Surprisingly, the median private equity portfolio company holding period has held stable at 4.8 – 4.9 years for the past four years. That is…
Covid had essentially no impact on the PE industry’s median hold period.
Historically, 5% to 8% of U.S. private equity platform acquisitions are made by PE firms outside the U.S.
2019 was the peak for this metric at 7.8%. That is, in 2019, 187 U.S.-based companies were acquired as new platform investments by international PE firms. (Add-on investments include a much larger number of acquisitions by international PE firms.)
The most targeted sectors by international private equity firms in 2021 were: Software, Healthcare, Technology, Data Analytics, and Food & Beverage (in that order).
We’ve been tracking the average number of current portfolio companies held by private equity firms from our M&A Research Database.
We have previously reported that private equity, as an industry, is moving down market, increasingly investing in smaller deals.
Related Posts:
While the migration down market was a trend, this seems to have stabilized, with little change in the last three years. That said, with the previous push down market, there’s now a long tail to the distribution of companies of interest to private equity firms.
So, how small of a company will PE firms still consider for a platform investment?
Our Private Equity Info Research Database shows 228 portfolio companies held by private equity firms in the Supply Chain space, with PE firms showing a substantial increased interest in Supply Chain companies in recent years.
The graph below shows the trend of private equity platform investments in Supply Chain companies over the last 20 years.
Private equity firms acquired 40 Intelligence companies as platform investments in the first half of 2021 (plus a number of add-on acquisitions).
Although Intelligence companies span a spectrum of applications and end markets, many of the 2021 Intelligence acquisitions group into three categories:
Based on acquisition criteria, we have grouped the private equity firms by the typical deal size they seek to acquire. In terms of Enterprise Value…
The graph below shows the median number of current portfolio companies held for PE firms in each deal-size range.
Previously, we ranked the private equity firms based on the number of platform acquisitions per deal maker at the firm – a deal efficiency ranking of sorts.
Below, is a ranking of the private equity firms based on the number of platform acquisitions in the first half of 2021.
Instead of providing a general list of the Top 10 Private Equity Firms with the largest, well-known firms, I wanted to identify formidable acquirers that may be lesser-known. To do this, I normalized the number of platform acquisitions for each firm (over the last 12 months) by the number of deal makers at each firm (titles of Vice President and higher).
The lists below show the top 10 most acquisitive private equity firms per deal maker, grouped into categories by deal team size.
The trending private equity investment sectors for May 2021 were Software, Manufacturing, and Retail. Sample transactions are highlighted below.
Industry Trends Report
