October 25 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian private equity firm BlackPeak Capital said it invested 8 million euro ($7.9 million) in local telecommunications and other infrastructure services provider Telelink Infra Services to accelerate its European expansion.
The fresh funds will allow Telelink Infra Services to fuel its growth both organically and by acquiring competitors from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as well as from the Western European industry sector players, BlackPeak Capital said in an emailed statement.
The private equity firm channelled the transaction through its BlackPeak Southeast Europe Growth Equity Fund.
"Our partnership with BlackPeak Capital will help us expand our services offering, expand our staff of qualified engineers, and acquire competitors to enable us to stay closer to the needs of our clients," Telelink Infra Services majority shareholder Lyubomir Minchev said.
The Sofia-based target company already has an established presence in the home market as well as in the UK, Germany, North Macedonia and Albania. It provides engineering services to top telecoms operators and other infrastructure players in Europe. Some of its projects include the installation of new security systems at North Macedonia's Skopje Airport and the implementation of traffic monitoring systems for Bulgaria's Road Infrastructure Agency.
The expansion of the business is planned so as to meet the rapid growth in infrastructure investments by network operators such as mobile mast owners. Investments in fixed digital infrastructure will be boosted by the European Union's Connecting Europe Facility programme (CEF2 Digital) in 2021-2027, which is set to unlock up to 3 billion euro in funding, in addition to pandemic recovery financing.
Telelink Infra Services will also appoint Steve Robertson, the founding CEO of UK BT Group's digital network business Openreach, as an independent member of its board of directors.
Telelink Infra Services was spun out of Bulgarian infrastructure and digitalisation services conglomerate Telelink Group in a corporate reorganisation in 2017, which gave rise to four separate entities. With over 400 staff, Telelink Infra Services offers construction, engineering, upgrade and maintenance services related to network and critical infrastructure to telecoms, private enterprises and governments.
Set up in 2014, BlackPeak Capital makes targeted growth equity investments of between 5 million and 15 million euro in fast-growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia.
($ = 1.01254 euro)