Emma
Nelson, former Sony FS head, signs multi-million pound deals in
Africa. Antonio Fabrizio reports.
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Leasing broker and funder Azule has
decided to expand its traditional broadcast leasing business to
also include IT and export finance among its services.
Azule’s director Peter Savage has already hired
specialised personnel to run the new businesses, which he plans to
consolidate over the next few months.
Savage launched Azule in 2004 jointly with
Gavin Scott, after selling Fineline, his previous broadcast leasing
business, to Five Arrows Leasing Group.
Before that, Savage had a small brokerage
called County Asset Leasing, which he jointly-owned with Ian Meakin
and Jeremy Stokes – who subsequently made £30m with his
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By GlobalData“When we started Azule, we set out to not do
exactly what Fineline did, but to develop other areas of specialist
funding, but obviously with a predominant broadcast slide, because
that’s where our main customers are,” Savage said.
Despite the recession – or possibly because of
it – the MD of Azule has increased the company’s leasing scope,
with a diversification strategy that includes export and IT
finance.
The export finance division was launched last
year, with the appointment of Emma Nelson, previously at Sony
Financial Services, which she headed for three years.
She now overlooks a business that has already
won two major deals – a £10m (€11.2m) transaction in the Middle
East and a £30m transaction in Nigeria, both from UK-based
broadcast manufacturers.
“That was adding another dimension, with the
market as it is in the UK and the manufacturers unable to sell
here, because no one was buying,” Savage said.
For Savage, the decision to cover the Middle
East and Sub-Sahara Africa fitted a niche that no other funders
were covering.
“We found ourselves able to go to manufacturers
and say to them that we could help sell their solutions in areas
where they wouldn’t normally expect to be able to offer terms to
customers who normally would have had to have paid cash up front,”
he said.
More recently, Azule also entered the IT
finance market. At the beginning of 2010, it hired John Openshaw,
who previously headed Sun Microsystems in the UK and Ireland. He
has already won a £150,000 transaction for financing hardware and
software.
According to Savage, one drive for the IT
expansion has been that the demand on IT-based broadcast kits has
increased “contacts” with the IT market.
Another reason has been the feeling that there
is capacity to be filled in the market as a result of a number of
lessors pulling out from various IT-related niches.
Over the next six months, Azule’s goals will be
to consolidate these two new businesses, as well as focus on
broadcast – a sector that Savage said is now “tentatively” seeing
green shoots, demonstrating positive performance in February and
March.
Savage believes in 2010 that the company will
also improve its profits – growing from £360,000 in 2009 to more
than £500,000 this year.
The biggest challenge, however, will be finding
adequate capital to grow the business.
“Banks are not lending and we need to put more
capital into the deal ourselves to keep growing,” Savage said.
“Our big task in the next two years will be to
make sure that we can fund all the good deals that come to our
door.”
