The 2013 PEI 300: "Not them again…"

TPG may have more firepower than anyone else in the PEI 50. But according to new research from academic Oliver Gottschalg and his team at PERACS, Apollo Global Management is actually the top-50 firm most likely to be a competitive thorn in the side of other firms in this group.

PERACS, a Frankfurt-based research group, has come up with a tool called ‘Relevant Competitor Analysis’. This analyses all the buyout deals firms have done and breaks them down into ‘strategic cells’, based on size, location, timing, sector and so on. By measuring how active different firms are in these various cells, it can then come up with a ‘strategic overlap score’ between any two.

Gottschalg and co. have run these numbers for the PEI 50, and worked out who the top five competitors are of each firm on the list (although some have fewer than five, since PERACS discounts any overlap below 5 percent). The results are interesting. Although TPG is apparently a leading competitor of 11 other firms on the list, that was one fewer than Blackstone, two fewer than Bain, and seven behind the most cited firm, Apollo – which is apparently a key rival of no fewer than 18 of the firms on the PEI 50.

What’s interesting about this is the implication that in terms of sheer breadth, Apollo’s sphere of operation surpasses all of its rivals on this list. And this analysis doesn’t even include debt-related deals, where Apollo is particularly strong.