News Summary

• French car parts group poised to kick off IPO deals

o Autodis, 1.2bn euro valuation
o Valuation are at their highest, there are currently two American players in the European
market and Autodis is well placed to be the third biggest player
o Autodis is private equity backed
o The top 10 European players represent only 22 per cent of the European market and the
remaining 78 per cent are 48,000 mostly small and medium-sized companies
o Bain Capital, which owns 91 per cent of Autodis, is expected to remain a major shareholder
after the IPO
o Geopolitical pressures are effecting IPOS
▪ Novares, an automotives plastics maker, was hit by high volatility and cancelled its
offering in February
• Advent in exclusive talks to buy Sanofi generics business
o Advent to buy Zentiva, Sanofi’s European generics business, for €1.91bn
• Investing in China
o Yahoo Alibaba
▪ Yahoo suddenly discovered that one of Alibaba’s key assets, its payments platform
Alipay, had been carved out of the company some nine months earlier
▪ Yahoo protested vehemently but later settled on an arrangement where Alibaba would
be paid between $2bn-$6bn if Alipay one day launched an IPO
▪ This is still a massive discount as Alipay is worth around $150bn, it is the backbone of
ecommerce payments in china
▪ Reminder: Even the best investments in China don’t always pay out as much as they
should
• Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Prepare for an I.P.O. Wave
o Zuora IPO, VC’s $17m investment become $150m
o Few VCs have cashed in because companies like Uber and Airbnb has remained private
o That finally may change.
▪ Investors, bankers and analysts said they expected a wave of initial public offerings to
bring some of the most highly valued and recognizable start-ups to the public market
over the next 18 to 24 months
▪ Two of the biggest start-ups still sitting on the sidelines — Dropbox, an online file
storage company, and Spotify, the streaming music service based in Sweden —
successfully went public
o Once this generation of start-ups goes public, investors said, it will ease the anxiety of the
wealthy families, pension funds and university endowments that finance the venture
capitalists’ investment funds.
o Those so-called limited partners have been itching for their returns
• Rothschild chairman to expand the bank in the US, M&A Deals
o M&A volumes have exceeded $3tn for four consecutive years, there will be a downturn in
deal volume at some point
o Global advisory business, which accounts for three-fifths of the group’s revenues, offers debt
and equity advisory and restructuring, as well as M&A work
o Hence Rothschild is well structured for a global downturn
• Britain’s electric car aspirations lag way behind Asia’s headstart
o UK industrial strategy focus on EV cars
o Part of the government’s motivation is to ensure that the British motor industry is not
damaged as it makes the transition to electric cars
 o Last week’s announcement of job losses at Jaguar Land Rover, caused by the collapse in
diesel car sales
o As for the future of the motor industry, the government’s anxiety is that, unless a viable
battery supply chain is established in the UK, the leading car assemblers — all of which are
foreign-owned — may decide to make their electric cars elsewhere.

• S&P raises a red flag on leveraged lending

o S&P Global raised a red flag for investors on Monday, cautioning that the looming peak in
the credit cycle could prove detrimental should a surge in private-equity backed M&A come
to fruition
o Key points
▪ Covenant-lite loans (ie obligations that don’t have the typical financial covenants that
can protect investors) now account for more than three-quarters of global deals
completed this year.
▪ M&A deal multiples keep climbing
▪ Leverage is approaching or exceeding 2007 levels
• Hammerson would-be French suitor Klépierre
o £5bn takeover approach for Hammerson swiftly rebuffed
o Klépierre came back to the table with a slightly increased proposal of 635p per Hammerson
share
o The UK group believes its portfolio of shopping centres, which includes London’s Brent
Cross and Birmingham’s Bullring, is worth about £10.5bn — but its shares trade well below
this
• Greyhound owner FirstGroup rejects bid from Apollo
o Greyhound is an American Bus group
• Netflix
o He also pointed to the $10bn that Netflix plans to spend over the next year on content and
marketing, compared with $1.3bn on technology.