News: Capita acquires Ventura

Capita, the UK's leading outsourcing company, has purchased Ventura, a customer contact specialist and employer of thousands of people in Rotherham.

Ventura, the trading name of Club 24 Ltd, is the third party customer services management arm of Next plc and manages more than 50 million customer contacts each year for a range of additional private and public sector clients. Ventura is particularly strong in the private sector with clients including a number of leading telecoms, utilities and retail companies, such as O2, Orange, British Gas and British Midland.

Ventura have their headquarters in Leeds and opened a contact centre in Manvers in 2000, providing capacity for 2,000 staff.

The award-winning company made a pro forma operating profit for its financial year to January 31 2011 of £8m and a turnover of £156m.

Capita already employ 37,000 people at more than 350 sites, including 64 business centres across the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands and India. They enjoyed revenues for 2010 of £2,744m.

Capita stated that the acquisition, for a cash consideration of £65m on a cash-free, debt-free basis, will increase their capacity for customer management services, providing additional front office services and flexible capacity for existing Group clients. It would also create the opportunity to provide Ventura's client base with access to Capita's wider service offering.

Next stated that it intends to continue to use the services of Ventura that are currently provided to Next and use the majority or all of the proceeds to buy back and cancel its own shares.

Paul Pindar, Chief Executive of The Capita Group Plc said: "The acquisition of Ventura is a good strategic fit with our existing integrated outsourcing services.

"Ventura's flexible service model complements our established customer contact operations which are integral to many of our long term contracts and businesses. It also provides Capita with opportunities to offer wider customer management and back office outsourced services to key, blue chip clients across additional industry sectors.

"We will be able to offer an enhanced customer management proposition, including providing customer acquisition and sales, help and information lines, technical support and emergency response both on a long or more flexible basis, alongside our breadth of administration and professional support services."

Ian Cherry, Managing Director, Ventura, added: "This is a great way to take the business forward; this news will strengthen our service to clients and business prospects. We are very excited about the future and look forward to offering our clients even more innovative solutions in customer management outsourcing than ever before."

Capita website
Ventura website

Images: Ventura