Urgent Cargus signs strategic partnership with Sprint Curier

Local courier services firm Sprint Curier announced a strategic partnership with Urgent Cargus. Within this partnership, starting the 11th of April, the internal deliveries in Romania will be taken over by Urgent Cargus, while Sprint Curier will focus on international deliveries.

The announcement only says the two companies joined forces to provide clients with an extensive delivery network and a better pickup process and delivery of parcels, not saying if the company was acquired by Urgent Cargus.

According to the latest available financial data, Sprint Curier had a total turnover in 2014 of 16.233.077 RON and an operational loss of 1.115.094 RON. The company, established in 2008, employed 165 people at the end of 2014 being one of the midsize courier service providers in Romania. Nationwide Sprint Curier has six sorting hub centers located in: Bucharest, Bacau, Brasov, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu and Ramnicu Valcea.

The appetite of Abris Capital, the investment fund that owns Urgent Cargus, for investments in the courier sector in Romania is well-known. In 2013, Abris acquired 100% of Cargus, Romania’s second largest provider of domestic courier services from DHL International, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post. In 2014, after completing a series of smaller acquisitions in the sector, Abris acquired Urgent Curier, the third largest domestic courier services provider, and merged it with Cargus.

At the end of 2015, Urgent Cargus contracted a loan of 36.8 million euros from BRD and BCR.

At that time, the representatives of Abris Capital did not mention the direction in which this money will be used. Through such funding scheme, an investment fund may recover before its exit transaction part of the money invested in the acquisition of the company.

Abris Capital Partners was founded in 2006 in Poland, has offices in Warsaw, Bucharest and Kiev and manages funds in excess of 770 million Euro through Abris CEE Mid - Market LP, launched in October 2007 with a capital of 320 million Euro, and Abris CEE Mid - Market II LP launched in 2011 with 450 million Euro under management .

The declared strategy of Abris Capital is to target investments in the range of 20 to 60 million Euro per transaction, with a typical ownership of a business between 3 and 5 years.