Yorkshire corporate deals review in association with Gordons

LDC rolls again with SSP

By Simon Pilling, corporate partner, Yorkshire law firm Gordons

The stand out deal of the last month has to be the £207m buy out of Halifax based IT services provider SSP by LDC backing the management team led by Laurence Walker in what is one of the most significant transactions of the year so far.

It’s second time around for LDC with the business having previously invested in 2004 before exiting when the business floated on AIM in 2006 with a market cap of £70m. San Francisco based private equity firm, Hellman & Friedman, took the business private again in 2008 for £162m before this latest deal.

SSP is already a fantastic Yorkshire success story; headquartered in Halifax but now a truly global business. It will be the opportunity to continue to grow its international office network, and deliver solutions globally, which provides the further growth story any PE investor needs to support its investment case.

It’s great to see a local PE team backing a Yorkshire business in a transaction of this magnitude and equally, to see a transaction like this advised out of Yorkshire by a number of local teams. It says a lot about the quality of both the funders and advisers that operate in our local market.

We will watch with interest as the next chapter in the story of SSP unfolds in what will hopefully be an era of yet further growth and success for both the management team and its new partners at LDC.