Could The Chip Industry See A Buyout Wave?

August 14 - Tech Trader Daily - Could the chip industry be ripe for a wave of private-equity financed buyouts? That’s a question addressed this morning in a research report by Merrill Lynch’s Joe Osha. He says the buyout of Philips Semiconductor by KKR and Silver Lake “indicates to us that private equity firms may now be comfortable in a sector that they’ve avoided in the past. We note that the valuation paid for Philips was in excess of what the market was paying at the time for Freescale, a comparable company much further along in the rationalization process.” Read More.

M&A Roundup from CFO.com

August 10 - CFO.com - Sears Holdings and Sears Canada; Universal Computer Systems and Reynolds and Reynolds; Aramark Corp. and Joseph Neubauer and investors; AmerisourceBergen Corp. and Kindred Healthcare Inc.; CommScope Inc. and Andrew Corp.; and more. Read More.

Habits of the busiest acquirers

July 2006 - The McKinsey Quarterly - A thin line divides the kind of merger that nurtures a company's growth from one that destroys value. No surprise, then, that M&A practitioners go to great lengths to tilt the odds in their favor. They hire world-class M&A teams, modify the organizational design of their companies, or add systems, tools, and processes to smooth integration and to accelerate the capture of synergies. Yet a merger's performance over time is subject to so many variables that it's difficult to analyze whether such moves really work. Read More.

M&A Roundup from CFO.com

August 3 - CFO.com - Ford Motor Co.; ADP; Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Silver Lake Partners and Philips Electronics; Verizon and Vodafone; Phelps Dodge, Inco, Falconbridge and Teck Cominco; Telenor and Mobi 63; Comcast, Time Warner and Adelphia; and more. Read More.

Scots Turn From Prey to Predators

July 30 - scotsman.com - Scotland's companies have defied the trend in acquisitions, with more companies north of the Border now taking over firms elsewhere rather than the other way round.

Scots firms spent £4.9bn on 53 acquisitions in the first half of 2006, while 51 Scottish companies were acquired for £3.6bn. Read More.

Mergers and Acquisitions Continue as Companies Seek Strategic Growth and Cost Reduction within the Oil and Natural Gas Sector

August 1 - OilandGasStockNews.com - M&A activity is not new for the oil and gas industry, especially with the increased emphasis on building domestic oil and gas supplies to encourage energy independence. Mergers and acquisitions enable companies to increase their scale, reduce costs, as well as improve their access to capital, equipment, valuable labor and expertise, which in turn leads ideally to increased production levels. These factors have led many industry participants, from small cap to large cap, to discover growth opportunities from both inside and outside of M&A transactions as they work to increase shareholder value. Read More.

Citigroup planning $3.5b fund for buyouts

August 2 - Boston Globe - Citigroup Inc.'s private-equity unit is raising a $3.5 billion fund to help finance acquisitions by leveraged buyout firms, said a person with direct knowledge of the effort.

Citigroup Alternative Investments has gathered about $2 billion from the bank and employees, said the person, who declined to be identified because the fund hasn't been completed. Read More.