A Birmingham corporate finance group has defied the market to arrange a £12million purchase deal for a Midlands medical firm.
Catalyst Corporate Finance, based in Cherry Street, advised on the purchase of CHKS, a Warwickshire firm providing healthcare support services, by outsourcing giants Capita.
CHKS was owned by parent company HKI, who were advised by Catalyst on the deal.Catalyst initially advised HKI on options for investments in its businesses in Spain, which included prospective buyers for the group as a whole, but it later persuaded the firm of the advantages of selling off part of its business.
This was the option agreed by the shareholders and Catalyst then marketed the United Kingdom business to a number of international trade purchasers, negotiating the terms of the sale with Capita and managing the transaction to completion.
CHKS, based in Alcester, is an independent provider of healthcare intelligence and quality improvement services including the area of healthcare benchmarking, the analysis of hospital performance across the UK.
It pioneered hospital benchmarking in 1989 and now has more than 90 National Health Service trusts as clients. Its services range from coding, data and performance management to benchmarking, accreditation and quality assurance.
The deal also involved the sale of Cardiff Research Consortium, a part of the HKI group which does modelling to help drug companies understand the burden of disease across the care sector.
Mark Humphries, a partner at Catalyst, said: “This transaction demonstrates that there is still a market for quality businesses and HKI had the additional advantage of supplying the public sector which is a more stable marketplace in these times.”
The healthcare sector has been relatively robust during the global financial downturn, which has crippled corporate activity in many markets. Catalyst director Richard Bailey added: “Businesses in the healthcare sector, while they are suffering the same challenges as the rest of the market, have more secure revenue streams. The healthcare sector is backed by a lot of government spending, which is relatively secure.”
Catalyst worked on one of the biggest corporate finance deals in recent time last year, advising on the £33m sale of IT training companies Zenos and Zenos Learning to Alternative Investment Market-listed rival Melorio.
