Latham & Watkins Advises Hg on Acquisition of P&I

Latham & Watkins advised private equity investor Hg on the acquisition of Personal und Informatik AG (P&I), a leading provider of cloud-based HR software. The company was sold by funds advised by Permira, the global private equity firm, who remain invested with a substantial minority stake. The enterprise value amounted to EUR 2 billion.

The transaction represents the 4th investment from the Hg Saturn 1 Fund, which had its first close in early 2018 and focuses on software businesses with enterprise values of more than £1 billion. Hg managed funds will become the majority shareholder in the business. 

The acquisition is one of the largest tech transactions of 2019.

P&I, based in Wiesbaden, Germany, was founded in 1968 and is an internationally operating, full suite provider of cloud-based HR software solutions. The firm serves more than 15,000 end customers, large data centres and international HR service providers.

Hg is Europe’s leading software investor. Based in London, Munich and New York, Hg manages around USD 12 billion for some of the world's leading institutional and private investors.

Latham advised Hg in the transaction with a team led by Frankfurt partner Oliver Felsenstein, with counsel Susanne Decker and associates Maximilian Platzer, Eileen Siemer, Sönke Bock, and Ku-Hyun Baek. Advice was also provided on employment matters by Frankfurt partner Anne Kleffmann and associate Kristina Steckermeier; on tax matters by Munich partner Stefan Süß and counsel Joachim Grittmann; on data privacy matters by Frankfurt associates Wolf-Tassilo Böhm and Tarik Arabi; on real estate matters by Hamburg counsel Panu Siemer and associate Martina Eisgruber; on antitrust matters by Frankfurt partner Max Hauser, counsel Jana Dammann, and associate Anne Haas; and on litigation matters by Washington, D.C. partner Les Carnegie, counsel Rachel Alpert, and San Francisco associate Max Mazzelli.