Market At A Glance

There are some bright spots, however. Boston’s Charlesbank Capital Partners, for one, easily hit its $1.5 billion hard cap for Charlesbank Equity Fund VII, a fund it began marketing in April this year with a $1.25 billion target. Elsewhere, San Francisco’s Hellman & Friedman this year has already collected $6 billion in pledges for its $7 billion-targeted Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners VII LP. If investors continue flocking to the mega fund, there’s a chance of it reaching its lofty $10 billion hard cap.

On the deal front, the third quarter through Sept. 22, 2009, was comparable to the pace of the previous quarter. Thomson Reuters, publisher of Buyouts, tracked 111 LBO deals during the period, roughly on par with the 114 deals tracked during the second quarter. The combined value of the 13 transactions with disclosed financial terms during the latest period was $2.92 billion, a total also nearly equal to the previous quarter, when the 22 deals with disclosed valuations added up to $2.87 billion.

New York-based Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. took the prize for the largest deal of the three-month period when it closed on the $1.8 billion acquisition of Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Oriental Brewery Co. In addition to being the largest deal of the quarter, the buyout of the South Korea-based maker of spirits was the largest of 2009, thus far.

The year-to-date deal count now stands at 345 transactions, with a total disclosed value of $10.8 billion.