Word: turnaround
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cashing in on the overleveraged firms' troubles. Not since merger madness first hit corporate America in the mid-'80s has so lucrative a financial field opened up so swiftly. Says Robert Miller, a Manhattan attorney who advises failing companies: "The buyout business of the 1980s has become the turnaround business of the 1990s." Concurs bankruptcy adviser Jay Alix: "To us, LBO means large bankruptcy opportunity...
...companies do not have to file for Chapter 11 to lure the new vultures. "There are many shades of failure," says Sanford Sigoloff, a turnaround specialist who runs the bankrupt U.S. operations of Australia-based Hooker Corp., which owns the B. Altman and Bonwit Teller department-store chains. Such troubled but solvent corporations as Wang Laboratories, the Lowell, Mass., computer maker that laid off more than 1,500 workers last year, have hired "workout" advisers to help pare down their debt. By pursuing a workout instead of bankruptcy, management can maintain control of the company and generally reorganize faster. "There...
...Turnaround experts can rake in hefty fees by representing ailing companies or disgruntled creditors -- or sometimes both. Lawyers and accountants earned nearly $4 million for preparing Campeau's 6,000-page bankruptcy petition in January, and currently share fees that total about $2 million a month for advising the company. The legal and financial specialists who guided Manville Corp. out of bankruptcy in 1988 received $100 million from the asbestos maker. "Every profession in the business of fixing and restructuring troubled companies is going through a sudden growth spurt," says Christopher Beard, publisher of Turnarounds & Workouts, an industry newsletter...
...Washington Congress has begun to consider sweeping changes in U.S. bankruptcy laws that could make it harder for turnaround artists to profit from troubled companies. One call for reform came from James Queenan Jr., a U.S. bankruptcy judge for Massachusetts, who termed the wave of 1980s buyouts "the greatest demonstration of greed that I have seen in my lifetime." Queenan testified that tougher restrictions on bankrupt companies "would present a major deterrent to abuses" by discouraging firms from irresponsibly loading up on debt and then enjoying court protection...
...Today's turnaround boom is rooted not only in overleveraging but also in a 1978 overhaul of the bankruptcy laws that strengthened the hand of ailing companies in negotiations with their creditors. The changes permitted bankrupt firms to restructure their finances and return to business without struggling through pitched court battles over every asset. Explains David Post, executive director of the Turnaround Management Association, a North Carolina-based trade group: "1978 said that if you can achieve an agreement with a majority of your creditors, the court will allow you to reorganize" without satisfying all of them...