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Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), a professional services firm, has appointed Mike Trenouth as a managing director for its expanding European private equity practice in London.
Trenouth’s (pictured) appointment comes against the backdrop of an increasingly complex and competitive deal environment in Europe, where there is rising demand for a differentiated approach to creating value both pre- and post-deal.
Trenouth will draw upon his 24 years’ experience in both due diligence and operational performance improvement to build on A&M’s through-the-cycle offering, allowing clients to better address a shifting and dynamic market in Europe.
Trenouth’s primary areas of focus
Octopus has led a GBP2.95m investment round into Conversocial, a specialist in social customer service solutions whose clients include Tesco, Waitrose, Barclaycard, Groupon, Hertz and Net-A-Porter.
With consumers increasingly using social media as a channel to communicate with businesses, Conversocial has developed a social media engagement system for customer service teams. The platform enables companies to communicate and respond efficiently to their customers on Facebook and Twitter.
Alliott Cole (pictured), a principal on the ventures team at Octopus, says: “We’re thrilled to be working with the team at Conversocial as they continue to grow their brand, technology development
Venture capital performance for the 10-year horizon continued its upward climb for 11th consecutive quarter, as returns across the one, three, five and 20- year horizons fell slightly as of 31 December 2012, according to the Cambridge Associates US Venture Capital Index, the performance benchmark of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
Slightly higher returns were also seen in the quarterly and 15-year horizons. Additionally, the venture capital index outperformed the DJIA, NASDAQ Composite and S&P 500 across the quarter, three, five, 15 and 20- year time horizons, falling short of these public indices in the one and 10-year
Littlejohn & Co, a private investment firm based in Greenwich, Connecticut, has made an equity investment in Gulf Coast Shipyard Group, a manufacturer of ocean-going and inland marine vessels for commercial and military markets under the brand name TY Offshore, as well as superyachts under the brand name Trinity Yachts.
Centrally located on the Gulf Coast of the US, Gulf Coast manufactures offshore supply vessels, tank barges, military patrol vessels, tugs and superyachts from two facilities located in Gulfport, MS and New Orleans, LA. Gulf Coast entered the commercial vessel market in 2010 with the brand name TY Offshore
LDC, a mid-market private equity house, has completed a significant investment to support the management buy-out and continued growth of Node4, a regional data centre, managed IT and communications specialist.
Node4 provides a wide range of data centre and managed IT services, including colocation, connectivity, managed hosting, communications and hosted telephony, and a range of cloud services, to a UK-wide network of around 700 fast-growing SME customers.
Established in 2004, the business is headquartered in Derby and operates four state-of-the-art data centre facilities – two in Derby, one in Northampton and a further site in Leeds – which all
Three-time entrepreneur Ed Bussey has closed a GBP1m investment in Quill, the content creation platform he founded in 2011.
The investment comes from Ariadne Capital’s fund and entrepreneur investors, including Shakil Khan (Spotify, Summly, buy.at), Rupert Ashe (Graze, Videojug), Karen Hanton (toptable.com), Andrew Burge (King Content, iSUBSCRiBE), Nick Beare (BBC Worldwide, LGI), Peter Read (Techlightenment, Songkick) and Andrew Grahame (Mr & Mrs Smith).
Formerly called iTrigga, Quill provides businesses, including Shop Direct Group, Swiftcover/AXA, WPP and Aegis, with high quality, web-optimised content, on any topic and in any language, helping them increase both revenues and reputation.
In
The Park Hill Group, a division of Blackstone, has appointed Pablo Calo as a managing principal in the firm’s secondary advisory business based in London.
This business delivers liquidity and capital solutions to private equity investors and managers.
Calo has spent the last 16 years dedicated to private equity, most recently as the head of European private equity secondaries at PineBridge Investments (formerly AIG Investments). Prior to this, Calo spent nine years at AIG Capital Partners, in both New York and Buenos Aires. At Park Hill, Calo will focus on providing secondary advisory services to clients across Europe.
Secondary buyouts (SBOs) helped to prop-up a deflated private equity market during 2012 as volumes and values hit an eight-year high, according to a report on global M&A trends.
Since 2007, SBOs have on average represented 20 per cent of all private equity deals by volume and 30 per cent by value, but in the second half of 2012 this rose to nearly 25 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.
The rise in SBOs has taken its toll on private equity exit multiples which were at their lowest for three years. This trend looks set to remain during
Charles Steel has joined the Ares private equity group as a managing director, based in London.
“We are pleased to welcome Charles to Ares Management,” say David Kaplan and Bennett Rosenthal, senior partners of Ares and co-heads of the firm’s global private equity activities. “Charles’ extensive experience investing across a range of transaction types in Europe will be of great value as we invest a portion of our latest USD4.7bn corporate opportunities fund outside of the United States.”
“I am excited to be joining Ares Management at this time,” says Steel. “The firm has established significant resources across
Law firm Morrison & Foerster is representing Shanghai’s Fosun International in the USD3.5bn going-private transaction of Focus Media, a deal which closed on 23 May. Focus Media, Nasdaq-listed since 2005, is a multiplatform, digital media company and provides flat-panel digital advertising services on displays located in more than 100 cities in China.
Focus Media’s delisting marks the largest-ever going private transaction by a Chinese company, and reflects an increasing trend in Chinese firms exiting the US securities markets.
Fosun, which is Focus Media’s second largest shareholder, agreed to rollover a significant portion of its investment in Focus Media, and now holds
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