IT Remains a Favorite of PE Firms As private equity activity in the U.S. has slackened, nearly every sector has experienced a decline in overall volume of investments, barring one. Only the information technology sector is seeing a rate of PE dealmaking comparable to that of last year, with 261 closed transactions through the end…

The decline in US private equity activity deepens US private equity activity continues to fall. Even if Q2 numbers are revised upward as time goes on, with additional datapoints backfilled, a quarter-over-quarter decline will still have occurred in the first half of 2016. As of early July, completed deal count for Q2 is more in…

Recent Wave of Exits Differentiated U.S. PE Fund Managers The boom in private equity-backed selling observed over the past few years, cresting in 2015, yielded rich returns for certain U.S. buyout funds. More than that, it proved a differentiating area for the top tier of U.S. fund managers. As illustrated by the chart above, certain…

Closing times indicate divergence in company quality In the first quarter of 2016, most private equity transactions still took between 10 and 14 weeks to close, accounting for 31% of deals completed during that timeframe. However, as illustrated above, the portion of deals that closed in 15 to 20 weeks shot up to near 25%…

Core-middle-market buyout multiples slide in Q1 2016 Between the end of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016, median buyout multiples for the central middle market slid considerably. Calculating multiples by enterprise value over EBITDA, and then breaking them down by enterprise values from $25 million to $250 million, reveals a decline from 8.6x in…

Median healthcare buyout size surges in 1Q In the first quarter of 2016, the median private equity buyout in the U.S. healthcare sector hit $139.3 million in size, topping the previous high of $123 million in 2012. Even if 2016’s numbers slide as the year goes on, transaction sizes shouldn’t decline by much, owing to…

Another year of record PE distributions back to LPs? 2014 saw a mammoth $463.6 billion returned back to limited partners by private equity fund managers, capping off several years of steady increases in the annual total of distributions. But at $342.0 billion through the end of September, PE distributions in 2015 already look set to…

Recent PE Funds Have a Head Start As is to be expected, private equity funds of all vintages and geographies see their average distributed-to-paid-in multiples climb over time, as managers successfully liquidate even aging holdings after years of operational enhancements. The rates of increase in DPI multiples by vintage, however, can be split into two…

Larger PE Funds Continue to Realize Gains at Longer Horizons From the one-year mark to the 10-year, the horizon internal rates of return (IRRs) of private equity funds worldwide gradually advance from 8.2% to 13.1%. Breaking down fund performance by size bucket yields further insights, most notably that on a sufficiently long time horizon, funds…

U.S. PE firms pull back in Canada Last year saw a decade high of 201 U.S.-headquartered private equity firms invest in Canada, far outstripping the 129 domestic firms that were active in the same timeframe. Through the end of 1Q 2016, however, U.S. and Canadian PE firms are nearly evenly matched. This equalizing occurred as…