Today, the life of many companies changes very quickly,
often as a result of a close encounter with private equity. Not
only are private equity firms buying more companies and bigger
companies, they are flipping those investments, including by
way of flotation, in shorter timeframes.
The success of private equity buyers is growing –
they account for a significant proportion of all M&A
activity and a recent Deloitte report indicated that private
equity firms now have a 74% success rate in auctions, as
compared to 30% in 2001. The largest public companies, once
thought immune from takeover by virtue of their size, are now
within the scope of private equity firms' ambitions (as
illustrated by KKR's recent takeover approach to Vivendi for a
supposed €40 billion), particularly those that
successfully manage to pool their resources – although
in this regard note the investigation by the US Department of
Justice and...