Private equity firm BC Partners has appointed JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to advise on the sale of United Group, its Southeast Europe-focused telecom and media group, three sources familiar with the situation said.

The sellside advisers are currently selecting vendor due diligence providers and will distribute teasers to private equity firms and strategic buyers around May this year, two of the sources said.

In the event a sale is struck, United Group is likely to fetch a high single-digit EBITDA valuation multiple, one of the sources said. Sell-side valuation expectations are around 8x group EBITDA for 2023, representing an enterprise value of EUR 8bn, a fourth source familiar with the situation said.

United Group, which offers pay TV and telecom services, posted EUR 2.74bn revenue for the first nine months of 2023, up 7% on the year while its adjusted EBITDA AL in the same period increased by 10% to EUR 751.2m, according to a Telecompaper report.

Greece was the group’s biggest market, where it operates under the Nova brand and achieved revenue of EUR 610.2m, followed by Vivacom Bulgaria with EUR 473.6m and the broadcast arm United Media with EUR 233.6m, as per the same report.

Last month Euro2day, citing unnamed sources, reported that Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan had received unofficial mandates to sell Nova.

The sellside advisers are yet to decide whether United Group’s sale should be split into two stages – one process for the Greece-based operations and another for the Balkans-based assets, one of the sources said.

The Dutch-based company is active in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Greece, North Macedonia and Montenegro, and has nearly 16m users and 15,000 employees, according to its website.

It is also not yet clear whether the upcoming transaction entails only BC Partners’ majority stake in the business, or whether the remaining stakeholders – including the group’s founder Dragan Šolak – will follow suit, one source said.

BC Partners acquired a majority stake in United Group from KKR [NYSE:KKR] in 2018, as reported.

At the time of publishing, United Group had a score of 40 out of 100, according to Mergermarket’s Likely to Exit (LTE) predictive algorithm*, mostly driven by companies for sale intelligence and sponsor exits in the region.

Potential private equity bidders for United Group include Blackstone [NYSE:BX], Carlyle [NASDAQ:CG], TPG and Apollo Global Management [NYSE:APO], one of the sources said, adding however that most global buyout funds may not be comfortable with the macroeconomic risk profile of Serbia.

United Group is a perfect target for strategic players operating in emerging markets, like América Móvil [BMV:AMXB], Telecom Egypt [EGX:ETEL] and Turk Telekom [IST:TTKOM], this source noted, adding that Dragan Šolak is likely to exit the business only if United Group is acquired by a strategic buyer.

Last April, United Group agreed a deal to sell 4,800 telecom towers in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Slovenia to TAWAL, a unit of Saudi Telecom Company  [TADAWUL:7010], for EUR 1.22bn, as reported.

United Group, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and BC Partners declined to comment.

*Mergermarket’s LTE predictive analytics assign a score to sponsor-backed companies to help track and predict when an exit could occur through M&A, an IPO, a direct listing or a deSPAC transaction.