M&A pathway: PE M&A - The sponsor’s logic

Tuesday 06 October 2026 | 13:00 - 14:00 | Webinar

M&A across three worlds: Large-cap, aggregators, private equity

M&A consumes huge amounts of capital and management attention, yet many deals fail to deliver value. This four-part series explores what drives successful acquisitions across large-cap corporates, serial acquirers and private equity investors.

Each session is led by an experienced practitioner and built around a real transaction: the Sky takeover battle, acquisitions within a high-growth software company, and the 2005 Hertz buyout.

Participants will:

• Understand what drives M&A and why many deals fail
• Examine how different buyer economics shape pricing, strategy and returns
• Analyse landmark transactions from deal execution through to integration and exit
  This session

This session

A financial sponsor sees a different asset from the strategic buyer across the table: no industrial synergies to bank, no permanent hold and a fixed fund life within which capital must be returned. Time is explicitly priced into returns, so acquisition price is an output of the model rather than the starting point. This session sets out that decision logic from the inside — how fund economics shape deal behaviour, how an LBO is structured and financed, and how equity returns are created through operational improvement, deleveraging and exit timing. 

In this webinar, Antoine Mallard, Partner at Arkanum Partners, applies the framework to the 2005 buyout of Hertz — a $15bn carve-out from Ford funded with $2.3bn of sponsor equity. Working through its fleet-backed financing, the dividend recapitalisation six months after closing and the staged public-market exit, the session shows how capital structure and cash-flow timing affect returns, and what higher financing costs, longer holds and constrained exit markets mean for private equity today. 

Learning outcomes:

• Understand how closed-end fund economics, holding periods and return requirements shape sponsor behaviour, acquisition pricing and exit discipline
• Analyse how an LBO converts operational improvement, deleveraging, multiple movement and the timing of cash distributions into equity returns
• Evaluate the Hertz buyout from asset-backed financing and dividend recapitalisation through its IPO and staged public-market exit 

Speaker
 
Antoine Mallard, Partner, Arkanum Partners 

Antoine Mallard is a Partner at Arkanum Partners, a Paris- and Geneva-based small-cap buyout fund investing in European SMEs across technology, health and the ecological transition. He has spent more than twenty-five years examining M&A from several seats at the table: investment banking at Credit Suisse First Boston, private equity at Apax Partners, and fifteen years in event-driven and merger-arbitrage hedge funds, including as Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of D’Alembert Capital.  

Across these roles, he has analysed hundreds of complex transactions as adviser, sponsor, board member and public-market investor. In 2022, he founded Liger Ventures, an independent advisory and fundraising firm serving technology companies and investment funds. Antoine teaches private equity, M&A and arbitrage strategies at Cambridge, HEC and other European business schools. He is a graduate of the École des Ponts and holds an MBA from the same institution.

Find the other sessions in the series here:
M&A pathway: M&A primer and large-cap case study
M&A pathway: M&A as a growth engine - Lessons from serial acquirers and strategic buyers
M&A pathway: Panel discussion - M&A across three worlds

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