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[New York] After US President Donald Trump’s tariffs sent global markets sideways, Silicon Valley private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and chipmaker Intel added some new terms to a deal they had spent months negotiating.
The talks continued for an extra week, during which the new clause was inserted into the final agreement announced on Apr 14 that deferred close to a third of the US$4.46 billion it was paying for a majority stake in Intel’s programmable chip business Altera, according to someone familiar with the matter.
Amid the market slump and unpredictable tariff fight, bankers and investors are finding creative ways to get some multibillion-dollar deals done, albeit delayed, from Silver Lake’s purchase of Altera to Prada’s acquisition of Versace, both announced in the last two weeks.
Some investors are adding clauses that protect them if the markets do not rebound while others have had to sweeten terms to get deals signed, interviews with more than a half dozen investors, bankers and corporate executives say.
Activity falls
While global dealmaking rose 12.6 per cent in the first quarter to US$984.38 billion from the year-ago period, it has since fallen off a cliff, according to data compiled by Dealogic for Reuters. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) volume during the first half of April slid 29 per cent from the same time last year to just US$98 billion, the worst kick-off to the second quarter since 2020, the data shows.
“We live in turbulent times,” Hans De Cuyper, CEO of multinational insurance company Ageas, told Reuters in an interview. He said his team gamed out several different economic scenarios before deciding to buy home insurer esure from Bain Capital for £1.3 billion (S$2.3 billion), announced last week.
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Dealmakers say some companies are modifying terms with lenders or floating creative financing structures to bridge gaps in valuations that have tumbled in recent weeks.
“People are rethinking deals, maybe cutting them a little bit. We saw this in 2008-2009 where deals had contingent value rights and earnouts because valuations were depressed. That might come back,” Alex Hecker, vice-chairman of global M&A at Deutsche Bank, said in an interview.
Recalculating numbers
Global Payments was close to closing an already complex, three-way, US$24.3 billion deal to buy one of its rivals on Apr 2 when Trump announced sweeping tariffs on his self-proclaimed Liberation Day that sent the company’s shares plunging by nearly 15 per cent over the next two days.
Days before executives hoped to finalise the agreement to buy Worldpay, they had to quickly recalculate their numbers, according to a person familiar with the matter. To seal the deal, part of which was being financed with stock, Global Payments executives decided to honor the company’s pre-Liberation Day share price of US$97, despite the fact it was trading in the low US$80s, according to this person.
For Silver Lake, Altera was also still worth the price, so they worked with Intel to mitigate some of the new risk that came with the tariffs.
Instead of lowering its bid, Silver Lake decided to defer US$1 billion of the purchase, US$500 million to be paid at the end of next year and the last payment at the end of 2027, a securities filing shows. While it does not cut Intel’s take, it increases Silver Lake’s internal rate of return, a key metric for PE firms that measures an investment’s profitability.
Enhanced structure
If the market rebounds to pre-Liberation Day levels in the next few months, as measured by the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, the first US$500 million payment will be paid when the transaction closes later this year.
Other deals getting done in this turbulent market have been in the works for months and make a lot of strategic sense, such as Prada’s US$1.38 billion Apr 10 agreement to buy rival Versace from Capri, dealmakers said. The two Milan fashion houses started talking in November after US regulators blocked Capri’s merger with US retailer Tapestry , which owns the brands Kate Spade and Coach.
“If a deal makes a lot of sense and it’s good in any scenario – a strategic deal, easy to fund – then you keep moving along and do it,” Hecker said. REUTERS
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