Think Investments outlines opposition to TaskUs going private transaction

Think Investments, long-term investor with ~23%1 ownership in the minority shares of TaskUs (TASK) issued a presentation outlining its opposition to the proposed take-private of the Company by Blackstone (BX) and TaskUs’ founders for a price of $16.50 per share. Think intends to vote against the Transaction. The firm said, “In the presentation, Think outlines the following: The Transaction price substantially undervalues TaskUs. Think’s analysis of relevant comparable transactions and the Company’s recent operating outperformance indicates that a fair valuation for TaskUs is $25.00 per share, more than 50% above the proposed buyout price. In just the few months following the Transaction’s announcement, TaskUs has significantly outperformed the financial expectations factoring into the $16.50 figure – according to Think, this alone warrants a re-rating. The Transaction is the result of a skewed process that lacked rigor and relied on cherry-picked precedent transactions and public comparables. Think believes that the TaskUs Board of Directors’ Special Committee failed to undertake a comprehensive process to determine a fair price for the Company. Additionally, the fairness opinion appears to deliberately and exclusively include precedent transactions and public comparables with low valuation multiples. The most relevant precedent transaction, which was omitted from the Company’s valuation materials, is the acquisition of WNS by Capgemini – this pending transaction implies fair value for TaskUs would be ~12x LTM EBITDA, in contrast to the fairness opinion’s 6.8x median precedent transaction multiple. TaskUs has significant value creation potential – and the Transaction would prevent minority shareholders from realizing this upside. In particular, TaskUs is well positioned to embrace AI. AI Services constitutes the fastest scaling portion of the business, with 65.5% YoY growth in H1’25. Coupled with strong momentum coming out of the first half of the year, Think believes the Transaction’s contemplated price fails to compensate minority shareholders for the Company’s intrinsic value.”