Sinking ship??, page-24

10 March 2024:

Civil mechanical and electrical engineering company Tasmea is believed to be reviving plans for an initial public offering, but this time it will have new brokers on board.

Last year Morgans was working with Tasmea on a prospective listing, but now it is understood Unified Capital Partners is working on a float of the business, believed to be worth at least $300m.

Unified Capital Partners was launched only in the past year and consists of a breakaway group of executives from Shaw and Partners who went out on their own, offering corporate finance, wealth management and research services. Mark Gray and Jarrod Davis head up its equities division.

Stephen Young is the founder of Tasmea and has been managing director since the company’s foundation in 1999 and it is chaired by Joe Totaro.

Tasmea consists of 17 integrated subsidiaries across the areas of maintenance, engineering, specialised project services and solutions to the mining and resources, waste and water, renewable energy, defence and infrastructure industries.

Its subsidiaries trade as Tasman Power, ICE Engineering and Construction, Yura Yarta and Tasman Asset Management Services.

This year, it announced the acquisition of Forefront Services, which specialises in fixed plant maintenance, shutdown maintenance and emergency outage support services.

A float of the West Australia business would be one of the few in the pipeline and comes after the successful listing of the special purpose acquisition company Metals Acquisition, which owns the CSA copper mine in Cobar, NSW.

Last year there were only 37 IPOs as 111 companies delisted.

Yet, at a private equity conference in Sydney last week, an industry operative said companies would come back to the market for listing from the second half of the year onwards.

However, unlike in the past, IPOs would likely be smaller, with buyout funds opting to hold on to greater portions of their companies going public and sell them down over time.

An institutional investor said there was appetite to put capital into quality offerings, and he expected to see more listings where private equity was using the ASX as a source of capital, but not taking money off the table.

A private equity operative also said they were seeing a large pipeline of privately held businesses owned by wealthy Australians who were now looking for an exit after delaying moves due to last year’s market uncertainty.

This could be software companies or others worth about $200m, and some may embark on dual track processes where they test investor interest.

One market source said they had a pipeline of about 20 deals they were looking at which fit those descriptions, or involved corporate carve-outs, another trend they were seeing in the market.