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Further growth on the menu as Dutch firm’s boss hails merger as ‘dream combination’

Shareholders in Just Eat have given the green light to a £6.2bn merger with Dutch food delivery firm Takeaway.com, which will create one of the largest food delivery groups in the world.

Takeaway.com said Just Eat shareholders holding 80.4% of the company’s voting rights had accepted its all-share merger offer, which it upped to an offer worth 916p a share just before Christmas. As a result of a fall in Takeaway.com’s share price since then, it was worth 902p a share on Friday.

Confirmation of the deal is a blow to rival Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed offshoot of the South African tech group Naspers, which tried to forestall the merger agreement with a rival offer. Before Christmas it raised its all-cash bid by £400m to £5.5bn, or 800p a share, having previously made 740p- and 710p-per-share bids.

Jitse Groen, the chief executive of Takeaway.com, said: “Just Eat/Takeaway.com is a dream combination and I am very much looking forward to leading the company for many years to come.”

The Takeaway.com deal is expected to be declared unconditional by 31 January 2020 and finalised by the end of February.

Takeaway.com’s offer hands Just Eat shareholders a 58% stake in the merged company. It has also said it will sell Just Eat’s stake in the Brazilian delivery company iFood, which Just Eat owns in partnership with Prosus, and return half the proceeds to shareholders.

Launched by five Danish entrepreneurs in 2001, Just Eat originally linked customers to restaurants that handled their own deliveries. It has recently branched out into handling deliveries, responding to competition from Uber Eats and Deliveroo.

The merger marks the latest phase of consolidation in the takeaway delivery market, which expanded by nearly 20% in the UK, excluding Northern Ireland, last year, according to analysts Kantar. The deal comes after Just Eat bought the UK firm HungryHouse and Takeaway.com acquired Delivery Hero’s German business in 2018.

Read More – www.theguardian.com

Deal will create second-biggest retail asset management group in Britain, managing £65bn.

The investment manager Jupiter is to pay £370m to buy Merian Global Investors in a deal that will create the second-largest retail asset management group in the UK.

The enlarged group will have £65bn under management, but some analysts said they regarded the deal as an essentially defensive merger of two struggling businesses.

Jupiter has been affected by significant outflows in recent months, losing £4.5bn of client funds during 2019 following the departure of a “star” European fund manager, Alex Darwall, who left to set up his own business. The trading update accompanying the news of the deal revealed a slide in Jupiter’s profits to £163m for 2019, compared with £183m the year before.

The market initially welcomed the relatively low price paid for Merian, better known under its pre-2018 name Old Mutual Global Investors (OMGI).

The private equity firm TA Associates backed a £600m buyout of OMGI in December 2017, subsequently renaming it Merian, but it sagged as funds flowed out of the business. At the time of the purchase in 2017, the OMGI/Merian business had £25.7bn in funds under management, but the figure has since fallen to £22bn.

Jonathan Miller of the investment research agency Morningstar said: “It is somewhat surprising that after Merian’s own change of direction backed by private equity around 18 months ago, they’re set to be acquired. The deal is symptomatic of the pressure active managers are finding themselves under.

“Merian was valued just shy of £600m in June 2018, but Jupiter is set to pay £370m for the acquisition, with £29m in net debt and Merian shareholders becoming a 17% shareholder of the enlarged entity.”

The acquisition is the latest deal by Andrew Formica, the Australian who led the merger between fund managers Henderson and Janus in 2016 then joined Jupiter as chief executive in early 2019.

Formica promised that shareholders would benefit from substantial cost “synergies” and that the deal will be “highly earnings accretive”. He added: “With this acquisition, our business will benefit from an increased capacity to attract, develop and retain high-quality talent, backed by further investment in our platform and technology.”

Read More – www.theguardian.com

Private equity mega-funds (of at least $5 billion) have tended to outperform smaller funds over the past 20 years. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, as mega-funds are only raised by firms that have outperformed over time.

At least for private equity, the biggest firms are almost by definition some of the best firms, at least perception-wise, since they had to justify their growth to LPs over several funds. Not every top-performing firm opts to grow that large—but the ones that do go on to raise mega-funds give themselves good odds of maintaining performance as they grow.

Our recent PitchBook analyst note dives into performance metrics for $5 billion-plus PE funds and how they differ from the rest of the market. TVPI figures—which reflect a fund’s investment multiple—suggest that mega-funds hit more doubles than the rest of the market, but also fewer home runs. For example, across several vintage buckets, mega-funds have a higher chance than smaller-sized funds to achieve a TVPI of at least 1.5x. That’s great news for larger LPs looking for consistently positive returns.

Read more – www.pitchbook.com

You finish a greasy-yet-satisfying lunch at the cafeteria, pick up the items from the table and walk to the trash and recycling bins. Like most well-intentioned people, you face a familiar dilemma. Used napkins. Leftover ketchup packets. A foam container. Wait, there’s food stuck on it. Where do they all go? Is anyone watching? Help.

We’ve all been there. And our three-second plight is part of an expensive problem that’s only piling up by the minute.

China took the world by surprise last year when it started banning imports on dozens of kinds of solid waste, including some plastics and other recyclables. The maximum acceptable contamination level in plastics and fiber also dropped to 0.5% in China, making it nearly impossible for recycling facilities around the world to quickly process sizable volumes of scrap.

The impact of those changes has been devastating, and for many private waste management companies in the US, plastic recycling is no longer a viable market. Like any other business, a recycling company needs to efficiently use available resources and have a healthy bottom line. The soaring cost of recycling has forced many local governments across the US and recycling processors to send increasing amounts of waste to landfills or incinerators.

Even in this dire situation, many environmentalists and entrepreneurs believe there’s a silver lining. China’s bold move has forced countries throughout the world to acknowledge green issues and push innovative recycling ideas toward tangible and long-term investments.

While humans could single-handedly choke our planet with waste, we may need some help to clean up the mess. Enter the robots.

One of the crucial steps in contributing toward a circular economy begins with correctly classifying what can and cannot be recycled. Even something as straightforward as a coffee cup could be complicated during disposal. Its light-weight plastic lid, paper cup and cardboard holder may appear to be recyclable components, but rules might be different for a sorting facility if it’s made of virgin tree fiber rather than paper or if it’s contaminated with leftover whipped cream.

Charles Yhap, who co-founded CleanRobotics in 2015, realized there might be a better way to sort trash than to expect high levels of awareness, accuracy and motivation from human beings—especially when recycling laws can be confusing and vary from county to county. The Pittsburgh-based company has developed an AI-powered robot called TrashBot that helps automate the separation process at the point of disposal.

“The idea was born out of frustration, of being confronted with an array of trash bins,” Yhap told PitchBook. “Waste management processes are either dirty, dull or dangerous, and it makes sense to target robotics in this industry.”

TrashBot uses cameras and sensors to scan discarded items from everyday waste—and that doesn’t mean it conveniently tosses an unfinished can of soda straight to the bin bound for the landfill. These robots can “swallow” excess liquids. CleanRobotics is focusing on high-traffic facilities such as airports, convention centers and schools, but one challenge is its technology requires waste to be thrown away one item at a time with a short delay in between. The company is backed by investors including GAN Ventures, SOSV and Innovation Works.

Swiss fintech startup Numbrs has received $40 million in funding from private investors, pushing its valuation above $1 billion. Launched in 2014, the Zurich-based company partners with banks and insurers such as Santander, Allianz and Barclays and has over €10 billion (around $11.1 billion) in managed assets. Numbrs allows users to manage all their bank accounts under one app, which has more than 2 million downloads. It brought in $27 million from investors including Israeli billionaire Marius Nacht in May 2018 and has reportedly raised nearly $200 million in total financing to date.

Numbrs is the ninth startup to join this year’s European unicorn class—a third of which are fintech businesses—per the PitchBook Platform. German payments provider N26 joined the ranks in January with a $300 million Series D that valued the company at $2.7 billion and in May, its London-based peer Checkout.com landed $230 million in its first fundraise at a valuation of $2 billion. Other newly minted unicorns reportedly include healthtech startup Doctolib and OneTrust, the developer of a privacy management platform.

While Europe still has relatively few billion-dollar businesses compared to the US and Asia, its unicorn club has witnessed significant growth in the past few years. The continent currently has 33 unicorns, including over 20 that hit the $1 billion valuation in the last two years.

The rise in European unicorns is proof that VCs are increasingly willing to invest their money in startups from the continent, but a few names are cropping up more than others.

Using PitchBook data, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 most active investors in European companies valued at more than $1 billion, with their deal counts since the start of 2011 in parentheses.

1. Accel (16)
2. Index Ventures (15)
3. Passion Capital (8)
T-4. General Atlantic (7)
T-4. DST Global (7)
T-4. Valar Ventures (7)
T-7. DN Capital (6)
T-7. HV Holtzbrinck Ventures (6)
T-7. SoftBank (6)
T-7. Insight Partners (6)

Read More – www.pitchbook.com

Heartland Express announces that it acquired dry van truckload carrier Millis Transfer for ~$150M.

The company says it’s impressed with the high quality of the Millis Transfer driving professionals and the organization’s safety profile.

Heartland plans to fund the purchase price and pay off the assumed debt with existing cash.  Looking ahead, Heartland expects to end the year with approximately $50M to $60M in cash, zero debt and approximately $90M available under its revolving line of credit.

Read More – www.seekingalpha.com

Before taking a flight, travelers typically arrive at the airport two to three hours before takes-off so they have time to check-in and make their way through security checkpoints.

What could make for a faster process?

Aviation attorney Mark Dombroff told Yahoo Finance’s “On The Move” a facial recognition system could become a standard part of airport screening relatively.

“I think we should see it implemented,” he said. “Since the events of 9/11 aviation and airplane travel has become even more and more stressful. It’s stressful on the passenger, on the crew, on the ground personnel and everybody across the board.”

“I realize that there’s inherit tension between the privacy issue and most of them are related to the more traditional law enforcement area and the facial recognition area,” he added. “I would predict that within 5 years we’re going to have facial recognition as part of the airport security process.”

In what he calls “The Disruptive Passenger Situation,” Dombroff got a chance to elaborate on the instances of passengers becoming unruly due to high stress from security check-ins, delayed flights and any other traveling factor one can imagine. He discussed how a British airline once charged a disruptive passenger 105,000 euros and how a U.S. airline delayed a flight due to a disruptive passenger and later billed them $120,000.

What is the best way to satisfy travelers?

“Anything that can be done to reduce the stress is something that I would say travelers, particularity business travelers, would be in favor of,” Dombroff said.

Some airports are making incremental changes to satisfy passengers. One option we see now is TSA pre-check, which is a government response program. Dombroff went on to talk about Clear, an alternative screening process that gets passengers through TSA quicker. Like Clear, facial recognition would be implemented be a private company that would allow people the ability to be able to opt out of the program whenever needed.

But the ultimate goal is to reduce stress for its users.

Read More – www.yahoo.com

Gambling firm William Hill has confirmed plans to shut 700 betting shops, placing 4,500 jobs at risk.

The bookmaker had threatened such a move before a crackdown on controversial fixed-odds betting terminal (FOBT) stakes was implemented on 1 April.

William Hill said in a statement: “Since then the company has seen a significant fall in gaming machine revenues, in line with the guidance given when the government’s decision was announced in May 2018.”

It warned that a “large number of redundancies” was anticipated among the staff affected.

It said: “the group will look to apply voluntary redundancy and redeployment measures extensively and will be providing support to all colleagues throughout the process.

Read More – https://news.sky.com

As expected, Blackstone flipped from a publicly traded partnership to a C-Corp on Monday. And the asset manager’s stock jumped nearly 5% to close the day at $46.58 per share, pushing the PE shop’s market cap to more than $55 billion and its stock price beyond its previous all-time high.

Blackstone announced in April it would make the move, joining KKR and Ares Management, which flipped after the 2017 US tax bill dropped the effective corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Blackstone hopes to make its stock more accessible to the average retail investor and eliminate the burdensome K-1 tax forms that had to be filled out for publicly traded partnerships. It also aims to make its financial metrics easier to understand.

But perhaps most importantly, flipping to a C-Corp will make the firm’s stock more accessible to index funds and ETFs.

Blackstone’s stock has risen about 55% this year and around 30% since the April announcement. That will no doubt please shareholders as well as co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who has long lamented that his firm was significantly undervalued on the public markets. And it’s happening during a year when the firm has already authorized a nearly $1 billion stock buyback program.

KKR hasn’t experienced the same jolt since it flipped to a C-Corp in July 2018. Its shares are trading at roughly the same price a year later, but at $26.88 per share, it’s still up about 30% year-to-date. Meanwhile, Apollo Global Management plans to make the change in 3Q, while The Carlyle Group has resisted the temptation to join its counterparts.

However, analysts have said Blackstone’s performance may cause Carlyle to follow suit, per The Wall Street Journal. Blackstone and KKR have outpaced the S&P 500, which is up about 17% so far this year.

Blackstone will announce its 2Q earnings in an investor call July 18.

In the meantime, the firm’s real estate division is reportedly nearing a deal to sell a portfolio of Spanish mortgages valued at €1.1 billion (about $1.2 billion) to CarVal Investors. Goldman Sachs and Elliott Management also bid for the assets as Spain’s housing market began to recover after that country’s financial crisis.

Read More – www.pitchbooks.com