It is February 2012. We are a PE firm, and are considering buying WIRK company, which is a food products distributor to stores in Germany. WIRK owns several warehouses. Its suppliers are leading food and beverages manufacturers. WIRK has been growing successfully due to its good service and generous customer policy. Like other companies in Germany, it suffered effects of the severe economic recession following 2007-2008 financial crisis. But it has recovered swiftly since then. We want to do the valuation for ourselves and for the seller.

Who is not very inclined to sell but has said he might do so for 300MM?

 

There are no other companies similar to WIRK listed in the stock market, so it is not easy to make a comparison. The companies most like WIRK are hypermarkets. Summary data is given in the table. We are also looking at the data for the German stock market, represented by DAX index.