Corporate advisor announces two specialist appointments

Growth in Australia’s IT and telco sector has prompted increased demand for specialist corporate advice; in response, Latimer Partners has appointed Alvina Galstian as its Vice President and Brian Lau as Senior Associate. Galstian has over 15 years of financial services experience across deal advisory and corporate development in Australia and the United Kingdom. Lau has previously worked at Deutsch Bank, where he worked across structured debt transactions and was responsible for providing financial advice to sponsor and corporate M&A clients, with a focus on optimal capital structures and funding strategies.

As the retained adviser for a range of public and private companies, Latimer Partners specialises in bringing a global perspective and connections to businesses across the digital economy. Latimer has a record of advising businesses across their full lifecycle, from raising capital for both public and private companies, to growth through acquisitions, and corporate exits to local and global buyers, including several takeovers.

Galstian previously spent six years as Executive Manager of the Commonwealth Bank’s investment development team, where she was responsible for the group’s capital investment portfolio, providing independent commercial advice on over $1 billion in capital investments a year. Prior to that, Galstian worked at KPMG in its global M&A Deal Advisory practice, working with large corporate clients across consumer, media and telecommunications sectors in Sydney and London.

Lau previously worked at HSBC, in the leveraged finance team, helping clients to raise capital in the international markets. Lau began his career as a financial auditor with the Audit Office of NSW and holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Dean’s List) degree and a Master of Finance from the University of NSW.

The principals of Latimer Partners, Hugh Richards and Mark Nesbitt, welcomed the new appointees and forecast continued growth in the sector. On top of the recent strong growth, Latimer Partners forecasts that there will be continued consolidation in the tech and telco space in the new financial year (2021–22).

Companies like Unity, Spirit Technologies, Tesserent, 5G Networks, MyNetfone, Overthewire, Nexon (owned by private equity firm EQT) and Cyber CX (owned by private equity firm GBH) have collectively acquired over 50 other players in the market in a rapid consolidation of privately owned IT services firms. Nesbitt predicts that this consolidation trend will continue, particularly with highly rated public companies capitalising on the relatively low cost of equity and debt funding to acquire private businesses from founders seeking to capitalise on a seller’s market.

“Digitisation has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic with many more people now needing to interact remotely. This is driving investor interest in technology and telecommunications businesses, which in turn is supporting M&A activity across those sectors,” Nesbitt said.

Richards said current digital and technology, media and telecommunications leaders need to be moving faster than ever before. In the past five years, Richards and Nesbitt has directly advised on 40 transactions for companies across the digital economy (at Latimer Partners and their previous firm, TMT Partners).

“Emerging digital companies need to ensure they can deliver, and deliver at scale, in order to compete with global companies that are looking to claim a slice of the expanding Australian market,” Richards said.

Image credit: ©Nmedia/Dollar Photo Club