Europe slows down considerably Download PitchBook’s Report here. European PE activity hit a skid in Q2, as expected. According to PitchBook’s recently released Q2 European PE Breakdown, deal volume plunged to its lowest quarterly totals since Q3 2013. 650 transactions closed in Q2 for €79.8 billion, YoY declines of 31.5% and 18.7%, respectively…. Subscribe to Read

Venture-backed > PE-backed Private equity is losing its oomph as an M&A driver this year. PitchBook’s new North American M&A Report found that PE-backed M&A is now less common than venture-backed M&A, at least by volume. It’s the first switch between the two asset classes since 2009, which isn’t a coincidence. PE exits come to…

Carveouts inching up Download PitchBook’s Report here. Carveouts are up slightly as a proportion of US PE activity, according to PitchBook’s latest Breakdown Report. They made up 10% of all deal flow in Q2, which is on the high end of what we’ve seen over the last three years. Carveouts didn’t boom in numbers in Q2…

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…