Assessing Acquisition
Basalt Infrastructure Partners were evaluating Unilode, a global provider of essential infrastructure to the aviation industry, as an acquisition target.
Undisputed Market Leader
With a 60% market share, Unilode manages a fleet of 145,000 Unit Load Devices (ULDs); containers and pallets for the efficient loading, transport and unloading of air freight.
Global Project Management
The Basalt transaction team was based in New York so the entire project was delivered remotely and working around the 5 hour time difference from our team in London.
Challenge
The timetable for the audit was considered tight at the start, with only 3 weeks. This tightened considerably due to the deal timetable and more detailed analysis being added.
The top 10 of the company’s 90 airline customers were modelled separately and operational metrics analysed by geography and service line.
Significant extra detail was added to the analysis, with a 70% increase in unique formulae. The timeline of the model was also extended during the audit process.
Solution
At each iteration we sent a single findings-report, with cell references for the current version of the model to Basalt, highlighting any issues.
Our software enabled us to efficiently review replicated blocks of calculation.
In addition to dealing with the timeline extension, our proprietary review software facilitated this by rapidly combining the comments of all consultants, tracking issues between versions until all were resolved.
By deploying 5 consultants we were able to deliver the model audit in 6 working days from start to finish, rather than the three weeks anticipated.
Results
We delivered our model audit report in record time, meeting the tightened deadline.
Basalt signed the deal to acquire Unilode from EQT Infrastructure in Q3 2021.
John Hanna, Partner and co-head of Europe for Basalt said “Numeritas has become a trusted partner of Basalt. They have supported us on a number of deals in the past and particularly in recent months when we have been deploying capital from our third, $2.75bn fund, which closed in January. In this deal, we are grateful to Numeritas for pulling out all the stops to meet a very challenging timetable, whilst remaining ‘user-friendly’ as a service provider.”
