Advantage Partners Said to Keep 1st Holdings Stake to 2012
August 22, 2011, 1:06 AM EDTBy Yuki Hagiwara and Naoko Fujimura
(Updates with Advantage’s other funds in second paragraph.)
Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Advantage Partners LLP, the largest shareholder in Japanese software developer 1st Holdings Inc., agreed to keep its 19 percent stake in the company for one more year, two people familiar with the plan said.
Tokyo-based 1st Holdings plans to announce the agreement today after the close of trading in Japan, the people said, asking not to be identified because the discussions are private. Four other funds affiliated with Advantage Partners, which hold about 13 percent of 1st Holdings, also agreed to keep their shares for at least a year, the people said.
The agreement will give the Japanese software developer, which began trading in December, time to search for a partner to buy the stake, the people said.
Advantage Partners, which has been free to sell the shares since May 30, agreed to extend the so-called lockup to ease investor concerns the buyout firm may sell its holdings to the market, the people said.
Shares of 1st Holdings fell 2.1 percent to 508 yen as of 1:32 p.m. on the Jasdaq market. The stock has fallen 19 percent since its initial public offering price of 630 yen last year.
Hideyuki Inokuma, a spokesman at Advantage Partners, and Takuya Shoji, a spokesman at 1st Holdings, declined to comment on the lockup period.
In August, 1st Holdings raised its six-month profit forecast 8.2 percent to 1.26 billion yen ($16 million).
--Editors: Nicholas Wadhams, Young-Sam Cho
To contact the reporters on this story: Yuki Hagiwara in Tokyo at yhagiwara1@bloomberg.net; Naoko Fujimura in Tokyo at nfujimura@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Young-Sam Cho at ycho2@bloomberg.net
