VTB buys 29% Magnit stake as founder quits

Bloomberg

State-controlled VTB Group is buying 29 percent of Magnit PJSC from billionaire Sergey Galitskiy, who said investors don’t trust his vision for Russia’s second-largest food retailer after its share price plunged in the past year.
Galitskiy will quit as chief executive officer after selling $2.5 billion of shares to VTB, Magnit said in a regulatory filing.
Galitskiy said he decided to sell because his views on running the company clashed with those of portfolio investors, as the market demanded fast growth and he preferred to focus on profitability, Interfax reported. “If investors want changes, they should get them,” he said, according to the news service. He will maintain a
3 percent stake.
While he built Magnit from scratch into an empire of more than 16,000 stores over the past two decades, generating revenue of almost $20 billion in 2017, Galitskiy struggled to manage the expansion as the economy slowed and he lost customers to rivals. Magnit’s shares have lost more than 50 percent of their value over the last 12 months as the pace of sales growth slowed and the company lost market leadership to billionaire Mikhail Fridman’s X5 Retail Group NV.
“This story looks weird,” Vadim Bit-Avragim, a money manager at Kapital Asset Management LLC in Moscow, said. “Many foreigners bought Magnit because of their appreciation for Galitskiy’s business acumen. With his exit, many investors are going to wonder about how effective the new owner is going to be.”

Sandwich Takeover
Chief Financial Officer Khachatur Pombukhchan will become Magnit’s new CEO, pending approval of the deal, according to VTB.
“It is purely an investment decision,” VTB’s First Deputy CEO Yuri Soloviev told reporters in Sochi, dismissing concerns about the Russian state’s growing presence in the economy. “When we bought a stake in the Burger King franchise, did you worry about the state takeover of sandwiches?”
VTB holds such investments for an average 2 years to 5 years, Soloviev said. VTB has been a financial investor in another Russian retailer— Lenta Ltd—together with US fund TPG Capital, first buying shares in 2009 before selling down to about 3 percent. It also holds a stake in wireless carrier Tele2 Russia.
With its new investor, Magnit plans to pay dividends in the second half of 2018 and may also consider a share buyback, part of which would be used for a management incentive plan, the retailer said in a statement.
CFO Pombukhchan told investors last month that Magnit would refrain from making dividend payments this year.
Galitskiy had a fortune estimated at $5 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index before the announcement of the deal. Both he and Fridman were included in the US Treasury’s oligarchs list this year.