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Private Credit 

David Brooke

This article is part of our forthcoming service, 9fin Private Credit. If you're interested in a free trial, contact subscriptions@9fin.com

KKR’s decision to switch from being equity to debt provider in the buyout of RBmedia is an interesting play. As 9fin reported, the private equity firm arranged, funded and partly syndicated a credit facility to finance Francisco Partners and HIG’s acquisition of the company from none other than…KKR. 

As part of the deal, RBmedia’s management team also have an equity stake in the audiobook publishing company. KKR, meanwhile is now moving from majority equity owner to lender — and you can see why they might want to maintain the relationship.

The firm bought the business in 2018. Since, then a new generation has been seduced by TikTok dances, YouTube gaming — but despite the moral panic about today’s youth, good old books (and increasingly, audiobooks) still command a place in the attention economy. People like to read.

This is part of the investment thesis behind KKR’s deal to buy the famous publisher Simon & Schuster fromParamount. 

The sponsor took the bank route to fund that deal, with Jefferies leading a $1.1bn term loan syndication this week. Early indications from the buyside are positive, with steady revenue in publishing making the company an attractive credit.

Once upon a time, people referred to the likes of KKR as ‘LBO firms’ before they rebranded as private equity. 

Today, many of them are such big credit investors that they prefer to be seen as asset managers. This is testament to how the broadly syndicated and private leveraged finance markets have ballooned over recent years, and to how assets have migrated from banks to non-banks.

KKR is in a small but growing club of such firms that has not just multiple private credit funds but its own capital markets division. Other seasoned PE firms have similar operations (Carlyle, for example) as do other more credit-focused shops like Golub and Antares. 

Yet again, this speaks to the increasingly blurry line between liquid and private credit markets. the fact that many private credit facilities are sub-syndicated to other direct lenders is just one example of collaboration; another is the recent refinancing for Lackawanna Energy Center, which involved both banks and private credit firms. 

An emerging truth is that banks and private credit firms are more co-dependent than the tired “private credit is eating the banks’ lunch” narrative might suggest. This is especially relevant amid rising popularity of fund finance products like NAV loans, without which Vista might not have pulled off its big Finastra refi.

To return briefly to the audiobook theme: please go listen to the latest episode of Cloud 9fin, which features an interview with Eric Muller of Oak Hill. He opines on whether banks can truly compete with big private credit funds, and dissects what it means to be an opportunistic lender these days.

On the latter point, we recently had a go at explaining the shift in how opportunistic credit is viewed (read the full piece here). “Good company, bad balance sheet” is the way some define it, and such funds are also taking pains to present themselves as absolutely, certainly, definitely NOT distressed debt investors.

Think back to the peak of Covid: the economy was effectively shuttered, but it was never going to close forever. Companies needed a bridge to the world returning to normal. Public markets ground to a halt, but private credit remained open; Muller said 25% of Oak Hill’s deals during that period were “liquidity financings”.

“I wouldn’t call it distressed,” he said. “Every location of a company was shut down and would have a liquidity problem. Not really distressed, but opportunistic.”

Any major financial event needs a film to explain what happened. In theaters now is Dumb Money — a movie about the Gamestop mania starring Paul Dano, which is perhaps attempting to be the Big Short or Margin Call of the current era.

The film takes us back to 2021, the year that began with the SPAC boom and Gamestop giddiness, and continued with celebrities buying JPEGs of bored apes and Bitcoin topping $60k. 

Cryptocurrency may have fallen from those heights, but it’s still becoming a more entrenched part of financial markets. In fact, it’s now come for private credit — last week 9fin reported on Build Asset Management’s new fund, which will invest consumer and small business loans backed by the borrower’s bitcoin holdings.

We’re unlikely to see a seismic pivot to crypto in private credit anytime soon. Call us old-fashioned, but we’re going to stick our necks out and forecast that multi-billion unitranches to buyout firms like Thoma Bravo and TPG are still likely to use the old-fashioned dollar.

Still, it’s further evidence of how private credit firms are trying to broaden access to the market. Many of them have been vocal about expanding their investor base to retail investors; maybe it makes perfect sense to target small-time crypto whales next. 

Who knows, maybe investing in private credit becomes as popular as buying listed shares in an embattled retail outlet — although that turned out well for some and not so well for others.

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