Blackrock’s choice to launch the fundraising of a 10 billion dollars private capital fund named BlackRock Long Term Capital (see here Bloomberg), focused on long-term investments in non listed companies, has surprised many people. However the US asset management giant led by chairman and ceo Larry Fink is just structuring an investment approach that it has been adopting for many years without a dedicated investment veichle.
In Italy actually BlackRock has made three investments of this kind at least. As for private equity investments, the asset manager subscribed for 50 million euros in January 2017 a 100 million euros capital increase in Linkem, a leading provider in Italy of high-speed tlc services with fixed wireless access. The remaining 50 millions where instrad subscribed by actual shareholders Leucadia National Corporation and US financial services company Cowen Group, on the basis of about 700 million euro enterprise value for Linkem (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
On the private debt side Blackrock subscribed a 60 million euros bond in 2013 issued by SIT Technologies spa, the parent company of SIT La Precisa spa, a adoa-based group leader in security valves for heating systems. The deal allowed one of SIT’s cofounders, Federico de’ Stefani, to buyout a 56.7% stake of the company from other family members (see here a previous post by BeBeez). SIT was then listed at the Aim Italia market in July 2017 ater a business combination with the Spac Italian Stars of Italy 2 (see here a previous post by BeBeez). In February 2014 BlackRock had instead subscribed part of a 50 million euros bond issue by Tuscan mutiutility company Estra spa (see here a previous post by BeBeez) which was listed at the ExtraMot Pro market. That bond was the first in a row of three private placements by Egea which is due to list on the Italian Stock Exchange in the next few months (see here a previous post by BeBeez).
On the international scene one of the most know investments made by BlackRock in private equity was the one in Formula 1. Actually that investment was made with a pre-ipo approach in may 2012 as CVC Capital Partners sold part of its stake in the company to BlackRock, Waddell & Reed and Norges Bank Investment Management thinking that the company would have been listed in Singapore in the next few months (see here Reuters). However that didn’t happen and Formula 1 was sold to Liberty Media in January 2017 (see here the press release).
