Macquarie buys controlling stake in Gabia and KINX after raising offer to KRW 53,000 a share
Macquarie Asset Management has agreed to buy a controlling 69.35 per cent of South Korean cloud and data centre firm Gabia and 7.97 per cent of its listed subsidiary KINX at raised prices of KRW 53,000 and KRW 190,000 per share respectively. The deal, worth about KRW 567.2 billion (S$424 million), b
Macquarie Asset Management has agreed to buy a controlling stake in South Korean cloud services and data centre company Gabia, and is offering to buy out minority shareholders in the company and its listed data centre subsidiary KINX after activist shareholders sank the Australian financial giant's first attempt to take Gabia private.
Macquarie Asia-Pacific Infrastructure Fund 4 (MAIF4) has agreed to buy the shares held by Gabia's management and by investors Align Partners, Miri Capital and Gumshoe Capital at KRW 53,000 per Gabia share and KRW 190,000 per KINX share, the Sydney-based manager said in a statement on Wednesday. Those agreements cover 69.35 per cent of Gabia and 7.97 per cent of KINX, worth around KRW 567.2 billion (S$424 million), according to Korean regulatory filings reported by local media.
The deal brings on board activist investor Align Partners and US-based Miri Capital, which together held 38.5 per cent of Gabia and whose refusal to tender their shares helped sink Macquarie's KRW 48,000 per share offer for the company in September, when only 22.1 per cent of the minimum required shares were tendered. “We highly appreciate Macquarie's decision to improve the price and transaction structure in response to minority shareholders' demands while taking into account the interests of shareholders in both Gabia and KINX,” Align Partners chief executive Lee Chang-hwan said in a statement.
Macquarie is buying through a special purpose company, Korea Internet Infrastructure Holdings. Gabia founder and co-chief executive Kim Hong-guk and fellow executives Jeon Jeong-wan and Won Jong-hong will roll part of their Gabia or KINX shares into that vehicle as an in-kind contribution and continue to run the business, according to local media reports. The deal requires a foreign investment and national security review by Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources, as well as merger clearance from the Korea Fair Trade Commission.
The special purpose company plans to launch tender offers for all remaining shares of both companies at the same prices within 10 business days of government approval, and then delist them. Align Partners made the launch of those tenders a precondition for completing its own sale, according to local media reports. Macquarie did not disclose a total deal value.
Macquarie first offered KRW 48,000 per Gabia share on 20 July, a 41.6 per cent premium at the time. It also agreed to buy the 24.4 per cent stake held by Kim, the company's founder. Miri, which held 24.2 per cent of Gabia, and Align Partners, with 14.3 per cent, said the price undervalued the company. When the offer closed on 17 September, only 721,413 shares had been tendered, about 5.4 per cent of Gabia. Macquarie had needed at least 3.27 million shares, so the deal and the agreement with Kim both lapsed, according to local media reports.
Macquarie had said during the first tender that it had no plans to delist KINX. A Macquarie official told local media that shareholders including Align Partners asked for the delisting during the latest negotiations. The change comes as Korean regulators crack down on parent and subsidiary companies both being listed. New Korea Exchange rules that took effect on 3 August restrict such duplicate listings when they ignore the interests of the parent company's minority shareholders.
Kim founded Gabia in 1998. The company provides domain, hosting, cloud and data centre services. KINX runs Korea's carrier-neutral internet exchange, the network hub where telecom carriers and content providers connect, along with a colocation business. It had seven Korean data centres as of October 2025, plus one each in Tokyo and Hong Kong. The two companies are already Macquarie's development partners. In March, MAIF4 and Gabia agreed to jointly invest around KRW 600 billion in a hyperscale data centre platform targeting more than 100MW of capacity. That venture, since named CoreHub, is starting with a 40MW facility in Ansan, an industrial city 30 kilometres south of central Seoul, which KINX will help run.
