Word: firm
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Buyouts have become so attractive that they are sweeping through corporate boardrooms like no other business fad in memory. In the first ten months of 1988, according to IDD Information Services, a Manhattan research firm, 143 companies were taken private in buyouts worth $91 billion, in contrast to 105 deals worth $36 billion during the same period of 1987. These transactions are enriching shareholders and buyout specialists, but the takeovers could be causing grave damage to U.S. industry. Never before has debt been substituted for shareholders' equity on such a huge scale. No one knows how these highly leveraged companies...
...also become a cash machine with many ways of making money. To begin with, KKR charges investors in its buyout funds annual management fees amounting to 1.5% of their investments. Companies taken private by KKR pay the firm 1% to 2% of the purchase price for handling the transaction. But the really big money rolls in when KKR starts to sell off divisions of the companies it acquires. So far, KKR has taken in $7 billion by unloading parts of Beatrice. In recent years the investors in KKR's buyout funds have earned annual returns of about 30%. Says James...
...along with or even instigate buyouts because as major shareholders they stand to profit. The resulting companies may be leaner, but often they are also weaker, with little money to invest in expansion or innovation. Says Michel David-Weill, the French senior managing partner of the Lazard Freres investment firm: "The wave of leveraged buyouts is weakening the competitiveness of many U.S. companies that have fought so hard to regain...
...Once a C- section, always a C- section" is no longer the case. -- After halting production of abortion pills in the face of protests, a French firm was ordered to resume making them...
Leveraged buyouts come in many different varieties. In some cases, corporate raiders snap up a company with borrowed money, then throw out the management, dismember the firm and sell off the pieces. But in other deals, including the proposed buyout of RJR Nabisco, the managers initiate the action. In one of the least controversial types of management buyouts, the executives of a particular division buy it from a larger parent company. These managers are out to prove they can run their own show -- and run it better than some sprawling conglomerate that has grown inattentive or slothlike in responding...