Private Equity
2 min read · 26 May 2011
LinkedIn is the darling of the market, pricing its IPO Wednesday at $45 and trading late today at $97.83, up 117%. But this is a big yawn compared to the days of the dotcom bubble. To put this in perspective, we thought we would look back at the top first-day pops by venture capital-backed IPOs, dating back to 1990. This slide show is a countdown, presented ranked by first-day percentage gain.
3 min read · 19 May 2011
The California Public Employees' Retirement System is, as everybody knows, the nation’s largest public pension fund with $233.6 billion of assets as of March 31 (the latest figure available, reported today). It also has one of the industry's largest portfolios of private equity investments; its $33.2 billion Alternative Investment Management program represents 14.2% of its total assets. We thought it would be interesting to find some of the system's top-ranking funds, which it reports on its Web site. The list that follows is current through Sept. 30. Sponsors report mark-to-market values on their portfolios quarterly, and they have 120 days to provide the information to their investors, so there is a two-quarter lag before CalPERS reports individual fund performance to the public. This slide show is a countdown, presented ranked by investment multiple. (As a point of comparison, when sister publication Buyouts Magazine did its annual ranking of fund performance last fall, based on reports from multiple sponsors, we found that it required a 2.0 investment multiple to crack the top quartile.) We had one tie, at No. 8. There we ranked T3 Partners II LP higher than CVC European Equity Partners III LP because of its larger IRR.
2 min read · 12 May 2011
Sponsor-backed industrial giants have been busy in 2011. sister publication Buyouts finds. Three of the largest LBO deals went public again since the first of the year, while others have taken advantage of easy credit conditions to extend debt maturities. Even the troubled Energy Future Holdings Co., facing a claim by a creditor of a techincal default, was able to extend the maturities on $17.8 billion in debt. A word about our methodology: Our list of biggest deals is derived from a Thomson Reuters database of private equity deals. We chose the largest buyout deals of U.S. companies that file quarterly statements with the SEC. We excluded foreign companies, deals that were predominantly about the real estate, companies that no longer have private equity sponsors (as a result of IPOs or strategic sales) and those that do not file 10-Ks. Here is a roundup of recent developments, based on regulatory filings, company announcements and news reports.
3 min read · 05 May 2011
2 min read · 02 May 2011
3 min read · 21 April 2011
2 min read · 19 April 2011
Benchmarking private equity fund performance is a notoriously slippery effort, with a variety of data providers, including our publisher, Thomson Reuters, generating results that can be widely divergent from one another. The newest player, poised to enter the game this month, is The Burgiss Group of Hoboken, NJ, a software developer and consultant to the alternative investment market. The company plans a Good Friday launch of an online benchmarking product, Private iQ, with data on 3,000 funds current through the end of 2010. (Have you tried it? If so, please let us know what you think ...
2 min read · 15 April 2011
Mid-market LBO dealflow disappointed lenders in the first quarter, according to Thomson Reuters LPC, a sister service of peHUB that tracks the loan market. With volume of less than $4 billion, activity was down 40% from the fourth quarter of 2010, according to LPC data. As a result, lenders have become more aggressive. Instead of the 3.5x to 4.5x EBITDA multiples that have been common, some new deals have offered 5x or even 6x EBITDA, LPC found. Follow the link for the video report by LPC’s Fran Beyers.
1 min read · 14 April 2011
2 min read · 08 April 2011
