The ebullient head of private equity outfit M2 capital is refusing to throw in the towel in his bid to buy up all of the 400 collapsed Wilko stores.
Mantse maintains his bid.
The day after B&M stores tabled a £13 million offer for 51 Wilko stores, Robert Mantse, the head of M2 Capital, shared an email with Matt Haycox Daily outlining a final offer for Wilko.
“Wilko’s 12,500 jobs will not be lost – As M2C will not give up on them. One way or another – the 12,500 jobs at Wilko Limited will be saved,” says Mantse in the document.
The deal.
Mantse’s offer, according to the email, is £88,888,808 for all of the assets of Wilko.
As part of the deal, all Wilko employees will be guaranteed two years employment and receive a 3.5% pay rise on January 1.
The offer also offers employees a share of ownership.
“20% of NewCo’s equity – the acquiring company’s equity – WILKO ACQUISITION LIMITED (to be registered at Companies House next week, as an 80% subsidiary of M2 Capital) – will be owned by the employees of the Company,” says the offer outlined in Mantse’s email.
Illusory bid?
This is a twist in the Wilko age. The 93-year-old discount chain collapsed under the weight of debt last month.
Whether the M2 Capital’s proposal holds water is uncertain. Administators PwC will have to work that out.
Oliver Shah, of the Sunday Times, wrote that M2 Capital was an oddball private equity outfit with an “illusory bid.” He commented it had given false hope to the employees of Wilko.
Meanwhile, discount chain B&M said this week it had snapped up 51 of the stricken stores.
Prospects for B&M?
B&M is well positioned to take advantage of Wilko’s network of stores and market share. An investor note by Deutsche Bank forecast as much as a £200 million sales boost.
Billionaire brothers Simon and Bobby Arora bought B&M when it was based in Blackpool with a struggling chain of 21 stores across the north.
From struggle to £5 billion.
They built it up into a FTSE 100 company with 650 stores worth more than £5 billion. It thrived through COVID lockdown as it was designated as an essential supplier. This meant it could stay open.
The Arora brothers live next door to each other in Altrincham, near Manchester. They cut their business teeth by supplying cheap homeware goods to high street stores with a wholesale company called Orient Sourcing that they sold for more than £30 million.
Unions sceptical.
GMB – the union representing thousands of Wilko workers – said it understood that the B&M deal merely related to properties and held no guarantees about jobs.
“Every single redundancy is a person who will wake up facing an uncertain future. This needs to be on the forefront of everyone’s minds. The reality is years of mismanagement have led us here, “says Andy Prendergast, the national secretary of GMB.
