警惕市场泡沫下PE投资利润率增长失速：私募股权基金公司如何应对

Strategy, operations and commercial excellence are highly interdependent. So why don’t PE fi rms approach them that way?By Miles Cook, Emilio Domingo, Saleel Kulkarni and Alexander De MolIntegrating Due Diligence to Build Lasting Value Miles Cook is a Bain & Company partner and a member of the fi rm’s Private Equity practice. Emilio Domingo is also a partner with the Private Equity practice. Saleel Kulkarni is a partner with Bain’s Con-sumer Products and Private Equity practices. Alexander De Mol is a partner with the Private Equity practice. Miles is based in Bain’s Atlanta offi ce, Emilio in London, Saleel in Boston and Alexander in London.Copyright © 2019 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 1Integrating Due Diligence to Build Lasting ValueAt a Glance Many private equity fi rms are missing the mark when it comes to projecting margin improve-ment at the companies they are targeting. One reason is that they approach due diligence as a series of unrelated questions targeting issues such as potential cost reduction or possible areas of expansion. Real insight comes from an integrated diligence process that unifi es the analysis and measures how a move in one part of the business affects others. From the outside looking in, it’s hard to argue that private equity’s performance has been anything but impressive over the past decade. By just about any metric—from investment value and fund-raising to returns—the recovery from the global fi nancial crisis has delivered an extraordinary period of growth and profi ts for investors. Yet viewed from the inside, the data is less convincing. Bain & Company research shows that PE fi rms too often fail to capture the margin improvement they anticipated at a deal’s outset. This isn’t evident in the returns data since many deals in the current cycle benefi ted from the general rise in asset prices, which made up for the shortfall in margin improvement (and then some). But it does suggest that the industry’s robust performance has had more to do with macroeconomic tailwinds than organic value creation. Multiple expansion has been responsible for about half of the value creation globally since the fi nancial crisis, according to data from CEPRES, a provider of investment analytics and data solutions for private capital markets (see Figure 1). Many private equity fi rms, meanwhile, are missing the mark by a long shot when it comes to projecting margins. Bain analyzed the outcomes of 65 mature deals invested in since the global fi nancial crisis, for which we had full access to fund and management projections. We found that most of them (71% of investments) fell short of projected margins—and not by a little. On average, margins ended up 330 basis points below the deal model forecast. Why do fi rms have so much trouble delivering on their projections? More often than not, it traces back to faulty approaches to due diligence. Firms and their advisers tend to structure diligence as a series of discrete questions about the target company’s strategy, its commercial prowess or its cost structure, as if those things had no connection to each other. From management interactions to adviser roles, the effort is siloed, which limits the buyer’s understanding of how each aspect of the business relates to the others. 2Integrating Due Diligence to Build Lasting ValueFigure 1: Multiple expansion has been the largest contributor to value creation in the current economic cycle0123xNotes: Includes fully realized buyouts with at least $50 million in invested capital and initial investment made January 1, 2010, or after; analysis based on 427 deals for which operational data is availableSource: CEPRES PE.AnalyzerEnterprisevalue at entry1.0Revenue growth0.4Margin expansion0.2Multiple expansion 0.6Enterprise valueat exit2.2Average value creation for US and Western Europe buyouts invested since 2010(indexed, enterprise value at entry = 1)Back to the futureThe PE fi rms that get it right use an integrated approach. They design the diligence process from the outset to build a 360-degree view of the company’s potential, considering key interdependencies between strategy and operations and quantifying their impact. Instead of evaluating potential opera-tional changes in a vacuum, for instance, integrated due diligence considers those moves in the con-text of the company’s market opportunity, competitive realities and management bandwidth. This leads to a different set of questions. Rather than simply asking, “What level of cost savings can we underwrite?” the inquiry becomes, “If we cut over here, will it compromise an opportunity to expand a business over there? Is that opportunity really worth the investment, or is there more value in cutting costs? What’s the potential margin impact of either decision?” For old hands in the private equity industry, a holistic approach like this will sound familiar. In the early 1990s, most fi rms analyzed companies this way, deploying small teams with a