The Electronic Arts video game giant (EA) is about to close an agreement of approximately 50,000 million dollars (about 42,731 million euros, to the current change) with a group of investors led by the US Risk Capital Manager and the Sovereign Fund of Saudi Arabia (Public Investment Fund, PIF) as reported The Wall Street Journal. With this agreement, the suitors seek to take the entire EA and get out of the stock market, Assassin’s Creed or the Sims.
As sources close to the operation indicated to the American environment, the agreement could be announced officially throughout the next week. Meanwhile, but do not rule out that they reach a value of up to 50,000 million dollars. The company, based in California, has a current market value of around 43,000 million dollars (36,749 million euros, to change). Through its EA Sports brand, Electronic Arts became LaLiga.
If it comes to fruition, the closure of this agreement could mean the greatest leverage purchase in history, without taking into account inflation, points the American newspaper. To date, the greatest acquisition of this type of signed firms took place in 2007, when the Texas Txu public services company became part of a private capital fund for around 32,000 million dollars (27,348 million euros), not including the outstanding debt, according to Dealogic.
One is the acquisition of a company using a large amount of debt to finance the purchase, where the assets of the acquired company themselves act as a guarantee of these loans. The objective is to improve the company to pay the debt and obtain profits on the capital invested, a process that is leveraged in the debt to multiply the return on the investment.
These types of operations disappeared practically after several of them obtained bad results following the financial crisis of 2008. However, a private capital firm strongly revived this type of operations in 2021, when it agreed to buy the medical supply company Medline Industries for more than 30,000 million dollars (to change, 25,638 million euros).
