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It takes a foreign investor to cheer up the doom-laden Americans

It takes a foreign investor to cheer up the doom-laden Americans

Times06-05-2025

A t the junk bond king Michael Milken's annual jamboree in Beverly Hills this week, the mood among billionaires and chief executives is sombre.
In ballrooms at the Beverly Hilton, asset managers, bankers and investors listening to doyens of Wall Street give their take on the investment climate heard Henry Kravis, co-founder of KKR, warn how the uncertainty caused by trade policy was causing investors to sit on their hands.
In a conference interview, Marc Rowan, chief executive of Apollo Global Management, said: 'We have done damage to the US brand — the brand for stability, predictability, regularity. I see us moving from what was hyper-exceptionalism to merely exceptional.'
The most optimistic chief executives are hoping that US leadership in technological advances around AI and quantum

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Qualcomm bypasses logic gate with $2 bln UK deal
Qualcomm bypasses logic gate with $2 bln UK deal

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time25 minutes ago

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Qualcomm bypasses logic gate with $2 bln UK deal

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time31 minutes ago

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Popular fitness equipment recalled by Costco after more than 100 injuries reported

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How Blackstone created a $100bn British empire
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When Blackstone seized control of the Savoy Group in April 1998 it brought to a close one of the longest-running corporate sagas of the 1990s. The US raiders succeeded where a string of bidders, including Lord Forte, Sir Maxwell Joseph of Grand Metropolitan and Lord Matthews of Trafalgar House, had previously failed. The £520 million acquisition of the Savoy — along with Claridge's, the Connaught and the Berkeley as well as the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds — also marked the start of a two-and-a-half-decade spending spree t in which Blackstone has built and acquired a string of businesses in the UK, ranging from holiday parks to data centres. In just over two decades the US firm has gone from a plucky outsider to one of Britain's top foreign investors, with more than $100 billion of UK investments that employ nearly 50,000 people. Britain is Blackstone's second biggest investment market in the world. The wider firm is also unrecognisable from the one that bought the Savoy in 1998. Founded with only £400,000, Blackstone now has a market value of $170 billion as it has ridden the boom in so-called alternative investments. The group manages more than $1.77 trillion of assets, up from only $8.4 billion in 1998, across multiple divisions including private equity, real estate, hedge funds and credit. Globally it owns almost 250 companies, which employ almost 700,000 people, and the group lends to a further 4,900 companies. Its UK office — which doubles as its European headquarters — employs 650 people. On Tuesday night the great and the good of the corporate and political worlds will gather at Spencer House, a grade I listed town house in St James's, to mark the 25th anniversary of Blackstone opening its first London office in 2000. Jon Gray, now Blackstone's president and chief operating officer, worked on the Savoy bid back in 1998. 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The year after the Cineworld deal, Blackstone acquired Merlin, then owner of the London Dungeon. Stephen Schwarzman, co-founder and chief executive of Blackstone, now describes it as one of his favourite UK deals, although at the time he took some persuading. With a value of only £85 million Schwarzman (and the investment committee) thought the deal was too small, but Joseph Baratta, then a senior managing director, was convinced that Nick Varney, who had led a management buyout of the business, had the skills to build a global business. 'We almost didn't do it because of the size, but I remember giving up and saying, 'OK if that makes you happy, go ahead and buy it',' Schwarzman said. Varney and Blackstone built the business into the second-largest theme park company in the world, before floating it in 2013 (and then buying the business back in 2019). Leisure has proved a fruitful sector for Blackstone. Bourne Leisure, the owner of Butlin's, also became an obsession for Baratta, now the firm's global head of private equity, who moved to London to help set up Blackstone's operations in Europe in 2001. Baratta was tireless in his efforts to buy the company from its three founding families, who had built out the business from a single caravan park in Whitstable in 1964. Assant stayed at the group's caravan parks with his family as part of a wider charm offensive by the investment firm to try to persuade the Harris, Cook and Allen families to sell the business, but they could not be convinced to give up the business. Yet, Baratta's persistence paid off when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and the families called Blackstone to ask if they were interested in doing a deal. Blackstone's team were convinced that the leisure sector would see a huge uplift in demand when the economy reopened and they acquired the business, with the families retaining a minority stake. 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Its affordable housing business — formed in 2017 — owns 22,000 homes. • Blackstone takes full control of £2bn railway arches portfolio Initially led by Kenneth Caplan, who now leads the firm's real estate investments globally, Blackstone made its ambitions in real estate clear with the £1.1 billion purchase of the Broadgate office complex in Liverpool Street in 2009. Gray described that deal as one of Blackstone's best UK investments. 'Sentiment had turned so negative around financial services in London,' he said. James Seppala, who now leads the firm's real estate investments in Europe, said: 'Blackstone was a well-known private equity firm at the time, but it wasn't anywhere close to as established on the real estate side in Europe as it was elsewhere. The team was probably 30 people, and you're at around 120 people now.' For Gray the anniversary isn't just a moment to look back and say: 'Hey, look at how far we've come … it's also a moment to say, hey, we're committed and we're going to do a lot more going forward.'

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