Tokyo/ Munich — Japa­nese tele­com­mu­ni­ca­ti­ons group Soft­bank plans to acquire a stake in Wire­card and invest around 900 million euros in the payment services provider.

For this purpose, Wire­card is to issue a conver­ti­ble bond that can be conver­ted into a total of 6,923,076 Wire­card shares (curr­ently corre­spon­ding to approx. 5.6% of the share capi­tal) at a conver­sion price of EUR 130 per Wire­card share after a period of 5 years. The Annual Gene­ral Meeting of Wire­card AG on June 18, 2019 is expec­ted to decide on the issue of this conver­ti­ble bond to Soft­bank exclu­ding the subscrip­tion rights of current share­hol­ders. This would make Soft­bank the Bava­rian company ’s fourth-largest inves­tor after MB Betei­li­gungs­ge­sell­schaft — the invest­ment vehicle of Wire­card CEO Markus Braun — the invest­ment bank Gold­man Sachs and the asset mana­ger Black­rock.

Advi­sors to Wire­card: Noerr LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher 

Advi­sors to Soft­bank: Sulli­van & Cromwell