is "winning the trade" as it acquires a "stable grower". Less commentary has surrounded GPN (GPN-WorldPay) specifically.
Strategic buyers are trumping private equity in tech acquisitions in 2024.
An example is Nasdaq-traded Docusign's (DOCU) acquisition of Lexion, an AI-powered agreement management tool, for $165m. It is an interesting example of expanding in AI through acquisition. Lexion is essentially an intelligent contracts database, that does all the smart interpretation of contracts. They started focusing on law firms and expanded into corporates. They spent time building their machine learning stack which required upfront investment.
Bain and Hellman & Friedman tried to acquire Docusign in February which fell through following failure to agree on a price shortly after which Docusign announced 400 layoffs.
Docusign has 1.5 million clients in 180 countries.
The great technology protagonist PwC expects software deals to dominate Tech M&A in 2H23, making up 70% of deals in 1H23. The appeal is the subscription based business model. The next biggest area is IT services, including cybersecurity, DevOps, digital transformation and low code segments.
PE still relishes Tech companies. Some big examples:
