Germany: Amadeus Fire Acquires Education and Training Firm Comcave in €200 Million Deal

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Amadeus FiRe, a Frankfurt, Germany-based staffing provider, announced last month the acquisition of 100% of the shares in Comcave Holding GmbH, a Dortmund-headquartered provider of workforce education and training.

Purchase price of Comcave and repayment of Comcave’s existing financial liabilities total approximately €200 million, according to Amadeus FiRe. The deal will be financed from cash and equivalents as well as a bridge loan of approximately €170 million.

“With the Comcave Group, we have found a partner that excellently complements the Amadeus FiRe Group’s previous offering and opens up highly interesting approaches to direct cooperation,” said Robert von Wülfing, spokesman for the management board.

Comcave, founded in 2002, focuses on publicly funded occupational and vocational training. It provides instructor-led lessons in virtual classrooms at 53 locations throughout Germany.

It serves more than 10,000 participants each year and mainly targets commercial and IT professionals as well as those in the marketing and multimedia sectors. Comcave also partners with firms such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IHK to offer specific training and certified qualifications.

Full-year 2019 revenue at Comcave is expected to be €60 million with an EBITDA margin of above 25%.

The acquisition will offer a new way to train personnel in needed skills, said Amadeus FiRe COO Dennis Gerlitzki. Accessing qualified talent has been a bottleneck in the recruitment process with the ongoing shortage of workers with the right skills.

“In my view, targeted cooperation between the two companies is a unique opportunity for training participants to receive targeted assistance from Amadeus FiRe and to smoothly find and shape their transition into the labour market,” Gerlitzki said. “A very large proportion of the participants in the retraining and further training measures qualify directly in the core competence areas of the Amadeus FiRe Group: commercial and IT professions.” Amadeus FiRe ranks as the 20th-largest staffing firm in Germany.