Deal Announcement 12/21: Service Industries

The Deal

The PwC M&A team is pleased to announce the successful sale of scanplus GmbH, Ulm (“scanplus”) to q.beyond AG, Cologne (“q.beyond”).

scanplus is a leading cloud-based managed services provider. However, the company filed an application for the opening of debtor-in-possession proceedings in September 2021. Attorneys at law Dr. Maximilian Pluta and Stefan Warmuth (PLUTA) were appointed as chief representatives of scanplus. Attorney at law Prof. Dr. Martin Hörmann (anchor) was appointed as custodian. Shortly after filing for the proceedings a structured, international M&A process led by PwC has been initiated.

On 9 December 2021 and after only two months q.beyond AG signed the purchase agreements to acquire the operations of scanplus. q.beyond is one of the leading IT service providers in Germany with annual sales of more than €140m.

q.beyond CEO Mr Jürgen Hermann explained the rationale behind the transaction: “The highly scalable scanplus cloud portal will extend our portfolio in the fast-growing cloud business.” q.beyond will now have a standardised modular toolkit that will allow it to easily assemble suitable cloud-based IT solutions for small and medium-sized companies. With the acquisition q.beyond gains 220 IT specialists located in Ulm.

q.beyond will benefit in particular from the long-standing sales partnership of scanplus and Telekom Deutschland as managed IT services are a major component of Telekom Deutschland´s service portfolio for SMEs. Telekom Deutschland intends to build on the strong sales partnership and to expand this business further with q.beyond. The transaction was closed on 23rd of December 2021.

PwC advised scanplus, PLUTA and anchor with its in-depth distressed M&A expertise. scanplus attracted significant interest both from strategic as well as financial investors in Europe. Despite the very ambitious timeline PwC was able to keep a fierce competition between several interested

investors until the signing of the transaction. q.beyond finally convinced the sellers with the most attractive offer and strategic concept. The vast majority of the employees will be taken over and the headquarters of scanplus will remain in Ulm.

scanplus GmbH

scanplus GmbH headquarted in Ulm, Germany is a leading cloud-based managed services provider in Germany with annual revenues of approx. € 30 million scanplus currently provides automated, high-performance managed IT services, such as managed connectivity and managed security, to more than 700 SMEs. For this, it draws on the private and public cloud offered by Telekom Deutschland, which is the main sales partner of scanplus.

q.beyond AG

q.beyond AG is a publicly listed German IT service provider headquartered in Cologne, with major locations in Hamburg and a further eight branches in Germany. The company emerged from QSC AG by way of a change of name on September 22, 2020. QSC had been founded in 1997 as a DSL network operator and provider of Internet and telecommunications products. Since then, the company has transformed itself into a German IT, cloud, SAP and IoT service provider. The group employs more than 890 people and generates annual revenues of more than €140m.

PwC

The global PricewaterhouseCoopers network is a worldwide association of independent auditing and consulting companies which together employ more than 295.000 employees in 156 countries (“global PwC-Network. Our global network comprises over 1,600 M&A professionals all over the world, realising approx. 400 successful transactions per year. Our Distressed M&A team led by Timo Klees (Partner) is market leading in Germany and has successfully advised on more than 70 transactions out of special situations and insolvency situations in recent years.

The transaction was led by Timo Klees (Partner) and Julia Jaumann (Manager) and was supported by Matthias Friedl (Senior Associate) and Dominik Wolf (Associate).