by David Snow
August 16, 2016

Surprising News from Cambridge on ‘Pre-Owned’ Deals

Don’t hate on sponsor-to-sponsor transactions: New research shows they tend to generate outsized performance

Limited partners in the private equity market have for years been wringing their hands over the growth of “sponsor-to-sponsor” transactions—where one private equity firm buys a company from another private equity firm. Detractors say these transactions simply extract fees from portfolio companies rather than create additional value. It’s not a trivial concern—the deals now make up about 30 percent of all PE transactions.

Yet it turns out that compared to the industry as a whole, the average sponsor-to-sponsor sale outperforms, and not just by a little bit. That’s the surprising news from Privcap’s recent interview with Andrea Auerbach, the head of private markets research for Cambridge Associates.

Auerbach explains:

 

Watch the full interview with Auerbach here