Back in Feb 2015, BGC the interdealer broker (IDB), bought rival GFI for $778m. The transaction included GFI’s FX Option platform Fenics as well as commodity and energy platform Trayport. Although Fenics was strategic to the transaction, BGC had talked about selling Trayport.
Today, BGC announced that ICE exchange, who last month bought IDC for $5.2bn, would pay $650m for the Trayport platform.
According to Howard Lutnick, CEO of BGC;
“One of the main reasons that BGC pursued GFI was the expectation that the sale of Trayport would dramatically lower the price and risk involved with respect to purchasing the rest of GFI’s businesses. The proposed sale price represents $650m of the $750m that BGC will pay for all of GFI.
This translates into BGC paying approximately $100m for $640m of GFI’s remaining revenues, or a multiple of just 0.16 times sales. Therefore, we expect the GFI transaction to produce enormous value for BGC’s investors.”
Trayport: generates less than 3% of BGC revenues ($18.9m in Q3/15)
FENICS, generates $60.7m in Q3/15, or $250m of annualized revenues and approximately $105m of annualized pre-tax distributable earnings
So, selling Trayport and keeping Fenics was a no-brainer for BGC!
David Weiss over at Aite group, has a nice blog post that saves me trouble of comparing the two heavyweight IDB groups of Tullett+ICAP’s Global Broking Business vs BGC+GFI.
Full details of the BGC/ICE transaction here
Filed under: ICE, OTC, Paul Blank | 2 Comments »
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