Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • Why is First Data so important? Why is this company worth so much?

  • It's important for a few reasons. This is KKR's biggest equity bet ever.

  • This company was taken private back in 2007, as you said, in that era of big LBOs.

  • And they struggled through the recession; they replaced the CEO several times; finally brought in this guy called Mr. Fix-It on Wall street Frank Bisignano.

  • And he has been in control since 2013. Now KKR is looking to make some money back on their investment.

  • They put into 3.9 billion dollars in equity. Right now, as of the price range that came out this morning

  • at the high end of the range, their stake is looking to be about 5.3 billion.

  • So on the surface, it looks like they're winning here on this one, but that's kind of the stage here for how big of a bet this is for KKR,

  • and how much is riding on this IPO pricing and trading while going forward.

  • It's interesting, you know, as we've seen all this market volatility, companies are still going public this year,

  • Jay, curious what other companies out there are at this level that have been going public this year?

  • There are a number of big deals in the pipeline with some well-known brand names, Ferrari, Albertens, Neiman Marcus,

  • as well as companies without real popular brand names, such as Pure Storage, but we're seeing a slowdown in bio-tech activity,

  • with the decrease in bio-tech prices and energy offerings have largely dried up.

  • So Alex, I know you've been crunching the numbers, flush that out for me in terms of the biggest IPO so far this year,

  • when it comes to, you know, general and tech focus.

  • So the biggest is looking to be First Data, if they price at the high end of this range at 3.2 billion dollars for the offering,

  • that will top the charts in what's been a slower year for IPOs.

  • Close behind is Digicel which has set terms. That's a Carribean Tell Co. company that's majority owned by the billionaire Dennis O'Brien.

  • He's an Irish billionaire. That offering size is looking to be about 2 billion.

  • There are some other companies in the mix: Tallgrass Energy, Univar, Blue Buffalo, and Fitbit,

  • that kind of are behind those two names.

  • But as you can tell, not as big of the year as last year, we did have Alibaba in the third quarter of last year,

  • and that 25 billion-dollar offering really tip the charts to make it a hard comp(etition) for 2015.

  • Now, Jay you mentioned Pure Storage, they're looking at an IPO next week. 450 million dollars.

  • Talk to us about what's coming up for the rest of the year. We were talking about square earlier in the show.

  • It all depends upon what happens with the stock market, as many people have noted,

  • a lot of tech companies have been finding it very easy to get a lot of private financing,

  • not only from venture capitalist, but also from neutral funds that are willing to invest in private companies.

  • So I think they're gonna be very sensitive to public market valuations.

  • If the stock market goes up, then they'll tap the public equity markets.

  • And if not, a lot of them will buy their time.

Why is First Data so important? Why is this company worth so much?

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it