Private equity firms buy companies, often with borrowed money, change how they are run and sell them on. Our researchers follow the deals, the funds behind them and what the returns depend on.
28 articles
LatestPrivate Markets
The London discount looked like the reason UK companies keep being bought. It was really the lender's underwriting policy, and that sets the ceiling regardless of where the shares trade.
7 min read
Private equity's hopes dating from 2025 have once again been simmered this year, and the liquidity reckoning could quietly rewrite how the industry raises and returns capital.
Rearmament has turned defence from an industry private capital avoided into one it is pouring money into, though Europe's governments are increasingly particular about whose money it is.
Britain's healthcare crisis is proving lucrative. As the NHS waiting list persists, investors are paying £1bn to bet on the future of private hospitals.
Buyout firms have spent $182bn on UK-listed companies this year while the London Stock Exchange struggles to replace them. Behind the takeover wave sits a tax-driven surge in exits, much of it firms selling to themselves.
Global private equity made zero new deals in mainland China in the first seven months of 2026, even as it raised record Asia funds for Japan and India. The retreat is structural, not cyclical, and none of the forces driving it are in reverse.
Offshore law firms have already sold stakes to private equity. US Big Law is watching, waiting for someone else to go first. The legal industry's long immunity to outside capital is ending, but the terms remain deeply uncertain.
Private equity is quietly rewriting football-club ownership. Chelsea and AC Milan offer two versions of the same wager, and raise the question of whether financial discipline and success on the pitch can ever sit comfortably together.
Sainsbury's got most of its money back from Argos, and the integration did roughly what management said it would. The problem is what the capital earned in the meantime: Argos now makes a 0.2% margin.
The retail push looked like growth. It was really the industry building a capital base that does not depend on selling anything.
EQT needed four bids to take Intertek private, and the sequence reveals less about price than about who now sets the value of a FTSE 100 company, and why London keeps losing profitable firms to private buyers.
Global PE fundraising is rising but the number of funds closing is collapsing. The industry is not recovering. It is concentrating, and the zombie firm data suggests the structural shift is already irreversible for much of the market.
Apollo has gatecrashed Castlelake's hard-won takeover of easyJet with a higher offer backed by the airline's board, setting up a bidding war over one of Europe's best-known low-cost carriers just months after a bruising first half of the year.
A £5.7bn approach for DCC is as much a bet on the Irish conglomerate's years-long transformation into an energy distributor as it is a straightforward take-private deal, and it says as much about KKR's ambitions as it does about DCC itself.
From preferred equity deals for LP stakes to carried interest loans for executives, private equity is manufacturing liquidity at every level of the food chain. The exit market remains blocked. The workarounds are getting bigger.
As NHS waiting lists for autism assessments pass 200,000, private capital is flowing into neurodiversity services – forcing the question of whether profit and patient care can ever be aligned.
Five years after TDR Capital and the Issa brothers' £6.8bn leveraged buyout, Asda has posted a £989mn loss and seen its UK grocery market share fall to a record low. The question is whether the private equity playbook is compatible with running a thin-margin grocer in one of the world's most competitive retail markets.
Thoma Bravo's $5bn Medallia loss and EQT's £10.7bn Intertek acquisition tell the same story from opposite ends. Private equity's software bet has failed. The platform strategy is what comes next.
Boots looked like a deal story, but choosing a $10bn sale over a London float is really a verdict on the IPO: when a listing can't promise a price or a date, certainty wins.
Apollo's co-president warned of a private equity reckoning at SuperReturn in Berlin, then withdrew a £1.5bn bid for Bodycote two days later. The contradiction tells you everything about where the industry stands.
As AI clouds software valuations, private equity is pivoting towards healthcare – a sector whose demand is underpinned by demographics and disease burden that can be forecasted decades ahead.