Gregory Puff Quoted on Decline in Take-Private Deals
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Gregory Puff, head of Akin Gump’s Hong Kong office and Asia practice, is quoted in Finance Asia about the slowdown in take-private transactions in the United States by Chinese companies.
Puff, who has worked on more than a dozen take-private deals, notes there simply are not as many announcements “compared to 18 months ago.” While some deals do continue to take place, they have not been following the earlier trend of “a chairman who wants to privatize … who’s going to own a significant percentage of the shares” following a transaction.
A stock market boom in the past year has eliminated valuation concerns for most companies, but Puff says the ability to get financing also “may have got more challenging for some.” Puff still expects a busy year, however, particularly in the healthcare sector. He points out that “the intellectual property values embedded in those [healthcare] companies make them very interesting and allow for significant multiples to be paid or received.”