Wilmington Plc, the London-based UK B2B, focused on compliance, legal and healthcare, has sold its AMT financial training business to Training the Street LLC for £23.4m. AMT had made a pre-tax loss of £300k last year. The deal helped the £200m listed UK company to reverse what had been net debt of £17m into net cash of £11m.
That was one of the highlights of Wilmington’s first-half figures to December 2021. They were positive numbers with 7% growth in revenue and 29% in EBITDA.
Analysts saw the progress as being due to the resumption of live events and also to a “refocused” portfolio. But – although Wilmington shows no signs of resuming its long-ago merger talks with the £65m Centaur Media – the company (like the smaller UK-centric Centaur itself) seems in need of strategic M&A to create the path towards some kind of market leadership in at least one international sector, rather than being spread thinly across disparate markets and geographies.
Wilmington is well-managed, clear-thinking, good with the cash, and has some strong brands (including Compliance Week and Health Services Journal). But the portfolio still seems a bit a random.
A Wilmington-Centaur combination might be relatively easy to achieve (they share a clutch of shareholders), would create a larger listed entity and provide the usual growth spurt from cost savings. But that ‘merger’ might not actually create a compelling longterm strategy. Perhaps Wilmington’s executives have a better idea.
Wilmington Plc is forecast to achieve revenue of £117m and £18.9m operating profit for 2021-22.
