Apollo Tyres-Cooper largest deal: Grant Thornton

The first quarter of this year saw tepid activity on Deal Street. However, activity managed to pick up in the second quarter. One key deal that stood out during the first six months of this year was the USD 2.5 billion Apollo Tyres-Cooper transaction, says Raja Lahiri, partner, Grant Thornton.

Talking to CNBC-TV18, he says that others that caught one’s attention are the Jet-Etihad deal, followed by the Bharti Airtel deal in the private equity space. Q: This is the half-yearly deal tracker, so what is the verdict for the first six months of the year? A: Basically as you see the observations are two or three. One is the overall value is around USD 20 billion, and in terms of overall deal value it has actually gone down by 23 percent. In terms of deal volume it has gone down by 16 percent. However, given some of the headwinds that we are seeing in the economy, in terms of the rupee falling and some of the issues that we are observing, USD 20 billion is not a small number to start with. Q: What according to you was that one big deal, that one key deal that stood out during the first six months? A: I think outbound is really the order of the day. The big deal was the Apollo Tyres-Cooper transaction in the tyre industry in the US, a USD 2.5 billion transaction. That is the largest deal that has happened for an outbound perspective. I think that is a very large deal. It is a significant leveraged transaction however timing is good and that is the largest deal in this first half. The second deal that caught one’s attention is the Jet-Etihad deal. Clearly that is the first deal in the aviation sector and I would see that these kind of deals are going to happen, especially in the aviation sector, given some of the governments reform policies. The other one in the private equity space was the Bharti Airtel deal. They got USD 1.2 billion from Qatar. That is one of the unique deals in the sense of a sovereign wealth fund putting in such a large amount of money in the telecom sector. So, I would say these would be the three top deals for the first half.