MOSCOW, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Two key Russian shareholders of Croatian food producer and retailer Fortenova Grupa, formerly known as Agrokor, have started consulting investment banks about taking the company public in the next 2-3 years, two sources said.
Fortenova, one of the biggest companies in southeastern Europe, was saved from bankruptcy in a restructuring deal with local and foreign creditors in mid-2018, which included a change of the name and the ownership structure.
Russian state bank Sberbank, which now controls 44% of the company, and VTB, another Russian state bank which owns 7.5%, both took part in the restructure of Fortenova and see an IPO as one of the options to cash out, at least partially, the sources said.
A source close to Sberbank and another source close to VTB said that JP Morgan and VTB Capital, the investment banking arm of VTB, are evaluating Fortenova for the initial public offering, which would not take place until 2023 or later.
JP Morgan sees Fortenova worth around $3 billion, the sources said. According to one of the sources, VTB Capital puts Fortenova's valuation at $2.2 billion-$2.5 billion. Both estimates include Fortenova's debt, sources said.
The first source said that there had been no formal hiring of the investment banks at this stage.
"It is the matter of shareholders," a Fortenova spokesperson said when asked to comment on IPO prospects. VTB and JP Morgan declined to comment, Sberbank did not reply to a Reuters request for a comment. (Reporting by Tatiana Voronova in Moscow Additional reporting by Olga Popova in Moscow and Igor Ilic in Zagreb Writing by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Susan Fenton)