Leveraged finance

A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loans, along with the assets of the acquiring company. The use of debt, which normally has a lower cost of capital than equity, serves to reduce the overall cost of financing the acquisition. The cost of debt is lower because interest payments often reduce corporate income tax liability, whereas dividend payments normally do not. This reduced cost of financing allows greater gains to accrue to the equity, and, as a result, the debt serves as a lever to increase the returns to the equity.

The term LBO is usually employed when a financial sponsor acquires a company. However, many corporate transactions are partially funded by bank debt, thus effectively also representing an LBO. LBOs can have many different forms such as management buyout (MBO), management buy-in (MBI), secondary buyout and tertiary buyout, among others, and can occur in growth situations, restructuring situations, and insolvencies. LBOs mostly occur in private companies, but can also be employed with public companies (in a so-called PtP transaction – public-to-private).

As financial sponsors increase their returns by employing a very high leverage (i.e., a high ratio of debt to equity), they have an incentive to employ as much debt as possible to finance an acquisition. This has, in many cases, led to situations in which companies were "over-leveraged", meaning that they did not generate sufficient cash flows to service their debt, which in turn led to insolvency or to debt-to-equity swaps in which the equity owners lose control over the business to the lenders.

Characteristics

LBOs have become attractive as they usually represent a win-win situation for the financial sponsor and the banks: the financial sponsor can increase the rate of returns on its equity by employing the leverage; banks can make substantially higher margins when supporting the financing of LBOs as compared to usual corporate lending, because the interest chargeable is that much higher. Banks can increase their likelihood of being repaid by obtaining collateral or security.

The amount of debt that banks are willing to provide to support an LBO varies greatly and depends, among other things, on the quality of the asset to be acquired, including its cash flows, history, growth prospects, and hard assets; experience and equity supplied by the financial sponsor; and the overall economic environment.

Debt volumes of up to 100% of a purchase price have been provided to companies with very stable and secured cash flows, such as real estate portfolios with rental income secured by long-term rental agreements. Typically, debt of 40–60% of the purchase price may be offered. Debt ratios vary significantly among regions and target industries.

Depending on the size and purchase price of the acquisition, the debt is provided in different tranches; senior debt is secured with the assets of the target company and has the lowest interest margins, and junior debt, or mezzanine capital, usually has no security interests and thus bears higher interest margins. In larger transactions, sometimes all or part of these two debt types is replaced by high yield bonds. Depending on the size of the acquisition, debt as well as equity can be provided by more than one party. In larger transactions, debt is often syndicated, meaning that the bank who arranges the credit sells all or part of the debt in pieces to other banks in an attempt to diversify and hence reduce its risk. Another form of debt that is used in LBOs are seller notes (or vendor loans) in which the seller effectively uses parts of the proceeds of the sale to grant a loan to the purchaser. Such seller notes are often employed in management buyouts or in situations with very restrictive bank financing environments. Note that in close to all cases of LBOs, the only collateralization available for the debt are the assets and cash flows of the company. The financial sponsor can treat their investment as common equity or preferred equity among other types of securities. Preferred equity can pay a dividend and has payment preferences to common equity.

In addition to the amount of debt that can be used to fund leveraged buyouts, it is also important to understand the types of companies that private equity firms look for when considering leveraged buyouts.

While different firms pursue different strategies, there are some characteristics that hold true across many types of leveraged buyouts:

* Stable cash flows – The company being acquired in a leveraged buyout must have sufficiently stable cash flows to pay its interest expense and repay debt principal over time. So mature companies with long-term customer contracts and/or relatively predictable cost structures are commonly acquired in LBOs.
* Relatively low fixed costs – Fixed costs create substantial risk for private equity firms because companies still have to pay them even if their revenues decline.
* Relatively little existing debt – The "math" in an LBO works because the private equity firm adds more debt to a company's capital structure, and then the company repays it over time, resulting in a lower effective purchase price; it's tougher to make a deal work when a company already has a high debt balance.
* Valuation – Private equity firms prefer companies that are moderately undervalued to appropriately valued; they prefer not to acquire companies trading at extremely high valuation multiples (relative to the sector) because of the risk that valuations could decline.
* Strong management team – Ideally, the C-level executives will have worked together for a long time and will also have some vested interest in the LBO by rolling over their shares when the deal takes place.

History

Origins

The first leveraged buyout may have been the purchase by McLean Industries, Inc. of Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company in January 1955 and Waterman Steamship Corporation in May 1955. Under the terms of that transaction, McLean borrowed $42 million and raised an additional $7 million through an issue of preferred stock. When the deal closed, $20 million of Waterman cash and assets were used to retire $20 million of the loan debt.

Lewis Cullman's acquisition of Orkin Exterminating Company in 1964 is among the first significant leveraged buyout transactions. Similar to the approach employed in the McLean transaction, the use of publicly traded holding companies as investment vehicles to acquire portfolios of investments in corporate assets was a relatively new trend in the 1960s, popularized by the likes of Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) and Victor Posner ( DWG Corporation), and later adopted by Nelson Peltz (Triarc), Saul Steinberg (Reliance Insurance) and Gerry Schwartz (Onex Corporation). These investment vehicles would utilize a number of the same tactics and target the same type of companies as more traditional leveraged buyouts and in many ways could be considered a forerunner of the later private equity firms. In fact, it is Posner who is often credited with coining the term "leveraged buyout" or "LBO."

The leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s was conceived in the 1960s by a number of corporate financiers, most notably Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. and later his protégé Henry Kravis at the time, Kohlberg and Kravis, along with Kravis' cousin George Roberts, began a series of what they described as "bootstrap" investments. Many of the target companies lacked a viable or attractive exit for their founders, as they were too small to be taken public and the founders were reluctant to sell out to competitors: thus, a sale to an outside buyer might prove attractive. In the following years, the three Bear Stearns bankers would complete a series of buyouts including Stern Metals (1965), Incom (a division of Rockwood International, 1971), Cobblers Industries (1971), and Boren Clay (1973) as well as Thompson Wire, Eagle Motors and Barrows through their investment in Stern Metals. By 1976, tensions had built up between Bear Stearns and Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts leading to their departure and the formation of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in that year.

1980s

In January 1982, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon and a group of investors acquired Gibson Greetings, a producer of greeting cards, for $80 million, of which only $1 million was rumored to have been contributed by the investors. By mid-1983, just sixteen months after the original deal, Gibson completed a $290 million IPO and Simon made approximately $66 million. The success of the Gibson Greetings investment attracted the attention of the wider media to the nascent boom in leveraged buyouts. Between 1979 and 1989, it was estimated that there were over 2,000 leveraged buyouts valued in excess of $250 billion.

In the summer of 1984 the LBO was a target for virulent criticism by Paul Volcker, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, by John S.R. Shad, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and other senior financiers. The gist of all the denunciations was that top-heavy reversed pyramids of debt were being created and that they would soon crash, destroying assets and jobs.

During the 1980s, constituencies within acquired companies and the media ascribed the "corporate raid" label to many private equity investments, particularly those that featured a hostile takeover of the company, perceived asset stripping, major layoffs or other significant corporate restructuring activities. Among the most notable investors to be labeled corporate raiders in the 1980s included Carl Icahn, Victor Posner, Nelson Peltz, Robert M. Bass, T. Boone Pickens, Harold Clark Simmons, Kirk Kerkorian, Sir James Goldsmith, Saul Steinberg and Asher Edelman. Carl Icahn developed a reputation as a ruthless corporate raider after his hostile takeover of TWA in 1985.10 Questions for Carl Icahn
by Barbara Kiviat, TIME magazine, Feb. 15, 2007 Many of the corporate raiders were onetime clients of Michael Milken, whose investment banking firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert helped raise blind pools of capital with which corporate raiders could make a legitimate attempt to take over a company and provided high-yield debt financing of the buyouts.

One of the final major buyouts of the 1980s proved to be its most ambitious and marked both a high-water mark and a sign of the beginning of the end of the boom that had begun nearly a decade earlier. In 1989, KKR closed in on a $31.1 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco. It was, at that time and for over 17 years following, the largest leveraged buyout in history. The event was chronicled in the book (and later the movie), '' Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco''. KKR would eventually prevail in acquiring RJR Nabisco at $109 per share marking a dramatic increase from the original announcement that Shearson Lehman Hutton

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