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KKR has provided debt financing for the acquisition of RBmedia by Francisco Partners and HIG Capital, which are buying the audiobook publishing company from…KKR. 

The buyout, in which Francisco and HIG are partnering with RBmedia’s management team to take equity control of the company after several years under KKR’s stewardship, was announced last week and is expected to close next quarter.

Details of how the deal was being financed were not publicly disclosed. But according to multiple 9fin sources, KKR’s capital markets arm arranged a credit facility to fund the transaction, with the firm’s private credit division taking down a portion of the debt itself.

The rest of the debt was syndicated to other lenders, said one of the sources. But by retaining a portion of the credit facility itself, KKR as a firm will maintain a relationship with RBmedia — even after its private equity division bids farewell to the asset.

The deal comes as an underwriter group led by Jefferies is syndicating a loan backing KKR’s acquisition of another publishing company, Simon & Schuster. That debt is understood to be getting strong demand from investors, partly thanks to positive trends in the publishing industry.

While publishing may not attract the same multiples as high-growth industries like tech, revenues can be fairly stable and the industry is growing. Book sales surged during the pandemic and some retailers, such as Barnes & Noble, are now expanding for the first time in years.

Those trends have benefitted RBmedia. Since KKR first invested in the company back in 2018, it has doubled the size of its audiobook catalog (which includes titles like Lord Of The Rings and Diary of a Wimpy Kid) and notched up five years of double-digit revenue growth, according to a press release announcing the sale to HIG.

From that perspective, it is understandable that KKR would want to maintain exposure to RBmedia as a lender, sources said.

“They just sold it for a high multiple, and they clearly like the industry because they’re doing Simon & Schuster,” said a source familiar with the situation.

The move also highlights the growing scale of large private equity firms, and the increasing influence of their private credit arms in capital markets and buyout financings in particular.

Having started out taking equity stakes in companies and selling them for a profit, in recent years firms like KKR, Apollo and Carlyle have become sprawling investment shops with multiple business lines, from private equity through to private credit, CLOs and asset-backed lending.

While private equity dealmaking has been slower than usual over recent months, these firms and others like them have benefited from dislocation in the credit markets. Opportunistic credit funds have become critical financing partners, helping unstick tricky debt deals like Citrix and Finastra.

RBmedia and KKR declined to comment for this article. HIG Capital and Francisco Partners did not respond to requests for comment.

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