Software tycoons eye £300m payday even as IPO market stalls

A group of software entrepreneurs are drawing up plans for a £300m flotation or sale even as London's market for new share offerings continues to stall.

Sky News understands that CHP Consulting, which provides end-to-end software across industries including automotive finance‎, has appointed bankers at Rothschild to review options for the future of the company.

CHP, which is said to be likely to be worth more than £300m, plans to decide next year whether it will pursue a sale or stock market listing, according to people close to it.

Any route to raising capital would be designed to raise funds for potential acquisitions, one of the people said.

If it opts to go public, it would be doing so against a backdrop of listings which have either been abandoned or seen their prices substantially reduced.

On Thursday, the owners of Misys, another software company, decided to abort plans for a flotation which would have taken it into London's blue-chip share index.

Pure Gym Group and an automotive parts supplier, TI Fluid Systems, have also pulled out of initial public offerings, while Biffa, the waste recycling group, was forced to cut the value of its shares to get its listing away.

CHP sells a product called Alfa, which allows customers to manage ‎relationships from point-of-sale to credit-checking, account processing and then asset management.

That part of the software sector is estimated to be growing at about 8% annually, and sees CHP competing with behemoths such as Fidelity, Oracle (Hanover: ORC.HA - news) and SAP (Amsterdam: AP6.AS - news) .

CHP, which was founded in 1990, counts Barclays (LSE: BARC.L - news) , Hitachi, Siemens (BSE: SIEMENS4.BO - news) and Toyota among its clients.

Andrew Page, its chairman, is the company's majority shareholder, while chief executive Andrew Denton and other senior managers own the remainder.

‎It has a network of offices in Australia, Europe and the US and is keen to expand that network.

A CHP spokesman declined to comment.