(News Bulletin 247) – The digital services specialist asked the stock market operator Euronext to suspend the listing of its shares on Tuesday evening, pending the publication of a future press release.

Any movement to come on the SQLI file? In any case, the digital services specialist asked the operator Euronext on Tuesday evening to suspend the listing of its shares on the Paris Stock Exchange as of today, “pending the publication of a press release which will be distributed shortly”, according to the established formula.

The SQLI title is suspended at a last price of 39.40 euros on Tuesday evening.

A trading suspension results in a temporary halt to the trading of a security on the market, in order to “protect the security and (to) guarantee the proper circulation of information, at a given time, to all investors”.

A whiff of a takeover bid?

The hypothesis that seems most credible at the moment would be a capital operation on the part of the British fund DBAY Advisors (via the holding company “Synsion BidCo”), its majority shareholder. The latter currently holds 83.4% of SQLI’s capital, but the journey to get so many shares in its bag has not been a walk in the park.

Let us recall that DBAY Advisors had first acquired 6% of the capital in 2019, then took over the stakes of the Nobel fund and the Amar family to increase to 28.6% of the capital. Then in January 2022, the reference shareholder, a French specialist in digital experience, managed to collect almost two-thirds (65.3%) of SQLI’s capital at the end of its public offer at 31 euros launched in the fall of 2021. This operation therefore ended in partial success, since some of the minority shareholders chose to keep their shares, preventing the initiator from delisting SQLI since the regulatory threshold is set at 90%.

Between June 2022 and today, Synsion BidCo has managed to gradually strengthen itself, convincing a few recalcitrant minority shareholders to sell their shares. But there is still 6.6% to be gleaned to consider the end of SQLI’s stock market history.

Reaching the 90% capital threshold would therefore allow the French digital services company founded in 1990 and listed on the stock market in the summer of 2000 on the new market, at the height of the bursting of the internet bubble, to be delisted.

Let us recall that SQLI was a pure and hard IT company when it was created – its name actually meant “SQL Engineering”, in reference to the IT language designed to manage databases – the company chose in 1995 to devote itself entirely to internet technologies and services.

Its mission is to help large companies (L’Oréal, Nespresso, Seb or Miele to name a few) to offer the best digital experience to capture the attention of consumers and build loyalty.