Contact: Brenon Daly
Amid a record pace of private equity (PE) transactions, buyout shop Apax Partners has announced not one but two billion-dollar deals already this month. The London-based firm sold both ERP vendor Epicor Software and a website for automobile classified ads, TRADER, to fellow PE shops. Thoma Bravo will pick up TRADER for $1.2bn, which marks its fifth transaction of the year, while KKR will acquire Epicor. (Terms of the Epicor acquisition weren’t released, but the software provider generated over $1bn in sales, and the rumored pricing was at least three times that amount.)
Apax’s pair of 10-digit deals brings the number of PE acquisitions valued at more than $1bn so far this year to 10, according to 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase. The transactions have run the gamut of possible structures, including secondaries like TRADER and Epicor, a carve-out (Dell’s software business) and take-privates such as Qlik and Marketo. Altogether, the string of blockbuster deals by buyout firms has put PE spending so far this year higher than the comparable period in any other post-recession year except one. (We would note that 2013’s totals were skewed by a single transaction, Dell’s LBO, which accounted for nearly 60% of the spending during that period.)
More importantly, the pace of both big-ticket deals and overall transactions has accelerated dramatically in the past three months. All but one of the 10 deals valued at more than $1bn has come since April, with 85% of total disclosed YTD spending of $21.9bn coming in just the second quarter, according to the M&A KnowledgeBase. Additionally, buyout firms announced a record number of quarterly transactions in the April-June period, with 72 PE prints. See more on recent PE deals and valuations in our full report on the tech M&A activity in Q2.
PE activity
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Source: 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase