Former head of the Czech O2 Tomáš Budník, who also worked for PPF in Eldorado, Russia, is fulfilling his dream of his own technological investment group. It was named Thein and started only this spring, but in September it joined forces with J&T to grow a new fund of qualified investors, the J&T Thein SICAV.
He is now buying the Ostrava company Network, which is mainly concerned with IT infrastructure, designs data center architecture or solves data analysis. The value of the transaction, which is in the final stages of negotiations and is currently being assessed by the Office for the Protection of Competition, is unknown.
In any case, the network achieved a turnover of 530 million crowns last year and net profit stopped just below 60 million. It can be assumed that J&T Thein SICAV is ready to pay hundreds of millions of crowns for the Network.
According to Budník, the company will become the basic pillar of the fund, suitable for further acquisitions in the area of data storage services and clouds.
“It will be an ideal partner for cooperation with other data center service providers, with whom they will complement each other’s product portfolio and supplier relationships,” comments the man, who in addition to PPF previously tried to engage under the Penta flag – led its then mobile company U: fon.
“The network has always responded to the requirements of its customers, who have recently increased their demands on the range of products and services provided. We were therefore looking for a partner who would help us grow further in this respect, “says the head of the Ostrava IT company Radek Soušek, whom Budník et al. interested in technological knowledge.
Budník’s plan is to build the investment group Thein purely synergistically, with a portfolio in units of billions of crowns and a relatively close focus on IT, cybersecurity and industry 4.0 – all in the Czech-Slovak area. The first acquisition this summer was Ponec, a company specializing in modern machining technologies.
In the fund of qualified investors, Thein holds 65 percent, while the rest belongs to J&T Private Equity Group. In the autumn, its boss Miloš Badida commented on the connection as an “ideal example of connecting knowledge with capital”.
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