soulxtc
August 25th, 2006, 04:07 PM
As leveraged buy-outs go, the recently announced $33bn deal to buy HCA, the US hospitals group, is rated the biggest ever. Now, NTL, the heavily indebted European cable group, looks set to go the same way for an eye-popping $20bn. With private equity investors gobbling up bigger and bigger chunks of the corporate world, fuddy-duddies worry that quoted equity will shortly become extinct. The usual party-poopers see a bubble and warn that hubris will soon lead to nemesis. For them, over-ambitious private equity folk deserve their status, shared with hedge funds, as the new bogeymen of the western world.
The new management could take the axe to Microsoft’s $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure. The bloated workforce of more than 60,000 could be slashed, to the point where the huge resulting increase in cash flow would at last permit the company to borrow mega-billions.
This brings us to the real joy of private equity: the so-called “dividend re-cap”, a dividend-for-debt swap. The enhanced ability to borrow would permit the newly private company to make the greatest dividend payment of all time. At a stroke it would solve the financial problems of the army of private equity investors who have been trying – hitherto unsuccessfully – to punt their way out of pension fund deficits. Here, going begging then, is a great historic opportunity for private equity to do its job of generating excess returns from illiquidity. In truth, Microsoft would be worth more off the quoted market than on it. Thanks to the joys of leverage and dividend recaps, the excess returns would come through wondrously fast.
Ah, I hear you say, but what about the exit strategy? How, in the brutal jargon of the trade, could Microsoft be flipped? Simple. With such a humungous dividend recap, who cares about an exit strategy once the dividend is nestling comfortably in investors’ pockets?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ratcliffe/?p=170
The new management could take the axe to Microsoft’s $6.6bn of wasteful research and development expenditure. The bloated workforce of more than 60,000 could be slashed, to the point where the huge resulting increase in cash flow would at last permit the company to borrow mega-billions.
This brings us to the real joy of private equity: the so-called “dividend re-cap”, a dividend-for-debt swap. The enhanced ability to borrow would permit the newly private company to make the greatest dividend payment of all time. At a stroke it would solve the financial problems of the army of private equity investors who have been trying – hitherto unsuccessfully – to punt their way out of pension fund deficits. Here, going begging then, is a great historic opportunity for private equity to do its job of generating excess returns from illiquidity. In truth, Microsoft would be worth more off the quoted market than on it. Thanks to the joys of leverage and dividend recaps, the excess returns would come through wondrously fast.
Ah, I hear you say, but what about the exit strategy? How, in the brutal jargon of the trade, could Microsoft be flipped? Simple. With such a humungous dividend recap, who cares about an exit strategy once the dividend is nestling comfortably in investors’ pockets?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ratcliffe/?p=170