PE firms look to invest ₹558 cr in Sapphire Foods

NewQuest Capital Partners and TR Capital are in advanced talks to invest in Sapphire Foods India Pvt. Ltd, one of the largest franchisees of Yum! Brands, and Pizza Hut in the country, a person directly aware of the development said.

The private equity funds are in talks to invest around ₹558 crore in Sapphire Foods, the person said on condition of anonymity. The company is valued at nearly ₹4,000 crore, the person added.

The transaction will simultaneously provide an exit to the company’s four existing investors—CX Partners, Samara Capital, Goldman Sachs and Edelweiss PE. “All of them would supposedly be part-exiting with almost 4X returns,” the person added.

Email queries sent to Sapphire Foods, NewQuest Capital Partners, TR Capital and existing investors didn’t elicit any response till the time of publishing this news report. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Sapphire Foods, which is planning to raise ₹1,000-2,000 crore through an initial public offering by the end of this year, was set up in 2015 by acquiring 250 KFC outlets. It currently runs nearly 400 KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell outlets in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. It owns a controlling stake in Gamma Pizzakraft Overseas—a franchisee of Pizza Hut and bakery Delifrance in north India and Sri Lanka. The company’s sales rose 12% to ₹1,340 crore in the year ended March 2020 from ₹1,193 crore in the previous year, according to the latest data available with research platform VCCEdge. Net loss widened to ₹159.4 crore from ₹44.6 crore during the period, according to VCCEdge, which tracks regulatory filings of companies with the ministry of corporate affairs.

The fast food restaurant space in India is dominated by multinational chains McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King and Subway. Burger King India Ltd, controlled by private equity firm Everstone Capital, saw its IPO subscribed 157 times in December.

Hong Kong-based NewQuest Capital Partners acquired a minority stake in maternity clinic Kids Clinic India Pvt. Ltd, which operates the Cloudnine hospital chain. The investment in Cloudnine was NewQuest’s third investment in India in the past six months, the Hong Kong fund had said in a press release. NewQuest recently invested in animation firm Cosmos-Maya and fintech startup KreditBee—both Indian companies.

Private equity firm TPG acquired a majority stake in New Quest earlier this year.