• Temasek will soon announce a deal to buy the U.K.'s Element Materials Technology from Bridgepoint for somewhere around $7 billion, per multiple reports, a sign that the market for major takeovers in the U.K. could remain robust into 2022. Element provides testing and certification services for materials and products across a range of industries, including aerospace, oil & gas, medical devices and transportation. Temasek, a Singapore state-backed investor which already owns a minority stake in Element, beat out other bidders including Cinven and and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, per Bloomberg. Bridgepoint bought the company from fellow British buyout firm 3i Group in 2015.
• A SPAC backed by Gary Cohn revealed plans to merge with major European lottery operator Allwyn Entertainment, resulting in an expected enterprise valuation of $9.3 billion. Formerly the president of Goldman Sachs and the chief economic advisor to then-President Donald Trump, Cohn teamed with investor Clifton S. Robbins to launch the SPAC in 2020, raising $828 million in an IPO that year. Robbins runs public-markets investor Blue Harbour Group, and he was previously a partner at KKR. During its latest fiscal year, Allwyn handled some €16 billion in bets across lotteries in Austria, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece and Italy, and it expects to log $1.7 billion in net gaming revenue this year. The company will trade on the NYSE once the deal is complete.
• Last year, Bob Dylan agreed to sell his songwriting catalog to Universal Music Group, reportedly fetching around $300 million. Now, the Nobel Prize winner is parting ways with his catalog of master recordings, too, agreeing today to sell his six decades' worth of albums and other recorded work to Sony. No price was announced, but Billboard estimates the value of the masters at around $200 million. A published song typically produces two copyrights: One for the lyrics and the melody, and another for the actual performance. Investors have been in hot pursuit of both types of assets amid the recent spurt of sales involving song rights. Here's a thorough (and rather critical) look at the how the history of music copyright law has informed this frenzy of deals.
• Shares of Unilever plunged precipitously last week after it emerged that the Dutch consumer goods conglomerate had tried and failed to buy GSK Consumer Health for £50 billion (about $67 billion). But the stock has since regained most of that ground, including a nearly 7% uptick today that came after news that activist investor Nelson Peltz and his Trian Fund Management have taken a stake in Unilever. Some critics and shareholders have been underwhelmed by Unilever's performance amid the pandemic, and they seem to believe that pressure from Peltz & Co. could turn the tide. In confirming its pursuit of GSK Consumer Health last week, Unilever issued a statement indicating plans to more aggressively push into the health and beauty sector in the near future and diminish its focus on food.
• In a bid to make its weather forecasts just a little more accurate, AccuWeather has purchased Plume Labs, a French startup that uses proprietary algorithms and technology to predict and monitor air quality and air pollution around the world. The growing frequency of wildfires in the American West has made air-quality data more important than ever for many of AccuWeather's users. The two companies are already quite familiar with each other, as AccuWeather previously owned a smaller stake in Plume and has incorporated the startup's data into its own products since 2020. Plume raised a few million in earlier venture funding from backers including Bpifrance.
• It took several years for the early food delivery sector to mature to the point of billion-dollar valuations and significant acquisitions. Fittingly, the burgeoning rapid delivery space seems to be progressing much more quickly. Berlin-based player Gorillas is in talks to acquire French rival Frichti, per Bloomberg, a potential move that would reportedly create the second-biggest provider of same-day grocery delivery in Paris. But Gorillas aims to be much quicker than same-day, with a goal of bringing customers their orders within 15 minutes. Gorillas is a child of the pandemic age: It only raised its first round of seed funding in July 2020, and by September 2021, it had already soared to a $3 billion valuation, per PitchBook. In the U.S., Gopuff and its $15 billion valuation serve as a testament to how the rapid delivery space has rapidly gone to the big time.
• Dutch dairy cooperative FrieslandCampina is mulling a sale of its Friso infant nutrition business, with hopes of attaining a valuation of between $1 billion and $2 billion, according to Bloomberg. Several potential suitors have already expressed interest, the report said, including Bain Capital, Baring Private Equity Asia, The Carlyle Group and Shijiazhuang Junlebao Dairy. Friso makes formula and other related nutrition products for infants, toddlers and pregnant women, with a network of 19,000 farms and sales across more than two-dozen countries. If a deal comes together, it would be the latest instance of FrieslandCampina slimming down: Last year, it sold its Nutrifeed animal nutrition business to Denkavit, a fellow Dutch company that specializes in animal feed.
• Blackstone's aforementioned deals aren't the only recent activity from a major private equity firm in the real estate sector. The credit division of The Carlyle Group has formed a new partnership with Précis Capital Partners to finance the development of new homes and apartments in the U.K., an aim to capitalize on what Précis describes as an "acute long-term structural undersupply" in the nation. For one of their first transactions, the pair helped provide a £251 million (about $337 million) loan to Moda Living to fund the construction of 467 new rental units in London, with Apollo Global Management also joining as a joint senior lender. Late last year, Carlyle, Précis and Apollo put together a £76 million facility for a development of 137 for-sale units in west London.
• A push into growth investing continues at Vista Equity Partners. The firm announced a $150 million investment in OfficeSpace Software, a creator of software for hybrid workplaces in the post-pandemic world, the latest evidence of Vista's increasing appetite for minority deals (as opposed to its typical software buyouts) since the start of 2021. The OfficeSpace platform helps companies manage desk booking, room booking, social distancing and other modern workplace necessities. Resurgens Technology Partners, which has backed OfficeSpace since 2019, will retain its stake in the Atlanta-based company.
• Longtime French private equity investor Wendel struck a deal today to buy the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists for $500 million, snapping up an organization that has certified more than 50,000 professionals who work to prevent financial crimes. ACAMS, which generated $83 million in revenue during its latest fiscal year, is currently part of the financial services unit at Adtalem Global Education. In a related deal, Adtalem also agreed to sell the rest of that financial services unit—namely Becker Professional Education and OnCourse Learning—to Colibri, a professional education company that is itself owned by Gridiron Capital. Becker helps would-be accountants prep for the CPA exam, and OnCourse provides governance, risk and compliance training for financial institutions.
|
|
|
|
