Safilo makes offer for part of InSpecs as it attracts other takeover interest

There’s a lot of acquisition speculation swirling around UK-based eyewear business Inspecs at present. Italian eyewear giant Safilo has confirmed that it’s made a non-binding offer to the business. It doesn’t want to take over the whole company but is interested in Inspecs’ Eschenbach Group and BoDe businesses.

Safilo said this is part of its activities “to explore new investment opportunities” but added that there’s “no certainty regarding the outcome of any such offer”.

Meanwhile Inspecs had said last week that it had “received two separate, unsolicited proposals from H2 Equity Partners Ltd, and Risk Capital Partners and Ian Livingstone (the ‘Consortium’), each setting out non-binding possible cash offers alongside the possibility of an alternative offer including unlisted securities to acquire the entire issued and to be issued share capital of Inspecs”.

That came just came just a few days after Safilo had made its approach.

Each of H2 and the Consortium is required to announce a “firm intention” to make an offer for Inspecs or to announce that it doesn’t intend to do so by no later than 5:00 p.m. UK time on November 20, although the deadline could be extended.

It’s perhaps no surprise that Inspecs and parts of its business have become acquisition targets. The company is active in a buoyant part of the optical and fashion sectors and makes and markets its own eyewear brands, as well as having licenses for O’Neill, Barbour, Joseph, Radley, Superdry, Temperley, Viktor&Rolf and others.

But it has struggled in recent periods with sales and profits falling.

The specific parts of the business that have interested Safilo, as mentioned, include Eschenbach, a global eyewear supplier based in Nuremberg, Germany. Its two divisions design and distribute eyeglass frames and sunglasses and design, manufacture and distribute speciality optics products and low-vision technologies. Inspecs acquired Eschenbach Holding GmBH in 2020.

And BoDe is a German distributor of optical and sunglasses frames that Inspecs acquired a year later.