Our private equity investing activities are conducted through several strategies, including traditional buyouts distressed buyouts and debt investments, and corporate partner buyouts.

Traditional Buyouts:

Traditional buyouts comprise the majority of our investments. We generally target investments in companies where an entrepreneurial management team is comfortable operating in a leveraged environment. We also pursue acquisitions where we believe a non-core business owned by a large corporation will function more effectively if structured as an independent entity managed by a focused, stand-alone management team. Our leveraged buyouts strategies seek situations that involve consolidation through merger or follow-on acquisitions; carveouts from larger organizations looking to shed non-core assets; situations requiring structured ownership to meet a seller’s financial goals; or situations in which the business plan involved substantial departures from past practice to maximize the value of its assets.

Distressed Buyouts & Debt Investments:

We target assets with high quality operating businesses but low-quality balance sheets, consistent with traditional buyout strategies. The distressed securities we purchase include bank debt, public high-yield debt and privately held instruments, often with significant downside protection in the form of a senior position in the capital structure.

Corporate Partner Buyouts:

Corporate partner buyouts offer another way to capitalize upon investment opportunities during environments in which purchase prices for control of companies are at high multiplies of earnings, making them less attractive for traditional buyout investors. Corporate partner buyouts focus on companies in need of a financial partner in order to consummate acquisitions, expand product lines, buy back stock or pay down debt. In these investments, we do not seek control but instead make significant investments that typically allow us to obtain control rights similar to those that we would require in a traditional buyout, such as control over the direction of the business and our ultimate exit. Although corporate partner buyouts do not represent a large portion of our overall investment activity, we do engage in them selectively when we believe circumstances make them an attractive strategy.

Other:

In addition to our traditional, distressed and corporate partner buyout activities, we also maintain the flexibility to deploy capital of our private equity funds in other types of investments such as the creation of new companies, which allows us to leverage our deep industry and distressed expertise and collaborate with experienced management teams to seek to capitalize on market opportunities that we have identified, particularly in asset-intensive industries that are in distress. In these types of situations, we have the ability to establish new entities that can acquire distressed assets at what we believe are attractive valuations without the burden of managing an existing portfolio of legacy assets. Similar to our corporate partner buyout activities, other investments, such as the creation of new companies, does not represent a large portion of our overall investment activities, although we do make these types of investments selectively.