Carlyle Fund hires Santander and Morgan Stanley as advisors to sell Codorníu

BarcelonaThe American investment fund Carlyle has hired the banks Santander and Morgan Stanley to advise it on the sale of the wine group Raventós Codorníu, of which it controls 68% of the capital, it announced this Monday. Expansion and has confirmed the ARA.

The investment company, which in Spain is led by Mario Pardo, decided about six months ago to begin the process to divest its stake in Codorníu, although it is still in its early stages. Starting in the summer, the process is expected to accelerate until a sale agreement is reached next year.

Carlyle acquired the well-known Catalan winery in 2018, when it valued it at around €390 million. That same year, Codorníu's main competitor in the cava market, the Freixenet group, was acquired by Henkell, the world's leading producer of sparkling wines and a subsidiary of the German food multinational Geschwister Oetker. In this regard, Carlyle could choose to find an industrial buyer with a similar profile to Henkell or one that operates in a complementary sector of the alcoholic beverage market (such as breweries or spirits companies), according to Expansion.

More benefits before the sale

To encourage sales, Codorníu has posted strong profits in recent years, which it hopes to repeat in 2025. Two weeks before the end of the fiscal year, "the outlook is positive," said the CEO of the bank, Sergio Fuster, at an event in Barcelona this Monday. The company expects to close the year with a double-digit increase in profits, as reported by already did in 2024 (at that time the increase was 15%).

"The increase in market share that we have maintained worldwide has allowed us to take a larger share in the wine and cava market, which is where we compete internationally," Fuster added. The executive assured that the company experiences a symbiosis between the private equity and the "family" that "works perfectly." In this sense, the 32% of the capital not held by Carlyle is distributed among some 200 shareholders who are members of the founding family. 2017—was founded in 1550 and remained under family control until its sale seven years ago.