Private Equity
2 min read · 29 March 2011
It all started with a letter. Rob Morris didn't even expect a reply. "I viewed it in my mind like writing the ex-girlfriend one last letter, and I would never hear from the person," said Morris, the managing partner of Olympus Partners, a buyout shop in Stamford, Conn. Morris had no connections to Spencer Bachus, the letter's intended recipient and the chief candidate to become chairman of the House Financial Services Committee after the GOP took the House of Representatives last November. In fact, Morris had no experience dealing with Washington, D.C. But Morris had been studying provisions of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that would require private equity firms to register as investment advisers, and the registration provision struck him as a waste ...
3 min read · 25 March 2011
Manufacturing has recovered strongly since the Great Recession and is likely to retain a key position in the U.S. economy, according to participants at the Association for Corporate Growth's InterGrowth conference this week in San Diego. This perspective should be reassuring for financial sponsors, who historically have favored sectors such as manufacturing, with its hard assets and generally reliable, if often unglamorous, financial performance. While the sector should continue to be a mainstay of the economy, its prospects are likely to be driven more by technological investments and automation, even as its role as a job creator continues to decline. Altus Capital Partners, a boutique buyout shop in Westport, Conn., looks for target companies that have a proprietary technology or process that can drive their growth, said Elizabeth Burgess, a senior partner at the firm, during a panel discussion on manufacturing. But the firm also must analyze the cost of maintaining the competitive edge of its portfolio companies, she said.
3 min read · 23 March 2011
My colleague Alastair Goldfisher took a swing already at the venture capitalists on the Forbes list of the world's billionaires. Perhaps it's no surprise there are more dudes from the buyouts world (and way predominantly, these superwealthy folks are of the male persuasion) on this list than there are from VC. The thing that may be more surprising is that the richest of the rich in the buyouts world, although they swim in the same waters as the fund managers we focus on here, don't play with the same pools. Consider, for instance, Warren Buffet, No. 3
3 min read · 10 March 2011
This supposed loan slump is looking more and more like a seasonal phenomenon to me, rather than a sign of the apocalypse. We have seen a fair amount of handwringing in 2011 about the slowdown in lending deal flow since the first of the year, both by Ron Kahn of Lincoln International here at peHUB and also by Randy Schwimmer of Churchill Financial. My colleague Bernard Vaughan has also written about the same issue at sister site Buyoutsnews.com. (Subscribers can see that report here.) The concern is that, apart from refinancings and recapitalizations, which have been booming, the volume of fresh deal flow in the leveraged lending market has been disappointing ...
2 min read · 10 March 2011
2 min read · 25 February 2011
1 min read · 22 February 2011
1 min read · 14 February 2011
2 min read · 09 February 2011
3 min read · 02 February 2011
