Good morning Eurohubsters, Craig McGlashan here with the Dealflow.
As the summer weather cools, things are really starting to warm up in the private equity market. We’ve got a couple of big exits to report this morning.
Precision deal. Rivean Capital is set to sell Muon Group to IDEX Corporation for an enterprise value of €700 million.
Muon manufacturers micro precision components for sectors such as semiconductors, medical technologies, digital printing, food processing and filtration. It is based in Eerbeek in the Netherlands. It expects to realise sales of around €140 million in 2022.
“Rivean Capital has supported Muon Group all the way on its journey of growth in the last four and a half years,” said Hein Ploegmakers, senior partner at Rivean Capital. “During this period Muon completed a multiyear investment programme and more than doubled its revenues. I am confident that IDEX will be an excellent home for Muon.”
The firms said the acquisition would provide IDEX with complementary precision technology capabilities.
The deal is set to close in the fourth quarter of 2022, subject to regulatory approvals.
Rivean is a European mid-market investor with headquarters in Utrecht and more than €3 billion of funds under management.
IDEX is based in Northbrook, Illinois. It develops, designs, and manufactures fluidics systems and specialty engineered products.
Healthy size. The Muon sale is the second big exit involving a European portfolio company this week.
AmerisourceBergen has announced that it has agreed to buy PharmaLex Holding, a service provider for the life sciences industry, from AUCTUS Capital Partners for €1.28 billion in cash.
PharmaLex provides strategic guidance and regulatory support to biopharma companies on their product development. It is based in Friedrichsdorf, Germany but has offices elsewhere in Europe, the US and other countries.
The sale is expected to close by March 2023.
Welcome aboard. Sienna Investment Managers, the alternative investment and real assets platform of Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, has appointed Paul de Leusse as CEO.
De Leusse joins from the Orange Group where he had been deputy CEO since 2018.
Sienna is headquartered in Luxembourg. It oversees over €32.9 billion on behalf of its shareholder GBL as well as institutional clients.
Pain ahead. Finally, I’d recommend taking some time to read an opinion piece by my colleague Graham Bippart over at Private Funds CFO.
Graham takes aim at some recent predictions in the media that private equity could be the source of the next financial crisis.
“With the total AUM of the private equity industry standing at around $6.3 trillion globally in 2019, the industry has clearly amassed enough scale to be viewed as systemically important,” Graham wrote. “But none of this means there will be a ‘crisis’ of the kind we saw in 2008, as one op-ed by an asset manager recently posited. One key difference is that the real killer then – the thing that precipitated a true economic crisis – was not just vast and sudden uncertainty surrounding the true price point of mortgage-backed and other securities, but also the immediate and prolonged evaporation of an ocean of bank-provided liquidity in the face of that uncertainty.”
But while the private equity market might not be crisis-inducing, it should certainly brace itself for some pain, he added. “Investors are in for a long-overdue reunion with more pedestrian performance and other adverse outcomes of the evolving economic situation.”
You can read all of Graham’s piece here.
That’s all from us – enjoy your day and we’ll speak again tomorrow.
Cheers,
Craig
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