Resideo Technologies Inc. - REZI
When one P/E company sells their problem child to another P/E company, who ends up getting the better end of the deal?
Who is the smarter investor? The buying P/E firm, or the one selling their busted, decade-long rollup to them?
From time to time a headline will cross my screen where one private equity firm will basically be buying a portfolio company from another private equity firm. This passing around of private companies between private equity investors always makes me scratch my head and wonder which investor is getting things right.
In investing circles, private equity is almost always seen as the ultimate smart buyer or seller, as taking only a cursory glance at the often wide gulf between public and private market values will tell you. When private equity is the seller, they have typically run the company for some time and installed the current management team, so must surely have some insight for choosing a sale rather than continuing to either grow the operation on their own or maybe taking their chances and slowly exiting through a public equity offering. On the other hand, the private equity buyer surely knows all this, and would likely be forced to pay a premium above what they would normally be willing to offer, making you think that they must have some novel approach to the business that the current owners have perhaps never considered.
This next company has a $4B equity market cap along with $2.5B in (mostly) newly acquired debt, some of which belongs to their new private equity backers. The old private equity folks? As the song says, “Go on, take the money and run.”