Share purchase takes Asirom over the 100m-euro mark

A transaction conducted yesterday involving the purchase of some 10% in Asirom, one of the top three insurance companies on the market, has taken appraisals of the company to nearly 100 million euros.

According to information on the market, the buyer is a financial group based in New York, QVT Fund, a hedge fund that has 2.5bn dollars invested throughout the entire world and is registered in the Cayman Islands.

“This is a very positive signal for our company. Lately, we have received lots of phone calls from investment funds interested in Asirom,” said Boris Schneider, Asirom”s general manager, who did not care to provide further details regarding the deal.

According to the Kansas City Business Journal, QVT Financial, which manages QVT Fund, also manages a discretionary account for Deutsche Bank. Daniel Gold, CEO of QVT Financial, founded the company in 2004, after having left Deutsche Bank.

As for the seller, it was most probably Tiberiu Bica Postelnicu, who owns 11.5% in the company. He could not be reached by Ziarul Financiar for comment yesterday. Tiberiu Bica Postelnicu is a shareholder in the distribution company Total Distribution Group.

Asirom is controlled by businessman Ioan Niculae, through the Interagro Group, which holds 40% in Asirom, and through Astra Romana, which owns 18%. Schneider said the seller was neither Interagro nor Astra Romana, and the representatives of the investment fund Broadhurst, which owns 19.7%, said they did not sell. Besides Interagro, Postelnicu and Broadhurst, another shareholder is the State Assets Resolution Authority (6.3%) and other smaller shareholders, totalling a 6.4% stake.

After several days of lively exchanges of Asirom shares, some 64.025 million Asirom shares were sold yesterday through 30 transactions, for 0.55 RON per share. The number of shares accounts for 10.03% in the company. The entire stake was worth 9.5 million euros, which suggests a total value of 95-100 million euros for Asirom.

The company posted 129 million-euro turnover last year and nearly 6 million-euro losses, for the first time after several years of profit.

Asirom posted 22.7% higher gross underwritten premiums in the first half of the year, compared with the same time last year.

The company logged a total of 93.8 million euros (344.1 million RON) in terms of underwritten premiums, up from the 76.4 million euros (310.5 million RON) seen in the same period last year.

The growth was exclusively generated by the general insurance segment, as the insurer witnessed a decline in gross underwritten life insurance premiums in the first half by 7.3% compared with the first six months of 2004, bringing the total down to 11.3 million euros (41.6 million RON). Asirom therefore relinquished second place in the life insurance ranking to AIG Life after the first six months, whose volume of premiums amounted to 13.15 million euros (48.2 million RON).

The company concluded the first half with profits of 540,000 euros (some 2 million RON), after having posted 5.8 million euro (236.2bn ROL) losses last year. sorin.pislaru@zf.ro