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It’s enough to make Leon Black, Henry Kravis and Stephen Schwarzman jealous.
UK-based buyout firm Resolution, founded by entrepreneur Clive Cowdery, has not only launched a rare IPO – it raised £600 billion ($889 million) last week- but the deal enjoyed a 15 percent “pop” in its trading debut on the London Stock Exchange Wednesday.
The buyout fund will target U.K. insurance and asset management companies in deals in the range of £3 to 5 billion. And that may be part of why the IPO did well: The U.K. insurance sector has underperformed the market with companies contending with lower valuations.
The deal was only the fifteenth IPO to list in London this year, where new issues in 2008 have raised only $8.9 billion, down 78 percent this year, according to Thomson Reuters data, and the fourth largest. The U.S. market for IPOs is down by about the same for the year.
The deal’s success came in stark contrast to the cold shoulder the IPO market in the U.S. has given financial companies, including private equity firms.
Apollo Management, which used the private placement market in August 2007 to begin trading stocks, filed to transfer its shares to the New York Stock Exchange in April, while Kohlberg Kravis Roberts has postponed its complicated plan to use the Amsterdam-based listing of a subsidiary to list on the NYSE.
But then again, with the performance of rival Blackstone Group – its shares are down 70 percent so far this year, who can blame investors for sitting on the sidelines? And it’s been a brutal year for private equity firms with little improvement in sight.
Happier days for Hank Greenberg, far left, in Hong Kong, 1997
Putting the catastrophe of AIG aside for a moment, it’s hard to imagine what blemishes might have convinced Chinese authorities to shut the door on Hank Greenberg’s plan for China’s first half-foreign-owned private equity venture. Greenberg’s China credentials are legendary, and Beijing wonks say everything that gets done in the People’s Republic does so because of personal connections.
Hank’s investment firm, Starr International, had hoped to start the $145.5 million joint venture with China’s top brokerage, CITIC Securities. Could the problem have been CITIC, and its soiled investment plans in U.S. firms? It came close to dropping $1 billion into Bear Stearns and had $76 million in Lehman Brothers. Sources tell us that Chinese officials did not want to open the door to a rush of foreign private equity investment.
More specifically, one of the sources said: “The regulator doesn’t want to make it a unique case so that other foreign investors take it as a model.” Well, that certainly clears things up.
It’s not that China is opposed to private equity. Officials want to develop yuan-denominated funds run by domestic managers, to reduce companies’ dependence on bank financing.
But with private equity getting such bad press in the U.S., particularly with Cerberus trying to convince U.S. taxpayers to bail it out of its investment in Chrysler, it’s no stretch to imagine Beijing getting a little less excited about private equity than it was earlier in the year.
Deals of the day:
* Fayrewood, a British computer parts distributor, said it agreed to be acquired by privately held Letchworth Investments Ltd for about 29.3 million pounds ($43.4 million) in cash.
* Media Square said it agreed to sell part of its Illuminas marketing research consultancy business to market research company IQ Holdings for an initial 750,000 pounds ($1.1 million) in cash and shares worth 250,000 pounds.
* Avarae Global Coins, a UK-based company which invests in rare coins, said Equity Partnership Investment Company had bought about 14.3 million shares, representing 13.85 percent of voting rights in Avarae.
(Photo Credit: Reuters)
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