TISE announces Blue Diamond as first private market client

Building on TISE’s well-established public market for bonds and equities, TISE Private Markets is an innovative, integrated service providing unlisted companies with tailored electronic trading, settlement and registry solutions. 

Blue Diamond Limited becomes the first company to join TISE Private Markets.

Cees Vermaas, CEO of TISE, said: “I am extremely pleased to welcome Blue Diamond as the first client of TISE Private Markets. Having launched this service very recently, it is extremely rewarding to onboard our first client and I am delighted that it is Blue Diamond. The company is a well-known Channel Islands success story that has the right profile to join a public market so we are proud that instead they chose to support us in the development of this service and become the first company to join TISE Private Markets.”

Blue Diamond was originally founded in Guernsey in 1904 as the Fruit Export Company. Today, it remains a locally owned and managed company with its headquarters at Le Friquet Garden Centre, operating 44 garden centres across the UK and the Channel Islands, with more than 4,000 employees and annual revenues approaching £350 million. The company has over 420 private shareholders, with 75% based in Guernsey, and new investors regularly becoming shareholders.

Richard Hemans, Group Finance Director and Company Secretary of Blue Diamond Limited, said: “We are delighted to be the first company to join TISE Private Markets. This service provides a fantastic solution for private companies, like Blue Diamond, whose shareholders want a better way to trade their shares but without the cost, regulatory burden, and loss of control that a public listing entails. We believe that using the bespoke auction trading model and wider functionality of TISE Private Markets will support liquidity, enhance price discovery and make share trading more transparent for sellers and buyers, and therefore ensure that the share price better reflects the company’s underlying fundamentals.”

Having joined TISE Private Markets, Blue Diamond has full control of their dedicated market, from onboarding shareholders to scheduling auction events and managing registers. The company has access to a bespoke auction model which concentrates liquidity, a tailored auction algorithm to protect pre-emption rights, seamless electronic settlement of cash and shares, and online tools for the convenient management of share transfers and shareholder records.

Mr Vermaas added: “We expect that Blue Diamond’s experience of our service will generate significant interest in TISE Private Markets from other companies who are in a similar position of being privately owned or are currently quoted on public markets but wish to return to a private ownership model. We are already speaking to a number of interested parties and that will only increase in the coming months as we step up our marketing and sales activity in the Channel Islands and the UK. I look forward to welcoming more companies to TISE Private Markets whilst continuing to work with Blue Diamond, as our first client, to build out our proposition.”