Curro Holdings shareholders have voted in favour of billionaire Jannie Mouton’s offer to take the group private, putting it on track to delist from the JSE in a month’s time.
Curro said in a statement on Friday that 99.98% of shares were voted in support of the takeover, which will see SA’s largest private school network operator being transformed into a public benefit organisation.
In August, Mouton, founder of Capitec, PSG Group and PSG Financial Services, offered R13 a share for Curro through his Jannie Mouton Stigting, valuing the deal at the time at R7.2bn.
The offer price, a 60% premium to Curro’s share price before the announcement, would be financed via a mix of cash and Capitec and PSG Financial Services stock.
In an update last week, Curro said the value of the scheme consideration was now R14.18 a share, representing a 74% premium to the company’s closing share price at the time of the initial announcement and a 66% premium to its 30-day volume weighted average.
The added value for shareholders came as a result of the higher closing share prices of Capitec and PSG Financial Services shares, which closed the preceding week at R4,030.05 and R24.63, respectively.
The company said it was “pleased with the significant support shown by shareholders for the proposed transaction”, which it said was reflected in the votes.
“This is a unique and game-changing transaction for SA education and has the potential to benefit the public at large for many generations to come,” it said.
The deal, which remains subject to regulatory approval from competition authorities in SA and Botswana, will end Curro’s 24-year career on the bourse and hand full control to Mouton’s family foundation.
Business Day reported that Curro shares surged more than 50% after the announcement of the proposed deal, which would remove profit targets and focus on reinvesting every rand generated in bursaries, classrooms, teacher training and new schools in underserved communities.
Four members of Mouton’s foundation will be appointed to Curro’s board.
Jan Mouton, Jannie’s son and deputy chair of the foundation, told Business Day in August that the takeover would allow Curro to focus on expanding its reach and impact without being beholden to shareholders.
He said Curro will build new schools in underprivileged areas in a few years’ time. For now, the focus will be on investing in its existing schools to provide underprivileged, high-achieving students with bursaries.
Curro’s latest results showed the group struggling to increase enrolment in the 18 months to end-June. In the second half of 2024, it attributed a weaker operational performance to “the broader economic pressures on SA households”.
The offer thus came at an opportune time for Mouton, with Curro’s share price having drifted for the past five years. After rising steadily to a peak of R57.49 in 2015 it closed at R13.22 on Friday.
The stock is down almost 21% over the past three years, underperforming competitor AdvTech, which has doubled in value over the same period. Over the past five years AdvTech has soared fourfold, while Curro is up just 0.12%.
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