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Last year ended on a cliffhanger for followers of Hg’s sale of Trackunit, as the decision on a winning bidder was postponed to 2025. One full week into the new year, and we are still waiting for a final decision.

Having attracted a lot of interest from potential buyers and financing partners, Trackunit is now left with two bidders: Goldman Sachs and Cinven. With a deal close, lenders are gearing up to fight.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime asset,” one source said of Trackunit, which makes software for industrial vehicles like diggers and cranes. “We will negotiate to be on this deal regardless of who buys it.”

A similar message was echoed by others involved in the process, which one source said involved “every lender and their mother”. Even so, with the spread expected to hit 475bps for a 7x levered credit, the process eventually got too hot for some to handle.

“We were quite interested in it, but with those terms there was no way we would be able to stay on — it was just too aggressive for us,” said one direct lender.

Others fell off due to the tight timeline and the fact that lenders were held away from sponsors for a large part of the process, which is being run by Evercore.

"We dropped out of the process given a lack of diligence materials and the high leverage,” said one. Another noted that they weren’t allowed to approach the potential buyers until late in the process, making it “really difficult for us to stay on.”

Hope springs eternal

Speaking of M&A, stop us if you’ve heard this one before: people think 2025 is the year that M&A finally comes back.

“The big four seem quite busy with work on the M&A side, which is a strong indicator,” said one source. “It looks more promising now than it did this time last year.”

That’s a low bar, but sure. If Trackunit comes to a successful close, it would provide some evidence of that promise, which we covered in our 2025 Private Credit Outlook. In that piece, Kirsten Bode, co-head of pan-European private debt at Muzinich, told 9fin:

“We’re expecting a significant pick up in M&A activity in 2025 given the pent-up demand. Private equity firms are sitting on record levels of dry powder and are under increasing pressure to put that money to work.”

There’s a long history of market participants trying to manifest an M&A boom into existence, and there are many factors that could hamper an increase in activity this year — the second coming of Donald Trump, the spike in UK government borrowing costs, potential trade wars, geopolitical conflict…the list goes on.

Still, there are a good few sale processes still in the pipeline from last year that could get things moving. In the Netherlands, TA Associates is understood to be considering bringing Unit4 to the market this year. The roughly €150m EBITDA software company provides AI solutions for managing financial, operational and human resources processes.

In Sweden, EQT is prepping the sale for Karo Healthcare, having mandated Jefferies and Morgan Stanley. The firm’s EBITDA is around €200m. The company sells and markets a portfolio of everyday healthcare products, including Paracetamol and Ibuprofen.

In France, Astorg is spicing things up with a potential sale of its seasoning company Solina. A deal could value the firm at €4bn, according to Bloomberg.

Elsewhere in the pipeline

We’ve become somewhat accustomed to BSL taking out private credit debt, but this week we saw TDR Capital going the opposite way.

The firm is executing a private credit refinancing for Constellation Automotive Group, as part of its efforts to reduce debt ahead of the maturities of its senior secured notes in 2027 and 2028. KKR is providing approximately £1.3bn in debt to the British used vehicle marketplace firm, perhaps better known by its WeBuyAnyCar brand.

In other pipeline highlights, Hamburg-based Berenberg Bank has lined up around €20m of super-senior loans as part of a private debt package led by Bridgepoint Credit, to fund Rivean’s acquisition Perbility, a German HR software business.

You can read our weekly updated pipeline of new and in-market deals here.

Continue watching

Streaming companies have purposefully made it a lot easier to hit the “continue watching” button when a season ends, often helping to boost the viewership of a struggling series.

In private credit, many funds are now figuring out how to to do something similar. With more distress and special situations impacting portfolios these days, fund managers are looking for an alternative to going through endless amend-and-extends or taking ownership of struggling credits.

This week, 9fin explored the various options for continuation vehicles in private credit, a trend that has already become all the rage in private equity.

“We can expect a drip initially, not a flood — but once a trend develops, everyone wants to jump in,” said Samuel Brooks, partner at law firm Macfarlanes. “At that point we may see this become a common part of the credit fund landscape.”

Not everyone’s a fan, though. The expense of setting up a continuation fund can be off-putting, and it can be tough to ensure a good mix of assets, so some are happy dealing with the options that are currently on the table: extend, or take ownership.

“It was too expensive and the portfolio wasn't diversified enough…I think we will see more extensions instead,” said one source we spoke to for this week’s article.

Another said: “It's really expensive and takes a lot of time and resources. We'd rather just take the keys and deal with it that way.”

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