DEAG Plans Delisting From Stock Market

DEAG’s main shareholders, including Christian Angermayer’s Apeiron Investment Group and U.S. billionaire Mike Novogratz, agreed to acquire the company and financially support its further growth after it delisted.

They thereby show greater faith in the future of live entertainment than the capital market does, where the general uncertainty surrounding the return of live has caused DEAG’s share to drop to just over €3 at press time.

It led DEAG founder and CEO Prof. Peter Schwenkow and his board of directors to conclude, “the stock market is not the place for us anymore,” as he told Pollstar.

The lack of faith shown by the market comes in spite of DEAG being the only major promoter in the world that is going to end the year 2020 on a positive EBITDA, thanks to its insurance against a pandemic, the majority of staff being placed on short-term contracts and government support in the various countries it operates in. 

Seeing that the valuation of DEAG’s shares isn’t likely to change anytime soon, given the ongoing state of uncertainty, the decision to delist from the stock exchange was made.

Without being allowed to name the exact figure, Schwenkow said, the financial spending power for acquisitions DEAG was able to access through its private investors was “many times over what we would have been able to collect on the capital market.”

Schwenkow said the delisting wouldn’t affect DEAG’s executive team, the board of directors, nor any of its partners and subsidiaries in the countries it operates in, which includes the UK.

Read the full interview with Prof. Peter Schwenkow on pollstar.com very soon.