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SIGNA Sports United | | SIGNA Sports United Business Combination with Yucaipa Acquisition Corporation Friday, June 11, 2011 |
Second, we have a lot of vertical-specific user experience elements like finders, filters, deeper product descriptions that make it much easier to find the right product for you and drive conversion. Third, we customize our sports gear at scale. For example, we are stringing more than 100,000 tennis racquets a year to the customer—to each individual customer’s requirements, and/or we also print team jersey sets for many hundreds of amateur and professional soccer clubs. And finally, we engage with the sports enthusiasts beyond e-commerce by building engagement apps ourselves, like myTennis, with more than 350,000 users, or by partnering with the leading vertical apps. This way, the customer and the consumer never leaves our ecosystem and we benefit from very high customer retention that Alex will allude you to in the finance section.
Now, all of this runs on our platform, driving organic growth as the first of three growth vectors. Let me now hand over to Philipp to tell you how we leverage our platform further for our second growth vector, M&A, and our third growth factor, the third-party platform businesses. Philipp, please take it away.
Philipp Rossner
CSO, SIGNA Sports United
Thank you, Stephan. M&A is indeed an important part of our strategy. We’ve done more than seven acquisitions in the past four years. The most recent three acquisitions are Tennis Express and Midwest Sports in the U.S. that we intend to combine to form a new leading US online tennis retailer, and there’s the acquisition of Wiggle Chain Reaction, the second-largest bike online retailer, with approximately US$500 million net sales out of the UK, which is a truly transformative deal for the entire industry.
For all our acquisitions, we follow a clear industrial logic driving geographic expansion, vertical integration and platform business model expansion on top to the financial synergy potential. We follow a proven post-merger integration playbook that brings newly acquired companies onto our platform to exploit the full synergy potential, which typically yields five to 15 percentage points higher growth rates and three to five percentage points higher EBITDA margins once the deals are fully integrated, roughly three to four years after closing.
And as you can see on the next page, Wiggle Chain Reaction really plays to our full strength, as this acquisition ticks all our investment criteria. It’s combining global number one and global number two online bike retailers with such a perfectly complementary geographic sales footprint, as you see on the right, and that acquisition itself will yield a total synergy potential amounting to US$50 million EBITDA per year, just from this deal once the integration is fully completed.
It is worth noting that we typically acquire companies under exclusive and very entrepreneurial terms, either with non-controlling minority interest still held by founders, like is the case in the recent acquisitions of Midwest Sports and Tennis Express in the U.S., or with a significant portion of the total consideration to be paid in shares, like is the case with Wiggle Chain Reaction.
All of this really makes us the buyer of choice for the most attractive sports online players in our space, and you can expect us to further consolidate our markets from such a clear position of strength. At the very moment, we’re diligencing other potential online retail acquisition targets within our verticals with a great strategic fit and a combined total 2022 net revenue of US$400 million. And none of that is included in our plan so far, but all of that comes with massive strategic and financial upside and significant shareholder value upside. But there lies so much more consolidation potential ahead of us, as the space is still highly fragmented, with the top three global retailers only accounting for 7% of the total sports retail market.
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