CVC plans to sell Nine ticketing arm

The sale of Ticketek, an agency which processes more than 18 million tickets to 13,000 events each year, could fetch as much as A$400 million, representing 8x underlying earnings, people familiar with the process told the Financial Times.

Nine is also selling its Allphones Arena at Sydney's Olympic Park, a source told Reuters. The two assets of Nine's events division could be worth up to A$600 million. UBS is advising the sale process.

The events division, which is a non-core business of Nine, recorded an EBTIDA of about A$60 million in the last fiscal year. Deal information will be sent out to potential suitors in the next week or so, according to the source, who added groups including other private equity firms and trade companies have already expressed interest.

The move comes after earlier reports that CVC is also targeting a potential sale of Nine's ACP magazines division.

CVC Capital Partners bought Nine for A$5.3 billion in cash through several transactions between 2006 and 2008, but has seen the value of the assets drop significantly since then. 

Following consierable secondary trading, Oaktree Capital and Apollo Global Management hold A$1 billion or about 37% of Nine's senior debt, and CVC has refused to entertain their proposals for a debt-to-equity swap which would effectively hand the hedge funds control of the company. In total, hedge funds are thought to own 50-60% of the debt.

CVC needs 100% lender approval to extend the life of the debt and a two-thirds vote to amend covenants. Two proposals to restructure the debt have met with a lukewarm response from creditors and subsequently been shelved.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Restructuring
• Media
• CVC Capital Partners
• Australia
• TMT
• Structured finance
• Oaktree Capital
• Apollo Global Management