Maven leads MBO of Indigo Telecom

Maven has completed the MBO of Indigo Telecom Group, investing alongside fellow private equity manager YFM Equity Partners, to acquire the business from parent TTG-Global Limited. The business will benefit from a £12m funding package to accelerate growth, including additional funds to support a buy and build strategy.

South Wales based Indigo designs, installs and maintains telecom networks across the UK and Europe, enabling customers such as Vodafone, Sky and BT to deliver fixed line, broadband, mobile and other data services to a wide variety of corporate, enterprise and consumer end users. With 85 full time employees, and a well-developed partner network of up to 500 engineers, the business operates across 20 countries and supports over 10,000 client sites, providing comprehensive geographical coverage for customers with minimal ‘time to site’ service levels. 

Pan-European operations are managed through a dedicated 24-7 Network Operations Centre, which allows engineers to fulfil stringent two to four hour service level agreements, and offers a geographic reach which provides a key competitive advantage in the market. 

Indigo is recognised as one of the market leaders for reliability of service and dependability, in a sector where investment in network infrastructure and technology, supported by continued high reliability maintenance, is essential to support the exponential global growth of IP traffic, which is forecast to increase nearly threefold in the UK over the next five years. Sustained high growth in the provision of fibre to the home, mobile multi-media and the cloud, is driving the need for well invested telecoms network infrastructure and underpinning Indigo’s core service offering. 

The senior team, led by CEO Stephen Thompson who was previously Vice President of Sales at Technicolor and COO of Alcatel Lucent UK & Ireland, has a growth strategy to create a global telecom services group that is resourced to achieve both organic growth, by developing a number of attractive market opportunities, and a focused buy and build strategy in a sector that has seen strong recent M&A activity. Management has already identified a number of strategic bolt-on acquisition targets in rapidly growing areas of the market, which each offer sales and cost synergies for an enlarged group.

This transaction continues a strong period of recent investment for Maven, having already completed private equity investments in 2016 across the technology, support services, healthcare and specialist manufacturing sectors for client funds. Recent investments include: backing the MBI of document management specialist Prime Document; supporting new product development at scientific instrument manufacturer Blacktrace Holdings; backing the expansion of innovative online GP business The GP Service; and leading the respective £11m and £12m MBOs of interior fit-out contractor EE Smith and Westfield Medical, a leading provider of sterilisation barrier products to the international healthcare and industrial sectors.

Stephen Thompson, CEO at Indigo, added: “The telecoms infrastructure market is experiencing sustained growth and our business is ideally positioned to grasp the opportunity for expansion as increasing client demand continues to reflect the need for access to reliable, high capacity networks. With the backing of Maven and YFM, allied to our existing client support infrastructure, we look forward to capitalising on the opportunity to gain additional market share, and pursuing a strategic acquisition programme".

Andrew Ferguson, Partner at Maven, said: “Indigo has established a well-deserved reputation in the market for delivering an integrated, multi service offering to telecoms clients, with market leading service levels. We have been very impressed by the senior team, who have a wealth of experience in the UK and international markets. Indigo enjoys clear completive differentiation across its target markets, due to a high quality service offering built on an unparalleled level of geographic coverage and a network of vendor agnostic engineers. The business is well placed to expand both organically and through acquisition, and we’re delighted to be backing this entrepreneurial team and their growth strategy.”