Online cycling and tri-athlete website Wiggle has been sold for £180 million ($282 million) to a private equity firm, just 13 years after it was founded.

😯

Full article

i bet crc would be worth a chunk more

Thats not a massive multiple to be honest. £86M turnover in 2010-11 and 53% growth. I’d have expected 3-4 times turnover. Low profits maybe? Maybe they are seeing the growth plateauing and decided to sell.

… but the private equity firm have still not received delivery of Wiggle, their emails haven’t been answered and they can’t find a phone number to chase their purchase up….

if you’re buying at 3-4 times turnover tony, I might have an opportunity for you! 😉

Its obvious the 53% growth wont be used in the multiple calc as it’s not going to be a long run growth figure. A multiple of 2 is a good price and probably implies some solid growth but a decent margin.

😆 thepurist

Did they pay for priority delivery?

… but the private equity firm have still not received delivery of Wiggle, their emails haven’t been answered and they can’t find a phone number to chase their purchase up….

…and somebody else has bought lots of stuff on their cc.

haha purist. Never used them since they couldn’t be arsed to answer my mails and phonecalls about the whereabouts of an item that was ‘in stock’ and turned up 3 weeks after I ordered it.

Plus their website is horrific.

Did they get a Haribo factory in the package?

Sold to a private equity firm? Does not compute. How can you asset strip a mail order business?

They did a feature on Wiggle in the financial pages of the Observer a while back, detailing their enormous growth and huge turnover.

They actually used the phrase “Cycling is the new Golf”. I nearly sold my bikes in protest. Then I thought Hmmmmmm dressing like a dick, and spending waaaaaaaaaay too much on unnecessary shiny ‘stuff’. Yip. Sounds about right. Though the snotty, exclusive, club mentality only appears to be roadies, who I presume is who they’re mainly talking about

If you think Private Equity is all about asset stripping, you should perhaps stop reading the scary pages in the back of the Daily Mirror binners.

Private Equity behaves little different to any other source of investment capital although It’s usually less transparent, and often more highly leveraged, it just wants the same thing as pension fund equity or shareholders in a publcily quoted company. Where PE might make a difference though is that they take a greater interest in their investment. Too many pension funds and large shareholders stay too remote from the businesses they own and dont take enough care over what their investments are up to.

Take, for example, executive pay – only small action groups ever vote against executive renumeration presented at board meetings of FTSE 100 Cos, the big shareholders just wave it through. You can bet your well-licked eyeballs that a PE owner of a company would pass a far more critical eye over directors’ pay and bonuses and make sure that no-one’s getting a free ride on the back of their investment capital.

It’s a MAMIL eat MAMIL world out there.

That is a really interesting deal – is this a sign that the bullsh!t mark ups on cycling/tri markets are now coming to an end? I Hope dhb survive as I like their stuff.

Agree on not tarnishing all PE firms with the same brush.

If there is one thing we could do with a whole lot more of it is private equity and venture capital. And less ignorance.

Sorry Stoner. Should have added a 😉 I was being sarcastic, dismissive and daft. I thought that was taken as read

Fat Face owner buys Wiggle
by Carlton Reid
about 22 hours ago
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IN NEWS

It has been confirmed that Bridgepoint has bought Wiggle in deal worth £180m.

Bridgepoint owns Fat Face and has been touted as the most likely suitor for some days and now the widely reported deal has gone through.

Wiggle was part owned by Isis Equity Partners and sells to 88 countries.

It has been voted as the BikeBiz ‘online retailer of the year’ for three years running.

Well that is what’s reported in Bikebiz

I thought that was taken as read

It shall be for evermore 😉

Didn’t wiggle start off selling condoms?

I’m sure I remember them selling condoms alongside the bike stuff many years ago.

Wiggle, the online cycling retailer, has been acquired by the private equity firm Bridgepoint in a deal worth £180m.

Bridgepoint saw off competition from EQT, the Swedish buyout company, to purchase Wiggle, which serves customers in 88 countries from Japan to New Zealand. Bridgepoint also owns the retailers Fat Face and HobbyCraft, as well as the sandwich chain Pret A Manger.

Wiggle grew its pre-tax profits by 55 per cent to £10.2m for the year to 31 January, on sales of £86.8m.

The deal is a coup for the private equity firm Isis, which acquired its majority shareholding in Wiggle for £12m in 2006. Rothschild ran the sale process.

Vince Gwilliam, a Bridgepoint partner, said: “Wiggle is benefitting from strong structural market drivers such as the shift to online retailing combined with the trend towards fitness and healthy living.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/bridgepoint-rides-off-with-wiggle-6273795.html

Sounds like it was already in PE hands.

Most companies* are held in “PE”. It just means not publicly listed. Planet X/On-One is held in “PE” – Dave’s grubby hands.

* by number, not market capitalisation.

bridgepoint rides off with wiggle

who writes these headlines? Noel edmunds?

I heard that too, that the website bellonged to an adult toy shop but the bike shop was more profitable, a bit like ebay was never thought of as a name for an auction site, it was just a domain name registered to the Echo bay trading co. who’s owner setup an online auction business.