Panmure Liberum acted as Joint Broker on Loungers plc’s £354m recommended acquisition by Fortress Investment Group

The acquisition was subject to a competitive sale process. Fortress made an initial offer of 310p per share in November 2024. This was increased to 325p per share in January 2025. The improved offer price was subject to a shareholder vote and was approved by shareholders on 30 January 2025.

The increased offer valued the entire issued share capital of Loungers at approximately £354 million, implied an enterprise value of approximately £367 million and a multiple of approximately 8.4x Loungers' FY24 Adjusted EBITDA (before site pre-opening costs) and of approximately 9.4x Loungers' FY24 Adjusted EBITDA (after site pre-opening costs).

Fortress believes it is a strong partner for Loungers, its management team, its employees and its other stakeholders in the next stage of Loungers' growth journey.
Panmure Liberum acted as broker to Loungers on its IPO in 2019 and has provided strong support to the company since, including a covid placing in 2020.

Alex Reilley, Loungers’ Chair, commented “The Panmure Liberum team has supported Loungers strongly since the IPO, through covid and all the way through our life as a quoted company. Their research, sales, trading and corporate broking teams have been fully committed behind Loungers since 2019. It was therefore natural for us to want to have them alongside us as corporate broker as we navigated our next transaction. The depth or their relationships with our leading institutional shareholders was crucial in securing such an overwhelmingly positive reaction and helped ensure a successful path to ownership under Fortress.”

Panmure Liberum Team

Exco – David Parsons, Bidhi Bhoma

Investment Banking – Andrew Godber, Will King, Freddie Wooding

Sales – Oliver Baxendale

Broking – Rupert Dearden

Research – Anna Barnfather

IR – Marcio Remedios