Czech billionaire Jiri Smejc uses bonds to fund global expansion

Jiří Šmejc is borrowing from Czech investors for the third time this year — and offering the highest yield he ever has. His group Emma Capital has opened a bond issue worth 2.5 billion crowns, with an option to raise it to 3.5 billion, at 7% annual interest, and the proceeds will go toward tightening control over the betting group Entain CEE and strengthening a logistics empire that spans the Czech firm Packeta and Greek firm BoxNow.

The group's finance arm, Emma Finance CZ, has opened subscription for bonds maturing in September 2031, with interest paid quarterly and a minimum lot of ten thousand crowns. In parallel, a smaller euro-denominated issue is running from the Slovak sister company Emma Finance SK — at 6% annual interest for 20 million euros, or roughly half a billion crowns.

According to the prospectus, approved a few days ago by the Czech National Bank, the money will go toward buying an additional 20% stake in the Central European betting group Entain CEE for 395 million euros (about 9.5 billion crowns). The group includes Croatia's SuperSport and Poland's STS, the country's largest bookmaker. After the deal, Emma's stake will grow from 22.5% to 42.5%, and thanks to a voting agreement with the Polish Juroszek family, which owns 10%, Šmejc will gain control with a combined voting stake of 52.5%. The deal is set to close in the autumn.

But betting isn't the only front where Šmejc is rolling out his international play. The second is logistics, fully disclosed in the prospectus for the first time. Emma owns 35% of Packeta, bought in 2024 together with private equity fund CVC, and 87.5% of Greece's BoxNow, a parcel-locker network the company built from scratch five years ago. The two sides have an option agreement under which Emma could contribute its BoxNow stake into Packeta's capital, which would restructure ownership across the whole group. According to the publication E15, this would leave Šmejc with roughly half of the combined company.

That could create one of Europe's largest players in out-of-home delivery. Last year Packeta delivered more than 184 million shipments — up 27% on the year before — and runs more than 13,000 automated parcel lockers and thousands of pickup points stretching from Germany to Romania. BoxNow, operating in Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Bulgaria and now Slovenia, has more than 4,200 boxes, most of them solar-powered, and processed 44 million parcels last year — a 130% increase.

The parcel-locker market is one of Europe's most fiercely contested battlegrounds right now, and Šmejc knows it from more than one side. Last June he stepped down as head of PPF, in which he was a co-owner and where he had run Home Credit for many years. PPF owns nearly 29% of Poland's InPost, Europe's largest parcel-locker network with 61,000 boxes, and this year agreed with FedEx, the Advent International fund and InPost founder Rafał Brzoska to take the company private for 7.8 billion euros.

Czech private investors' appetite for billionaires' bonds shows no sign of fading. Pale Fire Capital, the group run by Jan Barta and Dušan Šenkypl, opened its own issue on 17 August, and three-quarters of a billion crowns at 7.25% sold out in a single day. Emma itself raised 2.5 billion crowns and 50 million euros last summer, added another 2 billion at 6.35% this February, and sold out the company's very first Czech bond issue back in 2019 within a week. Notably, the same day Emma Capital's new bond programme launched also saw subscriptions open for the hugely popular state Republic Bonds.

The new issue is backed by a guarantee from the Cyprus-based holding company Emma Alpha and secured against 62.5 million shares of the Romanian energy company Premier Energy — more than half of the company, which trades on the Bucharest stock exchange. The group, which Šmejc founded in 2012 after leaving Petr Kellner, posted revenue of 2.56 billion euros (about 62 billion crowns) last year and net profit of 85 million euros. Energy remains the group's largest business by far, but betting and logistics are growing faster.