Winn heads Sanderson MBO talks

The management team at Sanderson is bidding to take over the reseller in a deal worth at least £100m.

The management team at Sanderson is bidding to take over the reseller in a deal worth at least £100m.

A source close to the parties involved, who did not want to be named, confirmed last week that Christopher Winn, chief executive of Sanderson, is leading the discussions into a management buyout. The bid is being backed by venture capitalist Alchemy Partners.

Speculation of a takeover first surfaced this month when Sanderson issued a statement to the London Stock Exchange announcing that it had received an approach which could lead to an offer for the company after its shares rose more than 30 per cent in one day.

The offer was rumoured to be "not substantially above" 220p a share, valuing the reseller at about £112m.

The source said Sanderson's management is expecting to buy back all its shares and take the company into the private sector. A statement is expected within the next 10 days when Sanderson turns in its full-year results.

The reseller recorded a 38 per cent jump in its pre-tax profit to £5.6m for the half-year ended 31 March on turnover of £54.5m. Turnover for the same period last year was £34.7m.

Sanderson was floated on the LSE in 1983.

Ian Spence, analyst at Richard Holway, said Sanderson has never had a high market valuation, so the management obviously thinks it can do something with it and make itself some real money.

• Telecoms and data services provider Energis is to buy networking systems integrator Datarange, according to sources.

Datarange, a Cisco gold partner and a Nortel enterprise solutions partner, is a wholly owned subsidiary of US technology services group SFA.

For the year ended 31 March 1999, Datarange recorded a profit of £412,000 on turnover of £13.6m.