From Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, January 12:
BlackRock Buys Infrastructure Firm GIP for $12.5 Billion in Major Alternatives Push
BlackRock Inc. agreed to buy Adebayo Ogunlesi’s Global Infrastructure Partners for about $12.5 billion, vaulting the world’s biggest money manager into the top ranks of investors that make long-term bets on energy, transportation and digital infrastructure.
BlackRock will pay $3 billion of cash and about 12 million shares, worth about $9.5 billion at Thursday’s close, and the deal is expected to close in the third quarter. Ogunlesi, a former Credit Suisse executive who’s GIP’s chairman and chief executive officer, will join BlackRock’s board and global executive committee.
The acquisition of GIP, which manages $100 billion, is the biggest deal in more than a decade for BlackRock and a major step by CEO Larry Fink to transform the firm into a key player in the rapidly growing market for private and alternative assets.
“The unprecedented need for new infrastructure – for digital infrastructure, for upgraded logistics hubs, and for decarbonization and energy security – coupled with record high government deficits means that private capital will be needed like never before,” Fink and BlackRock President Rob Kapito said in a memo to employees. “This will be one of the fastest-growing areas of our industry over the next 10 years.”
The deal, announced in a statement Friday along with a significant management shuffle, was the firm’s largest acquisition since its 2009 purchase of Barclays Global Investors, putting the asset manager on a path to becoming the biggest provider of exchange-traded funds. The GIP agreement came as the firm posted better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings with inflows pushing its total client assets back above $10 trillion for the first time in two years....
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