Majority owner Burda wants to take the online travel provider off the stock exchange.
Dusseldorf The Munich travel company Holidaycheck is leaving the stock exchange. This was decided on Wednesday by the board of directors and the supervisory board of the company, which has been listed on the regulated market of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2018. The media company Hubert Burda, which holds around 73 percent of the shares through Burda Digital SE, is behind the decision.
According to this, Burda Digital SE intends to pay the outside shareholders EUR 2.70 per share certificate in cash, which, in the opinion of the main owner, is above the legally stipulated minimum offer. This is based on the average price of the papers in the past six months, which had recently suffered severely due to the ongoing corona pandemic and the associated travel restrictions.
After the delisting announcement, the price jumped at times by around ten percent to 2.73 euros. The final price will, however, still be determined by the financial services regulator Bafin, explained Holidaycheck in the ad hoc announcement. He could therefore still deviate from the stated amount at the end of the day.
In the corona crisis, Holidaycheck’s sales fell by almost 90 percent at times, around 100 of the total of 400 employees had to leave, and the cruise sales business built up as a beacon of hope was sold. In the first half of 2021, the operating income was more than ten million euros in the red, so that analysts expect a loss of ten cents per share for the full year. For 2022, experts from Warburg Research are predicting sales of 80 percent of the pre-crisis level, but a dividend is not in sight for the next few years.
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The company itself looks back on an eventful past. It originally emerged in 2001 from the merger of the Burda holdings Focus Digital AG and Tomorrow Internet. After the sale of all journalistic media – including Focus Online and Huffington Post – the company renamed itself Holidaycheck Group, since the travel portal of the same name, acquired in 2006, now formed the core of the company.
Initially, they were content with evaluating accommodations and selling holiday trips from the major tour operators on the side. Since 2019, however, Holidaycheck has been putting together travel packages through its subsidiary HC Touristik itself, to which the group has added an unbeatable competitive advantage in the midst of the pandemic: Since September 2020, the “Holidaycheck Flex” tariff has not only allowed free travel cancellations up to six days before departure, including across the industry The managing director Vinzenz Greger waives the usual down payments.
The Offenburg media group now apparently wants to use the sharply lower share price to get the company back completely under its own control.
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