What does PE’s capital overhang portend? Through the end of 2015, the private equity industry in North America and Europe had an overhang of no less than $749.4 billion. A plurality of that is concentrated in funds of the 2015 vintage, with a majority—55%—in funds closed in the past two years (funds return data is…
PE Buyers Are Still Not Taking Public Cos. Private Through the end of June, financial sponsors accounted for only 23% of all take-privates in North America and Europe. This isn’t necessarily a result of the overall incidence of take-privates… Subscribe to Read MoreAlready a member? Log in here...
US MM Transaction Sizes Indicate Concentration in the Core In the first half of 2016, the median size of buyouts in the US middle market declined slightly to $128.3 million, a slide of just over $11 million. Given PitchBook’s methodology of classifying the core middle market as transactions sized between $100 million and $500 million,…
PE Interest in US Lower Middle Market Slumps Temporarily After trending upward for over a year, private equity dealmaking in the US lower middle market (defined as transactions sized between $25 million and $100 million) fell sharply between 1Q and 2Q 2016. Granted, there were fluctuations in the upward trend, but 1Q recorded not only…
US PE sellers slowly reducing inventory of aging portfolio companies After climbing steadily for several years, the median hold period in the US by private equity firms roughly leveled off between 2013 and 2014. From there, the hold period for companies exited via IPO briefly leapt upward in 2015, only to plunge once more in…
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…