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S&P 500 Earnings Dashboard 24Q4 | February. 12, 2025 Click here to view the full report. Please note: if you use our earnings data, please source "LSEG I/B/E/S".   S&P 500 Aggregate ... Find Out More
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Breakingviews: Walgreens invites a Rube Goldberg buyout plan

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg designed fantastical machines to complete simple tasks through tortuously convoluted mechanisms. Buyout shop Sycamore Partners might take his contraptions as a model, judging by a Wall Street Journal report that it’s in talks to acquire Walgreens Boots Alliance. The struggling $8 bln drugstore is buried under a $36 billion morass of debt, leases and legal costs. Yet a carefully orchestrated clean-up might extract a salvageable asset. The idea is straightforward enough. Set aside the complications and focus on Walgreens’ net debt of $6.4 billion. On that basis, before deal news broke on Tuesday, it traded at under 4 times
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Breakingviews
Dec 13, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Rubber meets road for divergent buyout-shop models

Buyout barons have been plowing disparate furrows, and the harvest is upon them. Third-quarter results from Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, Carlyle and KKR reveal their approaches are paying off in different ways. A presidential victory for business-friendly Donald Trump adds to the exuberance. For those who sowed with insurance, however, there are reaping challenges. Trump’s return to the White House, with his predilection for demanding lower interest rates, augurs an end to a long slowdown in transactions. The share prices for the private equity and credit foursome, with nearly $3 trillion of combined assets under management, jumped immediately following the election. The reaction compounds the benefits
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Breakingviews
Nov 11, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: EQT strikes a deal for post-Covid tech hangover

Dealmakers might be emerging from their bleary post-pandemic technology hangover. Though stock prices for companies like digital consultancy Perficient have sagged for some time, buyouts have been sparse as private equity recovers from a high-priced binge. If Perficient’s $3 billion sale to buyout shop EQT on Sunday is any indication, it could be time to pick up the pieces. The exit from Covid-19’s depths saw a giddy rebound for tech firms. The BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index spiked 75% between March 2020 and 2022. Delirious optimism attracted private equity firms stocked with mountains of dry powder and cheap debt. Information
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Breakingviews
May 10, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Private equity giants choose their own adventures

The four biggest U.S. private equity firms have a combined asset hoard of nearly $3 trillion, but within that big number, each is on a different quest. Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Apollo Global Management are all pursuing their own strategies, and their first-quarter financials showed them hitting some important new targets. Each, though, has ogres to vanquish. Apollo’s earnings on Thursday reflected its transformation into a gigantic private lender, powered by dollars from its in-house insurance business. Steady fees, which shareholders generally like, and income from investing policyholders’ premiums accounted for nearly all of net income. Apollo boss Marc Rowan wants its
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Breakingviews
May 3, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Cruise-ship IPO bets the rich will always float

High-end cruise line Viking is riding a grey wave. The California-based firm has filed to go public in New York, at a potential price of $10.8 billion, higher in relative valuation terms than its much larger peers Carnival and Royal Caribbean. In its favor is a reliance on older, richer customers. That is fuel for rapid growth, though investors will be subject to the whims of the fortunate few, in more ways than one. Viking is not shy about targeting a fairly narrow demographic for its fleet of nearly 100 boats. CEO Torstein Hagen, who also founded the company almost three decades
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Breakingviews
Apr 24, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Blackstone’s cash pile will buy only so much time

Blackstone is grappling with a peculiar sort of funding mismatch. The investment shop managing more than $1 trillion says market ructions present acquisition and lending opportunities, but it is also selling less. Moreover, the growing likelihood that interest rates stay higher for longer threatens deal activity. If the dynamic persists, it will sharpen the divide between fund backers focused on profit and public shareholders benefiting from capital deployment. The firm led by Steve Schwarzman has accumulated an impressive war-chest. Even as the U.S. Federal Reserve made borrowing costs pricier, Blackstone kept raising cash to invest, surpassing $200 billion. It more than
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Breakingviews
Apr 19, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Buyout shops take risky exit to bypass deal crash

Buyout firms have an even bigger problem than finding a place to park fleets of armored cars heaving with cash: what to do about their idling truckloads of portfolio companies. The two main avenues for returning money to increasingly itchy investors are largely blocked. To get around them, the existing owners are going down the road of cashing out backers while keeping assets. The problem is that more traffic will make this route riskier. Clearing the backlog is a gargantuan task. More than $3 trillion of unsold investments are sitting inside private equity firms, according to a report issued this week by
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Breakingviews
Mar 15, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Private equity is getting its story straight

Carlyle named a new boss; KKR embarked on a insurer-merger makeover; Apollo Global Management  touted its rise to debt-printing machine. The era of high interest rates choked off deals, cut into earnings, but saw a flowering of strategic shifts among buyout shops. The industry’s giants now all have a story to tell about why they’re on stronger footing. As the U.S. Federal Reserve loosens its stranglehold, the strategic mania should ease. But as they’re showing, buyouts still matter. Harvey Schwartz, now a year into the top job at Carlyle, on Wednesday unveiled turnaround targets, joining his major rivals in crystallizing a big-picture
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Breakingviews
Feb 9, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Basketball-maker will bounce back from IPO brick

If any company knows how to rebound from an ugly brick shot, it should be one in the basketball business. Amer Sports badly missed on the pricing of its initial public offering, despite having an all-star roster of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley on its team as underwriters. The owner of the Wilson, Salomon and Arc’teryx brands sold shares at just $13 apiece, below a marketed range of $16 to $18, valuing it at about $6 billion. Fears about its dependence on China are overblown, however, and make the investment a slam dunk. Amer has upped its game since the
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Breakingviews
Feb 2, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Blackstone is calling the bottom, almost

Not even the mighty Blackstone can defy the economy. At present that’s a good thing. The $1 trillion asset manager broke a five-quarter run of declining earnings in the fourth quarter. Money deployed for deals and cash flowing into its funds also increased year-on-year after a similar-length dry spell. Boss Steve Schwarzman says 2023 was the industry’s nadir, which means what comes next is the bounceback. Everything is going as a Blackstone investor might hope – except for one precious piece of the puzzle. Like his peers, Schwarzman had a rough 2023. Private equity firms couldn’t easily find cheap credit to fund
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Breakingviews
Jan 26, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Blackstone partly cracks new private equity code

Leveraged buyouts have become a drag. KKR, Carlyle and others are enduring a slump in the wheeling and dealing of companies because of higher interest rates and tumbling valuations while emergent businesses in credit, real estate and infrastructure generate more of the steadier fees desired by investors in publicly traded shares of private equity firms. Blackstone’s latest fund tries to crack this new code. In a sense, the $150 billion shop led by Steve Schwarzman is refocusing on its roots. Blackstone once relied almost exclusively on raising captive pools of money from big pension and sovereign wealth funds for buyouts. The new
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Breakingviews
Jan 10, 2024
posted by Breakingviews

Breakingviews: Private-asset binge exposes insurance to new risks

Alternative asset managers and U.S. insurers have come together to create a highly profitable version of pass-the-parcel. Regulators, bank executives and investors warn that this fast-growing alliance could be the source of the next financial crisis. Are they right? Insurers have plentiful safeguards to stop them going off the rails. The problem comes when the market evolves rapidly but rules that keep it in check do not. Apollo Global Management and KKR are among the buyout firms that have wedged themselves into the stodgy world of writing policies by buying control of insurers. KKR said on Wednesday it would buy
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Breakingviews
Dec 1, 2023
posted by Breakingviews
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