ShipServ sold to Marcura, backed by Marlin Equity

My name is Herman Marks. I was, and I still am, the chairman of ShipServ Holdings the parent company of ShipServ Limited. And, as such, I was involved in the whole transaction of divesting ShipServ Limited to a new owner. ShipServ is the leading e-procurement platform within the maritime industry managing critical, operational spend between buyers and suppliers. We have a very specialised business and for a specialised business, you need a specialised advisor. We ran a very small, short, beauty contest and saw different advisors. We had some experience, and I have also had other experiences in different processes with advisors and we chose Silverpeak because we think they were the most competent, the most agile and the most focused on what we were trying to achieve. Well, you know you have a very short period where an advisor needs to grasp, first of all, all the details of your business and then to be able to translate that into a compelling story towards other investors and they have been extremely fast in doing that and they also did it in a way where they kept the whole management team very, very much engaged and motivated to participate in the sales process. What excited me is the huge opportunity that there is to digitalise a lot of the operations, particularly around the procurement within vessels and shipping operators. At the start of the transaction, we were involved in managing inbound interest as well as trying to include additional interest through buyers that we had relationships with and knew that we would be interested in acquiring an e-procurement platform. We worked hand in hand with not only Herman, but also the management team, including Henrik and Mark to fulfill our transaction within three to four months. I think Silverpeak did a great job in managing the expectation of all the stakeholders in the process. In our case, it was particularly the management team and the board of directors. We have a very large shareholder group, so not all the shareholders were directly involved in the process. Some of the major ones were closely involved in the process but also the other advisors that are playing a role in the process everybody was kept, well advised. Silverpeak was a very nice team on the job very high work ethics very friendly persons, but also very determined and very firm on trying to achieve the objectives that we had set but also very cooperative with the management teams. Silverpeak was great in communications to us as a board and also towards the other stakeholders and the other advisors in the process. ShipServ’s business is a very international business. So the buyers, the potential buyers for this business are also international. We have been considering both strategic buyers and private equity buyers and then you end up with a pretty large group from all over the world and ShipServ have been able to Sorry, and Silverpeak has been able to identify them and bring them to the table. ShipServ was acquired by a business called Marcura and the management team felt that there was a good cultural fit between the two companies, and they wanted to be part of a bigger story going forward. We were pleased with the outcome of the ShipServ deal, first of all, because our clients were pleased. The financial investors in ShipServ had been investing in the company for a long time and they wanted an outcome they wanted a positive outcome that will give them a good return for their investment over the years and they got it and were able to achieve a result where some previous processes did not achieve a result. So we were very happy with it and they were very happy with that. I would consider working with Silverpeak again. The reason being is that they have a great team, great work ethic and they’re able to do things very quickly, very smoothly.