Private equity continues its historic rise. Fueled by available credit at low interest rates and high levels of committed capital, buyout volumes were up 27 percent in 2017 and are poised to accelerate in 2018. With so much money chasing deals, many business owners have elected to sell or complete financings through private channels. This environment has been favorable for Kramer Levin’s private equity firm clients, which have been acquiring companies and entering and exiting investments
with increasing frequency.
In 2017, firm client Stone Point Capital led an investor group together with KKR that acquired a majority stake in Focus Financial Partners, a leading partnership of wealth management firms valued at approximately $2 billion. Soon afterward, in the first quarter of 2018, Stone Point acquired two companies — Genex Services, a provider of cost containment services to the workers’ compensation, disability and auto industries, and Grace Hill, a provider of online training courseware and administration for the property management industry — and announced an agreement to acquire a third company, LegalShield, a subscription-based provider of legal plans and identity theft solutions.
Other private equity clients that have been particularly acquisitive during this period include Atlantic Street Capital and its portfolio companies — which acquired Planet Fitness gym owner and operator Planet Fit Indy 10 LLC, Lori’s Gifts, SL Fashions and GAT Airline Ground Support — as well as Quad Partners, MFG Partners, Education Growth Partners, Paine Schwartz Partners, Shamrock Capital Advisors and York Capital, among others.
Riding a wave of large cash reserves and available credit, strategic M&A helped push global M&A activity to a 17-year-record high in the first quarter of 2018. In the past 18 months, Kramer Levin clients BlackRock, Del Monte, Gener8 Maritime and Deloitte, among others, were active participants in this market.
Kramer Levin advised BlackRock on several strategic investments and acquisitions of companies whose technology improves and democratizes the investing process. These transactions include BlackRock’s investment in Scalable Capital, a Germany and England-based robo-adviser, and its acquisition of FutureAdvisor, a U.S.-based robo-adviser. We also represented BlackRock in its just-announced strategic investment in Acorns, developer of the nation’s fastest-growing micro investing app, and iCapital, a financial technology firm that simplifies access to alternative investments. In addition, we advised BlackRock in its acquisition of Cachematrix, a provider of financial technology that simplifies the cash management process for banks and their corporate clients.
Also on the strategic front, we advised Gener8 Maritime in its $4 billion merger with Euronav AG and Deloitte in multiple M&A transactions, including the acquisition of innoWake GmbH, a Germany-based software company, and the acquisitions of substantially all the assets of Web Decisions LLC, an omnichannel data management and marketing services company, and Day1 Solutions Inc., a cloud consulting firm. Other recent M&A clients include Del Monte Foods Inc.; One Beacon Insurance; SKOR SE, a France-based reinsurance company; Calamos Partners LLC, a U.S.-based investment management firm; and Institutional Shareholder Services.