Acquisitions Archives - Page 2 of 15 - Achieve Corporation

Markross121_ June 21, 2021 No Comments

Private equity brushes off past club deal woes with $34B Medline buyout

Private equity’s biggest guns are once again showing they can have record-setting buyout firepower when they work as a team.

After recently backing away from so-called club deals that bring together multiple firms, the industry now has its largest acquisition in years. The Carlyle Group and Hellman & Friedman have joined forces to acquire Medline in a deal reportedly worth around $34 billion, including debt.

The deal comes after US private equity firms amassed approximately $721 billion in dry powder as of June 30, 2020 following years of record fundraising outputs. And it may signal that club deals involving multiple buyout shops have returned after they fell out of favor following a series of high-profile flops.

The Medline deal also marks the largest private equity buyout by value in at least a decade, according to PitchBook data. So far in 2021, private equity firms have struck 13 deals in the US worth $5 billion or more, surpassing last year’s total of 11.

HelloFresh inks $277M deal for US meal delivery startup

Germany’s HelloFresh has agreed to buy Illinois-based meal delivery business Factor75 for up to $277 million, as European food companies turn their attention to the US to fuel growth.

The deal comes just a few weeks after Nestlé completed its $1.5 billion acquisition of New York-based meal delivery startup Freshly. In June, Just Eat Takeaway.com fought off a rival bid from Uber to buy Grubhub in an all-stock transaction worth about $7.3 billion.

Factor75 will join HelloFresh’s existing US portfolio including EveryPlate and Green Chef, which it bought in 2018. The deal will give HelloFresh its first office in Chicago, as well as four production and fulfillment facilities.

Frankfurt-listed HelloFresh is currently the largest meal-kit provider in the US in terms of market share, reportedly surpassing Blue Apron in 2018. It logged 2.5 million active customers in the US during Q3 2020, a near 70% increase year-over-year. The pandemic has created a surge in demand for meal kits as shoppers seek alternatives to grocery stores. The meal kit market is expected to reach $14.8 billion by 2025, representing a 10.6% compound annual growth rate, according to PitchBook’s Q3 2020 foodtech report.

Founded in 2013, Factor75 specializes in healthy ready-to-eat meals. It secured $12.5 million in May in a round led by Marcy Venture Partners. Factor75 is expected to generate revenue of around $100 million in 2020.

Bertelsmann set to buy US publisher Simon & Schuster

Penguin Random House owner Bertelsmann has agreed to acquire New York-based publisher Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS for over $2 billion, Reuters reported.

Following the deal, the German group will hold nearly a third of the US publishing market by revenue. Bertelsmann beat out Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and French media group Vivendi in an auction for the company, which ViacomCBS put up for sale in March in order to refocus on its core assets.

Rival book publishers, including News Corp-owned HarperCollins, have raised antitrust concerns about the acquisition, according to the Financial Times. Critics have said that Bertelsmann could exert too much power in specific genres, particularly hardcover fiction. Simon & Schuster publishes some of the world’s bestselling authors, including Dan Brown and Stephen King.

Through Penguin Random House, Bertelsmann is already the largest global book publisher by revenue, reporting €3.6 billion (about $4.3 billion) in 2019. The group agreed last December to acquire the remaining shares of Penguin from UK-based peer Pearson for $675 million, giving Bertelsmann full ownership.

UK revisits IPO rules to entice tech founders

The UK government said Thursday it will review the rules around initial public offerings as it looks to make post-Brexit Britain more appealing to tech founders seeking to take their companies public.

The review includes measures that would give founders more influence over their companies upon listing, including the allowance of dual-class share structures that give some shareholders—notably founders—more voting rights per share than others.

Free float rules are also under review. Currently, companies listing on the London Stock Exchange must make 25% of their shares public. A lower free float threshold would let entrepreneurs maintain more control after going public.

Not everyone is a fan of the changes suggested.

“Traditionally, many institutional investors are wary of dual-class structures in the UK because they value the principle of one share, one vote,” said Claire Keast-Butler, a London-based partner with law firm Cooley who herself has been advocating for the use of dual-class shares. “They think that it is potentially bad for corporate governance because they’re putting too much power in the hands of a founder, or founders, rather than the shareholders as a whole.”

Keast-Butler said there has been a lot of resistance in the investor community to changing the system. Many fear rule changes could make founders less accountable. A case study often pointed to by critics is WeWork. The co-working giant imploded as it was preparing to go public in 2019, largely due to founder Adam Neumann taking advantage of a multi-class voting structure to wield outsized influence and thus eliminating any checks and balances on the company’s governance.

Marston’s and Carlsberg UK announce £780m merger

Brewer Marston’s is to merge with Carlsberg’s UK arm, uniting ales such as Pedigree and Hobgoblin with Danish Pilsner and Somersby cider.

The joint venture is valued at £780m, with stock market-listed Marston’s taking a 40% stake in the merged firm.

The deal involves Marston’s six breweries and distribution depots, but not its 1,400 pubs.

The new Carlsberg Marstons Brewery Company will create “synergies and productivity” benefits, Marston’s said.

Marston’s employs a total 14,000 people.

Carlsberg UK will put its Northampton brewery, London Fields brewery, and national distribution centre into the joint venture. Marston’s will put in its six national and regional breweries – Marston’s, Banks’s, Wychwood, Jennings, Ringwood and Eagle – and 11 distribution depots.

The deal means Carlsberg will have access to Marston’s pubs to sell a wider range of brands.

Ralph Findlay, chief executive of Wolverhampton-based Marston’s, said the joint venture brings together companies known for heritage and brand portfolio.

Tomasz Blawat, managing director of Carlsberg UK, said the deal enables the companies to offer “a bigger beer portfolio of complementary international, national and regional brands”.

The coronavirus lockdown means UK pubs are closed, with many in the industry saying that a mooted re-opening with a two-metre rule for customers would not work. Some pub operators have suggested that a one-metre rule might be a better compromise.

Hedge fund criticises ‘unjust’ takeover bid for Sirius Minerals

Crispin Odey’shedge fund has attacked Anglo-American’s “unjust” takeover bid for Sirius Minerals, saying the £405m offer does not represent a fair price for shareholders in the troubled fertiliser miner.

Odey Asset Management, which owns 1.3% of Sirius, said it would vote against the mining giant’s 5.5p-a-share bid for the company, which plans to dig the UK’s first deep mine in 40 years under the North York moors.

In an open letter to Anglo’s boss, Mark Cutifani, and Chris Fraser, the chief executive of Sirius, the London-based fund argued that Anglo had stopped short of making a “final” offer so that it could raise its bid to see off any potential counter bid for the company.

Odey said it believed Anglo would be willing to “bid substantially more” for Sirius if a counter bid for the company emerged, which it said proved that the existing offer did not represent a fair price for the company.

“It is Odey’s belief that Anglo American’s current offer does not represent fair value for shareholders in Sirius,” said the letter, which was signed by Odey’s fund manager, Henry Steel. The hedge fund said it would vote against any offer that was not final or that was less than 7p a share.

The existing takeover offer would wipe out the investments of thousands of small shareholders, but it still won the support of the Sirius chairman, Russell Scrimshaw. He said last month it was “the only viable proposal” to save the company’s multibillion-pound project to develop the Woodsmith fertiliser mine under the North York moors.

As big bank M&A heats up, Morgan Stanley will pay $13B for E*Trade

Morgan Stanley declared Thursday that it has agreed to buy discount brokerage pioneer E*Trade for a whopping $13 billion—representing the priciest acquisition announced by a major US bank since 2008, according to PitchBook data, when regulators arranged a string of hasty mergers to rescue the financial system.

With the deal’s emergence, the online brokerage wars may have reached an apex. Trading commissions are out the window. Charles Schwab has gobbled up smaller rival TD Ameritrade. Now, America’s second-largest investment firm is plunging into the battle in a bid to further diversify its business.

“Wealth management and online brokerage are both relatively steady and relatively capital-light, especially in comparison to sales and trading operations,” said Morningstar equity analyst Michael Wong.

This diversification effort has fueled a consistent acceleration of M&A activity in the US financial services sector. Deal value hit a decade-peak in 2018, with about $289 billion worth of acquisitions in the space, according to PitchBook data. 2019 was in second place with deals totaling $230 billion.

10 big things: Blue Apron, HQ Trivia move on to Plan B

Blue Apron set out to transform the way people eat. HQ Trivia wanted to build the future of TV. Both companies financed their dreams by raising a lot of money from some of venture capital’s biggest names. And for a while, both companies seemed on the brink of breaking through.

But startup life can be fickle. Gradually, the early success gave way not to failure, but to what’s in some ways worse: irrelevance. And when the next-big-thing buzz wore off, both Blue Apron and HQ Trivia were confronted with the realization that their original plans for supremacy might need a major adjustment.

Blue Apron is publicly seeking a buyer, and HQ Trivia has apparently risen from the dead after a raucous, live-streamed funeral. The existential angst emanating from a pair of former Silicon Valley darlings is one of 10 things you need to know from the past week:

1. Cooks and questions

I’ve written before in some length about the turbulent times at Blue Apron, a company that encapsulates the venture capital world’s brief infatuation with meal-kit delivery startups. This week, along with its Q4 earnings, the company announced it is evaluating strategic options, including a potential merger or outright sale.

Once valued at $2 billion by VCs, life has gotten much tougher for Blue Apron since a 2017 IPO. The company has never turned an annual profit—although it did cut its losses by nearly half from 2018 to 2019, dropping from $122.1 million to $61.1 million—and revenue has been steadily shrinking.

In addition to revealing new financial numbers and plans to sniff around a sale, Blue Apron also announced the closure of a fulfillment center this week. The combination was enough to send the company’s stock price plummeting even further. It closed Friday with a market cap of less than $40 million, meaning its valuation has declined by more than 98% from its VC-backed high point.

If Blue Apron is able to find a buyer, two obvious options might be an established grocery chain or a larger food-delivery company. Those were the routes taken by some of Blue Apron’s former rivals in recent years: Fellow meal-kit startup Plated sold itself to Albertsons, while Home Chef was acquired by Kroger and Maple was gobbled up by Deliveroo.

Talks of an acquisition were also at the root of HQ Trivia’s recent drama.

The startup burst onto the scene in 2017 with its joke-filled, live-streamed trivia games, where users could win money by correctly answering an increasingly difficult slate of questions. The next year, it raised $15 million in a round reportedly led by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $100 million, according to PitchBook data.

Co-founder Rus Yusupov, who previously co-founded Vine, took to the pages of The New York Times to proclaim HQ Trivia’s “ambitions to essentially build the future of TV.” But instead, viewers slowly began to drift away, and funding dried up.

On Valentine’s Day, Yusupov reportedly sent a memo to workers announcing that a planned acquisition had fallen through and that HQ Trivia would cease operations that day. That night, HQ Trivia broadcast what was purportedly its last episode ever, replete with f-bombs, spraying champagne, complaints about high-priced dog food, and statements from host Matt Richards like, “Why are we shutting down? I don’t know. Ask our investors.”

But Monday morning brought a twist. Yusupov tweeted that after a “busy weekend,” he’d found a new buyer for HQ Trivia that wanted to keep the company up and running. Employees and fans are surely trying not to dwell on a succeeding tweet from Yusupov admitting that it’s “[n]ot a done deal yet.”

No matter what happens, we haven’t heard the last of the story. The Hollywood Reporter indicated Friday that The Ringer is planning a new podcast charting the trivia company’s rise and fall.

Today, neither Blue Apron nor HQ Trivia is where they hoped they would be back in 2017. One could go so far as to say recent events at the companies have been disastrous. But the fact remains that both have been more successful than, I don’t know, 97% of all startups that get up and running. Creating a sustainable company is really hard. Almost everyone fails. And almost everyone fails long before the point of making national headlines or reaching a unicorn valuation.

And who knows: Maybe new ownership is all Blue Apron and HQ Trivia need to mount wholesale turnarounds. The past week, though, brought plenty of reason for pessimism.

Grocery shopping may very well be transformed in the coming years, and a new future of TV may be built. But I don’t think Blue Apron and HQ Trivia will be the ones doing it.

Optiv confirms ‘temporary’ UK closure and turns attention to M&A

Security giant says it is still committed to European expansion

US-based MSSP Optiv has confirmed what it called a “downsizing” of its UK operation, claiming the move is temporary as it turns its attention to M&A.

CRN reported yesterday that Optiv was in the process of shutting down in the UK, keeping on a handful of staff to continue any outstanding customer transactions.

In a statement Optiv called the move “temporary”, insisting that it still has plans to build a presence in Europe and has looked at 40 European businesses to acquire before deciding it “simply couldn’t justify the high valuations of these companies”.

“After a comprehensive strategic review, we’re temporarily downsizing our London-based organic operations,” Optiv said.

“We remain committed to serving the European market, clients, partners and prospects,” it added, claiming it could acquire “once European valuations right-size”.

Optiv’s CMO had previously said that the firm looked at acquiring the likes of SecureData and SecureLink, opting against making a bid because it thought the pair were overvalued.

SecureData was bought last year for a multiple of 20 times its EBITDA.

Micky Patel – partner at August Equity, which sold SecureData to Orange – told CRN earlier this year that the multiple was achieved because SecureData was unique in that it was a cybersecurity service provider that had scaled.

A panel of private equity investors also told delegates at CRN‘s Channel Conference MSP that they believe high multiples are here to stay.

Yahoo Japan and Line set to merge

Japan’s biggest search engine and messaging app are set to merge under a deal agreed by their parent companies.

Yahoo Japan is the country’s biggest search engine, and has e-commerce and online banking subsidiaries.

Line is the country’s dominant messaging app, and is also popular in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Analysts say the merger will help the companies compete with Japan’s other online giants.

Yahoo Japan has long offered a diverse range of services but has lagged behind many of its competitors, said Seijiro Takeshita, from the University of Shizuoka.

“This will be a very big headache and threat to the players like NTT Docomo and Rakuten,” he said.

Big in Japan

While Google is the predominant search engine in the US and Europe, Yahoo is Japan’s most popular search engine.

More than 50 million people visit Yahoo Japan’s website every month.

Yahoo Japan is no longer linked to its US namesake, which sold its remaining stake in the company in 2018.

Line, which is owned by South Korean company Naver, has roughly 80 million users in Japan and a similar number in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

The app itself is perhaps best known for cartoonish stickers, a feature which its competitors have also adopted.

In recent years, Yahoo Japan’s parent company, Softbank, has bet billions on primarily Asian-based tech companies.

The deal could also make it a dominant player in the payments market in Japan.

Softbank already has its own payment service PayPay.

With this deal, it will scoop up Linepay, which is used by many of its competitors.

“I think there will be a lot of game-changing issues that will go on,” said Mr Takeshita.

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