I need help understanding how PE continues to exist, beyond the assumption that they got money out of the deal and will move on to another one…
I need help understanding how PE continues to exist, beyond the assumption that they got money out of the deal and will move on to another one…
The Atlantic: When Private Equity Firms Bankrupt Their Own Companies https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/private-eq...
> Interesting, "pension laundering" is a tactic that seems quite abusive.
"U.S.-based Instant Brands Holdings Inc. (formerly known as Corelle Brands Holdings Inc.) is issuing a new $450 million first-lien term loan. The company will use the proceeds, along with $100 million in cash, to refinance its existing $200 million term loan due 2024, $100 million seller notes, and fund a $245 million dividend to shareholders."
If you subtract out the refinanced debt the new owners walked away with $100M in company cash and another $150M in borrowed money.
I don't understand this attitude. If you're in the arts I can understand why you don't want to be a "sellout", but founders/investors? Isn't the point literally to sell out?
Ticketmaster makes no secret of being a for-profit enterprise…
The shady tactics end more commonly as part of the LBO or Distressed style firms.
In its purest form resembling instance, PE is a decomposer. It takes a business that isn't particularly healthy (due to mismanagement, sector headwinds, etc.), and efficiently disintegrates it into raw material (various forms of capital, essentially) for eventual re-allocation elsewhere. It profits and reproduces as a side-effect of playing its role in the recycle of raw material.
It's sad because a company that played a meaningful role for people and other companies is dying and being sold for parts, but it's the cycle of life – not every company is meant to endure indefinitely.
The executives and boards who sell to these kinds of private equity companies know exactly what they’re signing up for. It’s a parasitic relationship, it isn’t dignified, but it’s less wasteful in some global market sense than self-immolation (i.e. ceasing operations).
It's possible to have a perfectly good and marketable product, and a terribly owned or operated company.
In this case, while the company has given up the ghost, the products are still valuable. Them most likely outcome is that some other company will acquire those products/brands and continue to extract value from them on the other side of a bankruptcy.
To do anything else would be to leave money on the table, which is not what PE owners do.
It's also worth noting that Instant Pot, Pyrex, etc. will almost certainly be back.
Freedom Group's well-deserved bankruptcy (its PE-induced enshittification began in the mid-2000s with Cerberus Capital Group) and subsequent sale of Remington, Marlin, Bushmaster, etc. to other manufacturers in no way suggests their products were not financially viable, which is why the companies that acquired them are still making said products.
Interestingly, just like Pyrex, these companies all face stiff competition from products they made more than a century ago that are still as capable as the day they were made. It's a tough go when you make products that last that long and where the market is already saturated with one's own products, and means that the industry isn't actually as large as their reputation would suggest (which is partially why we never see anything truly new from it- the other part is mostly just technological stagnation over those 100 years).
As far as other firms ruined by PE (for instance, Sears)... well, they won't be back mainly because the decline was slow enough, and competitors were present enough (Amazon, in Sears' case) to make the only valuable thing about the company the cultural cachet its name held 30+ years ago.
Why do active investment funds survive (when the evidence for passive indexes is so overwhelming)?
Because people think they can make money.