SEOUL (Reuters) – Creditors of Daewoo Electronics have ended talks to sell the South Korean appliance and TV maker to U.S. private equity firm Ripplewood Holdings and would look at ways to restructure Daewoo, a bank official said on Wednesday. The collapse of the talks marks the third failed attempt to sell loss-making Daewoo. Tighter […]
LONDON (Reuters) – The value of UK private equity takeovers fell to the lowest level in 13 years between October and December due to a lack of debt funding and the rapidly cooling economy, a leading research group said on Wednesday. The value of buy-out deals reached just 994 million pounds ($1.48 billion) in the […]
What are they going to do? There hasn’t been a new SPAC deal announced in months, after what seemed like a nonstop flurry of “SPAC-Attack!” announcements. Yet as I recall, SPACs raised $12 billion in 2007. According to research site SPAC Analytics, and 52 SPACs, or $10 billion worth, have yet to find an acquisition. If we subtract the $3.8 billion they raised in 2008, we can roughly estimate at least $6 billion worth of SPACs will be meeting their 18-month deadlines to strike a deal in the coming year. Even if they do find a willing seller, those SPACs have a boatload of headwinds working against them. For starters, you may have noticed the public markets have redefined ugly. SPACs have almost universally seen their share prices drop this year, which bodes poorly for getting a deal approved. Then we have the natural buyer of SPAC shares—hedge funds. It’s an understatement to say they’ve been blasted by redemptions. The blind pools are dry as the desert, and their shareholders have every motivation to vote against any proposed merger to get their money back.
CHICAGO, Jan 6 (Reuters) – The winning bidder in the long-awaited sale of the Chicago Cubs baseball team will be identified this week, three sources close to the process said on Tuesday. “Bidders have been told a single party to negotiate with will be chosen this week,” said one source, who asked not to be […]
Erin Griffith lists 49 PE deals that went Chapter 11 in 2008, up from just two in 2007. Wow! But, not one technology deal made the list. (Wow again?) Leveraged buyouts in the technology sector are not new, as firms like Welsh Carson, TA Associates, GA and Warburg Pincus have been at it for over 25 years. But when the tech bubble burst and the IPO market became terminally ill back in 2000, these old-line firms were joined by a rush of overfed VCs (Battery, NorthBridge, Insight), generalist buyout shops and several new tech-focused PE firms – all of whom went on a remarkable fund-raising and shopping spree. The new breed of tech-focused PE firms were lead by names like Silver Lake, Francisco, Golden Gate, Vista and Vector. Many of these firms were built on tech banking talent that spent the 1990’s taking companies public. With the public markets dominated by hedge funds, day traders and regulators – these PE firms focused taking their old banking clients private. Like all LBO activity – the velocity and amplitude to tech buyout deals were dramatically enhanced by free credit and peaked in Q2 of 2007, when Kronos was taken private by Hellman and JMI for $1.8b, or 17x EBITDA.
Yellowstone Landscape Group, a portfolio company of Gridiron Capital, has acquired Austin Outdoor, a Bunnell, Fla.-based provider of landscaping services in Florida and The Bahamas. No financial terms were disclosed.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Goody’s Family Clothing, a privately held apparel retail chain which emerged from bankruptcy in October, plans to liquidate its remaining stores as the U.S. economic recession has undermined its ability to continue operating. “The company is in the processes of obtaining bids to liquidate substantially all collateral and inventory,” said Cathy […]
Add one more bruise to the growing list of battered Apollo management investments. Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus believe Inkeepers USA, a hotel REIT investment made by the firm's publicly traded BDC, is heading for default in '09. For background, Apollo Investments is a BDC traded on NASDAQ under the ticker AINV. It makes equity, debt and senior secured loan investments across a variety of sectors and has a $1.34 billion market cap. You may remember the fund's CEO, John Hannan, resigned in November; he's been replaced by COO James Zelter. The fund took Innkeepers USA Trust private in April 2007 for $1.5 billion. According to the analyst report, the deal brought Innkeepers from 4x leverage to an estimated 10x proforma expected 2008 EBITDA (page nine has a nice before and after cap structure chart). The report states that the investment is "significantly underperforming," and likely to see a rocky '09.
Total Safety U.S. Inc., a Houston, Texas-based portfolio company of DLJ Merchant Banking Partners, has acquired Wholesale Radio Rental Inc., a provider of portable communication devices for use in the petroleum, oil and gas and petrochemical industries. No financial terms were disclosed.
Macrovision (Nasdaq: MVSN) has terminated its agreement to sell the TV Guide Network to One Equity Partners for $225 million, after reaching a $255 million agreement to sell TV Guide Network and TV Guide Online to Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF).