Il Romano che ha Speso €3 MILIARDI per Comprare le più Grandi Aziende Italiane 🇮🇹 Giovanni Tamburi

Today TIP's assets are over 3 billion. Great gurus of the time who said it was illegal to do these things. I don't care. I am convinced there is a terrifying bubble. How much money do you want? 3.5 million. Boom, I sent the wire transfer and our, I believe, 14.5 million became at least 300.

I played with toy cars and that was enough for me. The first years of my life I wasn't very well, so for every injection there was a model car given, and in the end there's a nice collection.

My mother didn't do anything, in the sense that she was the mother of four children, which was already a big job. My father worked at FAO.

At 11, instead of going to the countryside or playing tennis, I sold cigarettes from the tobacconist. Then later with friends and my brother I set up a small advertising agency, I was 17-18 years old and it was already billing. We were quick to catch the trend of those paper cubes that were printed on the sides, which didn't exist in Italy. We had seen them at a trade fair abroad, so we helped sell these cubes to companies that printed their logos on the sides. Then with another of my brothers I enjoyed buying and selling, repairing scooters. I started working during university at this consulting firm, I was a bit of an assistant to the founder. During that period, for example, I worked a lot on tourism. He was one of the consultants of Valtur, at the time Valtur was the top of Italian tourism, so traveling around Italian villages and studying a strategy for how to evolve the tourist villages was one of the very interesting schools.

And one of the clients was a large construction company that asked me to go work there permanently. A friend of my father, who had a large construction company, Cogefar, told me 'You can't work for the competition, come to me.' From September 1st, 1977 to Milan, which I had no desire to do because I was very happy in Rome, etc., but these are people you can't say no to. And it was one of my great fortunes because from there the consulting was managed by a man who later became general manager of Bastogi, a large financial group of the time, so I found myself working more for Bastogi than for Cogefar, which was the beginning of this work in investment banking, merchant banking, and everything went well.

By chance, in the sense that I indirectly knew one of the founders of Euromobiliare who one day asked me if I knew anyone good at M&A at Bastogi. I said, 'Look, there's no one.' After a few months they called me back and said 'Why don't you come? We'll pay for your courses in Italy and abroad on M&A because we need to set up this sector.' And I started as a young assistant of M&A at Euromobiliare.

26. It was the great school of my life because with Guido Roberto Vitale and Alberto Milla we entered true merchant banking, while at Bastogi we sold a company a month to pay salaries. There was intermediation, wealth management, a foot in the insurance business. We invented M&A for medium-sized companies in Italy in those years, in the 80s at Euromobiliare. I started as a young M&A assistant, then became general manager in 10 years, and then decided to leave because the company was bought by Midland Bank, which in turn was bought by Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, so I had no desire to be an officer of an Anglo-Chinese bank. I took a sabbatical year, a year writing books, teaching at university, because I was always a bit against New York, London, Milan finance, closed, reserved, you can't say anything, you can't do anything. You do your job well if you spread it, not if you tell it to yourself and don't even tell your wife when you come home.

After a few months I was proposed to join this privatization commission of the Ministry of the Treasury because in my last year at Euromobiliare I had been sent to England to Midland Bank, which also had a privatization part, the Thatcher era, so I studied a lot what Thatcher was doing. One day I get a call from Professor Cappugi, who had been tasked by the minister to set up the privatization commission, but no one knew what these things were, and he remembered that at a dinner I had talked about this thing. He said, 'Listen, come here because no one knows what we're talking about, but the state debt is so monstrous that we need to try to save it by selling some jewels. Will you give us a hand?' I gladly accepted because what could be better than a sabbatical period to go and help the Italian state. Most people said it was unconstitutional to privatize ENI because of the oil, it was unconstitutional to privatize ENEL because of the electricity bills. 'Oh my God, giving electricity to private hands, we're crazy.' I must say that with a certain stubbornness, I convinced almost everyone, we wrote the law and the law started the privatizations of pieces of IRI, ENEL.

There would be quite a few anecdotes, especially of all the great gurus of the time who said it was unconstitutional, illegal to do these things. I believe the strong bet was to say 'I don't care about all these sanctimonious people who think they know it all. Let's try to do good for the country and not for lawyers, notaries, bureaucrats.' The best anecdote was when Professor Cappugi realized there were all these resistances, he called Matelda Grassi, a lawyer, and me, and said: 'Let's forget everyone else, we three give ourselves a room, write the draft of the law, take it to Giuliano Amato and see if he adopts it.' He adopted it and essentially the commission was presented with work already done, against most of them. So at 38, good Giovanni had already become CEO of one of the largest investment banks in Italy and had also written the law that started the privatizations of giants like ENEL. Okay, those were different times, but if today for a thirty-year-old it's already a half-miracle to have a permanent job, how does he manage to do all this before turning 40? Well, a fundamental role is played by his three mentors.

The first teacher was Valerio Levi with the consulting during university in Rome. The second teacher was Nanni Fabris, general manager at Cogefar and Bastogi in those 3 years I was there. The third teacher was Guido Roberto Vitale, with whom I was 10 years at Euromobiliare, he was already recognized as one of the great gurus of Italian finance.

One thing that stayed with me from Nanni Fabris was the fact of simplification. At a time when universities were explaining balance sheet analysis with 100,000 ratios, 27 ratios, etc., he argued that to understand the really important things, three or four items were enough, and that was one of the most important lessons of my life. From the point of view of Guido Roberto Vitale, I believe that combining work ethic, passion for intelligent corporate finance, because finance as pure finance I think is only interesting up to a point. We were never into derivatives, structured products, complicated operations.

I always went to the companies, I never tried to wait in Milan, in a place like this, for the client, and this was always quite appreciated. So my life was on the road. I did 50-60,000 km a year by car, going to companies, trying to listen to entrepreneurs, trying to understand what they might want in strategic terms, generational transitions, capital alternatives. The activity developed quite well, so after a short time Alessandra Gritti also came to work, who later became my wife, and the current general manager of TIP, Claudio Berretti, was my student at Castellanza, he took the exam with me, I found him sharp, I said, 'Why don't we do a thesis?' He did the thesis, and before even discussing the thesis he was already here working.

It was the era when private equity funds were born in Italy. I realized there could be a different role. First, not to be a fund that by definition must buy and must sell. Second, that it replaces the entrepreneur by putting in a tied administrator, but being a financial director with the aim of controlling as if you didn't trust the entrepreneur. With Alessandra and Claudio Berretti we devised this model of minority stake for long-term development. Whoever wants to sell should go to the funds, whoever wants to accelerate growth through M&A, investments, etc., could have us, not just as a consultant, but someone who by participating in the capital risked with him and risked even more by leaving him the trust of management, but putting money in. Obviously not wanting to do a fund because I didn't want to do something that would imply the resale of the company. And besides, TIP was launched wanting no banks, only families. There were about fifty families, we then listed the company on the stock exchange after 4 years, and at that moment the families doubled to about 100.

Well, we started with five, me and four others. The four were clients from the M&A part who had understood that this formula could work. Between me, Alessandra, and them, through word of mouth, it became 50 because it was a new project. It was 2000, so there was also the dot-com bubble, which helped because everyone was saying 'Mom, we want to invest in these innovative, modern things.' In fact, the initial focus was more on that world than on more traditional companies. So in 1999 Giovanni founded Tamburi Investment Partners, a company that buys stakes in the most successful Italian companies and helps them grow. It gains from the increase in the value of their shares and the profits they distribute. The idea was brilliant, also because in 1999 the value of tech companies had risen so much that even my grandmother had invested in them. The year after, however, the internet bubble burst. In one month the market lost 40% and almost one in two internet companies failed. Were there any problems due to the bubble burst or not?

We suffered a few small losses, nothing transcendental. At that moment venture capital is a bit of a statistical matrix, right? You invest in 10 companies, it's enough that one does well, you don't care about the other nine. We were never fascinated by that. We looked at each company one by one, trying to extract value from each one. The big leap, the first important investment, was Interpump 24 years ago. We created the first club deal to do this very large operation. What I had in mind was to try to remove from companies this excess of financial leverage, of a 'take the money and run' mentality of many private equity funds. Interpump was owned by a private equity fund at the time because the founder decided to sell the entire capital to this fund. The fund had then listed the company on the stock exchange and was left with a small piece. The ambition was to say, if we take this small piece, maybe invest some more money, take a true long-term perspective, we can create with Interpump an international model of great success, removing that desire that frustrated the founding entrepreneur very much: 'The better things go, the faster you have to sell on the stock exchange or in other ways.' And this worked. The club deal was created because we didn't have enough money, so with all the families behind us, I made a few phone calls, I said: 'Gentlemen, will you help me?' And again, with six or seven families, not even many at the time, we immediately filled the gap that was needed. We grew four times in Interpump over the years by buying shares from families who sold when they thought they had earned enough, but we held on and then earned more than everyone else, except the founder who is still there. Just to give a number, we bought Interpump shares at about €3. In these 24 years, dividends have been distributed for much more than €3, and today the stock is worth €45, it even reached €60.

But things are simple, much more than you think. Mega due diligence is useful up to a point, mega contracts are useful up to a point. We trust the entrepreneur.

One day we created a contact with the CEO Franco Moscetti. The Holland family already had very strong control over the company. There are two ladies, a mother and a daughter, so we went to the palace to propose entering the capital. They looked at us at first with some suspicion because although already listed on the stock exchange, they preferred to go their own way without partners who might condition family life, and that was it. Then later we thought it might be useful to tell the CEO, look, if one day you have a big acquisition, rather than going directly to the market to propose capital increases, we could guarantee a part of this capital increase so that you can negotiate the acquisition with money in your pocket. I wrote him a letter saying up to 100 million euros, if you want, they are ready here, just convince us with a good operation. After a few months he came back with a nice acquisition in Australia. We had a new meeting with the Holland ladies. They liked the idea, also because they liked that we wanted, so to speak, to bet so much money on a new operation. And Franco Moscetti, who by the way later we made president of OVS, because the world is small, negotiated, brought the operation home, then the operation was proposed to the market in a capital increase open to all. In the end we put in less than the promised 100 million, and from that moment the desire to accelerate this development was born, so a whole series of other acquisitions around the world, of store networks, because being a large retailer, like OVS, you buy companies that have stores in their belly. Moscetti left, Enrico Vita arrived, the current CEO, and currently Amplifon has almost 11,000 stores in all corners of the world, so it has become the absolute leader in retail hearing aids.

I had him explain what he had in mind. He said: 'I have about eighty stores, generally small and in ski resorts. I want to enlarge the stores in ski resorts. I want to open stores in cities like Milan, New York, just doing these operations. If I give the right product at the right price, we can grow. Today I have a great margin, which seemed excessive at that time. I can even lose margin and the combined effect of these two operations can bring me revenue growth that more than justifies in absolute terms the growth of the margin.' I said, 'Dear Remo, I like it very much, let's bet together and move forward.'

I met Stefano at De Longhi because I was on the board of De Longhi many years ago, we were partners. He left De Longhi as CEO, very young, to do the OVS operation with a private equity fund, so I observed him. When OVS had problems, stemming from an operation they did abroad that was unlucky, I started collecting some shares because it seemed to me an unfair punishment that the market was giving to the stock, without even telling Stefano anything. When we reached a point where we had to announce it officially because we had exceeded a certain threshold, I called Stefano one evening, I remember he was in the car, I said 'Stefano, did you read the news?' He says 'No, why? What happened? I'm in the car under the rain.' 'No, we announced that we passed the threshold and we are partners. We are partners of OVS. And why a partner like us for the next 20 years can give you a hand?' 'But how 20 years? I've been here with funds, first one fund, then another, to repay debts.' And he says 'But the package of these funds that are left in the capital.' I said 'Well, in the next few weeks we'll go visit them together, see if we find an agreement and buy them.' So we did, we went to visit them together, we overpaid for that package. I know from internal sources that they would have sold it even for less than what we paid, but patience because in these things, strategy rewards more than the 0.0 of price saved. We reached this agreement with BC Partners, coincidentally, the same partner of Interpump 20 years earlier, and we started. At this point, between the package we had and the package we bought, we were by far the largest shareholder. The industrial adventure was to say: 'Dear Stefano, you have done very well, but you have based yourself a lot on low price, a medium segment, more of a price activity than quality. Why don't we try to make a bet a bit more on quality? Let's increase prices, improve stores, maybe study whether to add some other brands.' Besides, he said: 'I already have this in my head, but they never allowed me to do it because they always wanted dividends, repayments. I think he has reimbursed the private equity funds almost a billion over the years, so I told him 'No, look, if necessary we will even do a capital increase to show that the money is not being taken out.' And so this adventure of this pair of go-getters was born. We talk, not every day, but certainly very often. This year OVS will make the record balance sheet in its history. The stock since we entered has multiplied by 4-5 times.