Watershed event for AIM

The proposed acquisition of main market listed SDL (LON:SDL) by AIM quoted RWS Holdings (LON:RWS) is, in our opinion, a watershed moment for AIM, as an AIM company acquires a sizeable main market listed peer, but the combined group reamins on AIM.

RWS is one of the world’s leading language, intellectual property support services and localization providers. While those don’t sound like the most thrilling of activities RWS has delivered stunning results for shareholders over the years.

Chris Boxall discusses the deal in this video here.

Fundamental have been investors in RWS, whose headquarters is close to our own office, for about 14 years. Here is a brief history of its progress on AIM.

RWS arrived on AIM in October 2003 via a reverse into the previously named shell company Health Media Group.

The equivalent share price at the time was 22p and market capitalisation £45m. Fast forward nearly 17 years and the shares have risen nearly 2700% to 613p (they were as high as 767p this month), with the market capitalisation £1.8bn.

Through a mixture of organic, and more recently more acquisition led growth, RWS has developed into one of AIM’s largest companies.
RWS’s acquisition strategy really accelerated in 2013 with the acquisition of inovia Holdings, a leading provider of web-based international patent filing solutions.

It followed this in November 2015 with the sizeable acquisition of Corporate Translations for US$70m. CT was the world’s leading life sciences translation and linguistic validation providers.

February 2017 saw the acquisition of LUZ, a market leading Life Sciences language services provider based in San Francisco, for a cash consideration of US$82.5m. To support this meaningful acquisition, it raised gross proceeds of £40.0m at 330p per share.

In Nov 2017 it acquired Moravia, a leading provider of technology-enabled localisation services, for $320m. Localisation is the adaptation of content, software, websites, applications, marketing materials and audio/video for hundreds of languages and geographies. It requires the translation and customisation of clients’ content and platforms for cultural conventions, compliance with local regulations and consistency of brand style and tone.

For the half year ending 31 March 2020, Moravia represented 47% of RWS’ group revenue of £170m and 34% of the group’s operating profit.
Smaller acquisitions followed in 2019 and June 2020, culminating in this week’s deal to acquir main market peer SDL Group in a £700m all-share deal.

The combination of SDL and RWS will create the world’s leading language services and technology group with capabilities across a range of language services and IP services, combining the complementary strengths of RWS’ specialist technical translation and localisation capabilities with SDL’s software, machine translation and AI capabilities.

It will support an expanded blue chip customer base with limited overlap across its core markets, including 90 of the world’s top 100 brands by value, all the top 10 pharmaceutical companies globally, many of the major West Coast technology businesses, and approximately half of the top 20 patent filers worldwide.

The RWS name will be retained for the combined group which will continue to be headquartered in Chalfont St Peter and remain listed on AIM, which is good news for those holding shares in RWS for the Inheritance Tax planning attractions, including many of our clients.

The combination should put SDL’s technology to better use thereby enhancing margins, which in the case of SDL, have been somewhat ordinary – while the two businesses had similar revenues in 2019, RWS’s operating margins were more than double those of SDL. Pro forma FY2019 revenues are £732m and pro forma adjusted operating profit £116m, imply a combined operating margin of 15.8%.

What has been constant in RWS’ journey has been the presence of Chairman Andrew Brode, who retains a near 33% stake in the current business and to our knowledge has never sold a share. We are reassured that, with so much of his personal wealth at stake, Mr Brode would have thought long and hard about this deal. The Inheritance Tax planning attractions are no doubt an incentive for him to keep the group on AIM!

You can find out more about Fundamental Asset Management’s high performing AIM portfolio service, which has been delivering exceptional investment returns for more than 16 years, from the link here.