Brisa buys share of Ascendi and gets 100% of Via Verde

Portugal’s Brisa Group is to buy a 25% share of tolls and mobile charging services company Ascendi, effectively giving it a 100% control of the company and of the Via Verde payment system.

The agreement between the Brisa Group and Ascendi is still awaiting approval from both the Portuguese Competition Authority and the Bank of Portugal.

The regulator will have a say on the deal because of the recently created Via Verde Pay payments system. The value of the deal has not been made public.

Ascendi, owned by the French fund Ardian, has held a 25% stake in Via Verde since 2021 after exercising its preemptive right to keep the 5% sold by Portuguese payments processing systems company SIBS.

Ascendi is also part of a joint venture created created by Via Verde and the German company Yunex to roll out a new electronic tolls charging system for Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGV) in the Netherlands that works using satellite. The consortium won the competition in October that had been launched by the Dutch transport authority RDW.

Created in 1991, Via Verde processed 566 million transactions last year at tolls worth €1.4Bn over the 3,000 Km of network that it operates.

Via Verde has 5.2 million scanners or ‘identifiers’ fitted in vehicles of which 1.8 million are purchased and 3.4 million are for subscription plans.

Via Verde is also installed in 312 multi-story car parks and has street parking charging points in 62 cities. It also supplies electric charging stations for electric vehicles as well as operating an application to buy transport tickets.

BCR – Brisa Concessão Rodoviária closed last year with profits of 325.9 million euros, which represents an increase of 17.8% compared to 2023, according to the information communicated to the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (CMVM). The results benefited from the “growth of Portuguese GDP [which] continued to positively impact road traffic.”