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Europe's PE Firms Ready Record Fundraising Efforts | Silver Lake Nears a Windfall | CDPQ Eyes $1 Billion Payday
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Good Monday to all! As we near the end of winter we can expect more than the weather to warm up. As our William Louch reports, private-equity firms in Europe are readying what could be a record fundraising push, while deal makers are already picking up the pace. In California, Silver Lake-backed Credit Karma is near a deal to be acquired by Intuit for about $7 billion and eBay may carve out its classified-ad division at a nearly $10 billion valuation, attracting the interest of big buyout shops.
On another front, our Preeti Singh has a take on cross-fund investing, which poses special hazards for institutional investors. All that and more below, so please jump in…
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Gamla Stan, the old town of Stockholm, where Nordic Capital is based. The firm is among a group of European buyout shops that plan to raise new funds this year. PHOTO: INTS KALNINS/REUTERS
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Some of Europe’s best-known private-equity firms are preparing to raise new funds in what could be a record-breaking year for the region. Charterhouse Capital Partners and Nordic Capital are both expected to raise their latest flagship funds in 2020, targeting €2.5 billion ($2.7 billion) and more than €4.3 billion ($4.66 billion), respectively, WSJ Pro’s William Louch reports, citing people familiar with the situation.
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Silver Lake could be lining up a big win as Intuit Inc. nears a deal to acquire personal finance site Credit Karma Inc. for about $7 billion in cash and stock, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Cara Lombardo and Dana Cimilluca, who cited people familiar with the matter. The buyout firm acquired a roughly $500 million stake in San Francisco-based Credit Karma in early 2018 in a deal that valued the company at about $4 billion.
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Quebec’s giant pension-fund manager, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is poised to earn a $1 billion profit from Alstom SA's planned takeover of Bombardier Inc.’s train business, thanks to an unusual deal it struck four years ago to finance the aircraft maker, The Wall Street Journal’s Jacquie McNish reports. CDPQ owes its big gain to terms it demanded in 2016 when it paid $1.5 billion for what is now a 32.5% stake in Bombardier’s train car division. At the time, Bombardier was so stretched for cash to finance plane and train orders delayed by production issues that CDPQ was one of the few institutions willing to back the company.
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Singh's Take: The Risks of Double Dipping With Cross-Fund Investing
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Institutional investors don’t like losing money on their private-equity bets, let alone taking multiple hits on the same deal. But when a general partner bets big on a company through more than one fund and the deal sours, that can be exactly what happens. Read More.
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$389 Billion
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The value of private equity-backed buyouts that closed last year, down 21% from 2018’s total of $493 billion, Preqin Ltd. data show
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It has been a time of tumult for eBay, a one-time internet darling whose core marketplace business has been weakened by the rise of Amazon.com. PHOTO: FABRIZIO BENSCH/REUTERS
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EBay Inc. is taking steps toward a potential sale of its classified-ads business, which could be worth roughly $10 billion, Cara Lombardo, Corrie Driebusch and Miriam Gottfried report, citing people familiar with the matter. Private-equity firms including TPG and Blackstone Group Inc. and strategic bidders including Naspers Ltd. and KKR & Co.-backed German publisher Axel Springer SE have recently expressed interest in the business, the people said. The company has also started reaching out to other potential buyers and may opt for a spinoff or joint venture.
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A former EMC Corp. executive, Harry You, has joined with Niccolo de Masi, a veteran technology company leader, to form a blank check company that has priced its initial public offering to raise $200 million. The Las Vegas-based special-purpose acquisition company called DMY Technology Group Inc. aims to acquire one or more
mobile consumer apps providers with an enterprise value of $500 million to $1.5 billion, a regulatory filing shows.
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Carlyle Group Inc. has invested in family-owned Mak-System International Group, which provides software for blood banks and other organizations that collect and distribute human blood and plasma. The Paris-based company’s programs help organizations manage blood donations, storage and transfer to care providers for transfusions. Carlyle invested through its Carlyle Europe Partners V and Carlyle Europe Technology Partners IV funds.
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A blank-check company backed by a private-equity firm and formed to acquire a technology business active in the financial services sector plans to raise as much as $138 million in an initial public offering, regulatory filings show. East Stone Acquisition Corp. is backed by Burlington, Mass.-based East Stone Capital co-founders Xiaoma (Sherman) Lu and Chunyi (Charlie) Hao. The backers also include two executives from China, Tencent vice president Hua Mao and Baidu veteran Cheng Zhao. The company has 15 months to identify and acquire a fintech enterprise or it must return the capital raised
to investors, the filings indicate. The offering is set to close Monday.
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Battery Ventures has acquired GRAS Sound & Vibration, a maker of audio testing and measurement microphones and other hardware, and added it to its acoustic test and measurement group, which includes Audio Precision, Holte, Denmark-based GRAS said. Family-owned GRAS has been in operation since 1994 and will remain under current management, led by Lars Kjærgaard as chief executive.
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Our add-on deal interactive tool allows you to sort and analyze volumes of add-on deal data compiled by WSJ Pro. View more.
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Thoma Bravo sold about 21.3 million Dynatrace Inc. shares at $34.50 each in a secondary offering that priced late Thursday, Colin Kellaher reported for Dow Jones Newswires. Waltham, Mass.-based Dynatrace, a software-intelligence company, has seen its share price more than double since a July initial public offering priced at $16 a share. Thoma Bravo separated Dynatrace from Compuware Corp., a software developer it acquired in a $2.5 billion deal in 2014. The Chicago-based private-equity firm will still own a roughly 50.9% stake in Dynatrace, assuming an over-allotment option is exercised.
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Main Capital Partners has agreed to sell business software provider Onguard International Holding BV to Oslo-based Visma AS, which sells software to corporations and governments. The Hague-based private-equity firm acquired the cloud-based software company in 2014. Amsterdam-based Onguard provides customers with programs used in billing, collections and other transactions.
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Private-equity firm Ethos Capital on Friday sought to placate critics of its $1.1 billion offer to buy the rights to operate the internet’s Public Interest Registry, which governs assignments of the .org suffix often used by nonprofit organizations. Ethos said it would cap price increases and create an advisory board with veto powers to ease concerns about the deal from the nonprofit community. The registry runs the databases containing more than 10 million .org names. The deal has raised concerns about pricing and administrative issues and spurred calls for official inquiries from Congress and California’s attorney general.
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The bail-bond industry in the U.S. is under intense pressure as more states virtually wipe out cash bail and financial firms such as Endeavour Capital look for exits from an increasingly controversial profit center in the criminal-justice system. Most recently, Endeavour followed other investors out of the industry by selling its stake in Aladdin Bail Bonds, one of the country’s largest bail-bond providers, The Wall Street Journal’s Laura Kusisto reports.
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Melody Capital Partners and GFR Holdings would take control of bankrupt oil-and-gas company Furie Operating Alaska LLC’s assets under a proposal submitted last week to a U.S. bankruptcy court judge in Wilmington, Del. The firms set up Kachemak Exploration LLC as a vehicle to take control of the enterprise after Anchorage, Alaska-based Hex LLC’s $15 million winning bid at a December auction didn’t come to fruition, WSJ Pro’s Aisha Al-Muslim reported.
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Send us your tips, suggestions and feedback. Write to:
Ted Bunker, Laura Cooper, Chris Cumming, Luis Garcia, Laura Kreutzer, William Louch, Preeti Singh, Chitra Vemuri.
Follow us on Twitter: @wsjpe, @LCooperReports, @LHVGarcia, @LauraKreutzer, @william_louch.
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