Q2 was as bad as expected PitchBook’s latest US PE Breakdown is out this Friday, and newsletter subscribers will have access to it that morning. The first full quarter of COVID-impacted data is in and it isn’t pretty. Overall US PE deal flow was down 54% from the first quarter, from 1,147 transactions to only…

Fundraising sped up in Q1 Download PitchBook’s Report here. Somewhat expected, we found a quirk in Q1 fundraising data that should reverse soon. Funds that closed in the first three months of 2020 were wrapped up relatively quickly compared to 2019, according to PitchBook’s latest US Middle Market Report. As a whole, middle market funds that…

Slow start for big deals Download PitchBook’s Report here. The US middle market only saw about $7 billion worth of deals valued in the $500M-$1B transaction range in Q1. That translated into 7% of total dollars invested in the middle market, a very small ratio by historical standards, according to PitchBook’s latest US Middle Market Report….

Add-ons appear healthy Download PitchBook’s Report here. At the outset of the quarantines, at least one market observer—yours truly—believed add-ons would hit the pause button after two torrid years of deal flow. The assumption: it was hard to imagine too many add-ons being done when existing portfolio companies had so many sudden issues of their own….

How sponsors are handling the crisis The economic impact of the COVID lockdowns was so swift that many investors “didn’t know what they didn’t know” at the outset. Many didn’t even know what the problems were, let alone fix them. In a recent collaboration with RSM, “COVID-19: Rewriting private equity’s playbook,” their in-house industry experts…

Only 27 exits in April We’re starting to see the true effects of the pandemic show up in the data. In an upcoming PitchBook collaboration with RSM, exit volume fell 73%, to just 27 transactions, between January and April. May will see similar volume or lower…. Subscribe to Read MoreAlready a member? Log in here...

The short-term forecast Download PitchBook’s Report here. PitchBook analysts expect deal flow to drop fairly substantially over the next several quarters. The trajectory is similar to the drop during the 2008 financial crisis but doesn’t reach the depths that it did in 2009. If our forecasts come close to the truth, deal volume will dip to…

April was down, as expected Download PitchBook’s Report here. An early look at April 2020 deal volume shows the significant decline we’ve all been anticipating. Only 158 transactions were completed last month, less than half of the typical monthly volume we were seeing pre-pandemic. As we’ve noted in the past, some of these deals were announced…

The consolidation question Download PitchBook’s Report here. If the current downturn mimics the 2008 financial crisis, private equity may see a few years of industry consolidation before diversifying again. In 2007, on the eve of the GFC, firms with at least $10B in AUM accounted for about 41.1% of the industry’s capital…. Subscribe to Read MoreAlready

The bankruptcy question Download PitchBook’s Report here. A looming question over the next several months is how many PE-backed companies will be forced into bankruptcy. The odds suggest an increase in PE-backed bankruptcies as cash flows begin to dry up in the short term. According to PitchBook’s Quantitative Perspectives, GFC-era data offers some clues on what…