Ardian Acquires Digital 9 Infrastructure’s Stake in Verne Global for $575m

British investment firm Digital 9 Infrastructure (D9) initiated a strategic review of its portfolio on Monday and said it had agreed to sell its stake in data group Verne Global for $575m as it seeks to cut debt and boost its finances.

D9 in October, had said it was assessing a divestment of its Verne Global shareholding and had received indicative offers. It has now sold the stake to funds managed by private equity investment company Ardian France SA.

The disposal will enable the company to pay down about $373.83m of an existing credit facility while reviewing options for “maximising shareholder value.”

The FTSE-250 company said initiating a strategic review before the Verne deal “could have undermined the process to maximise shareholder value from Verne Global without directly helping to address (D9’s) financial uncertainty.”

The company also added that it intends to review the skills and composition of the board as a part of the review.

D9 primarily invests in digital infrastructure assets such as data centres and fibre systems.

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D9 had acquired Verne Global, which runs a data centre campus in Iceland, for $264m  in September 2021. D9 has since acquired and merged Finnish data center firm Ficolo and London’s Volta Data Centres into the Verne brand.

But D9 struggled financially this year as its debt grew and share price dropped dramatically. To boost its stock, it initially said that it would sell a minority stake in Verne, but shareholders pushed for a total sale.

Prior to the sale, Verne had a five-year pipeline to expand the capacity of its data center campus in Iceland from the current 40MW to over 96MW, which will require $483.6m in capital expenditure. The company secured a $100m loan in June 2023 to fund its expansion plans.

Source: MarketScreener

Source: DCD

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