What is a buyer paying for when a hundred-year-old coffee brand changes hands at less than one times revenue? In November 2026, Kraft Heinz, the US packaged-food group, agreed to sell its North American coffee business — Maxwell House, Gevalia, Tassimo and four other brands — to the private equity firm One Rock Capital Partners … Read more
A drugstore chain with no year of operating profit on record, roughly 190 stores, a carve-out from its former parent still in progress, and a seller that has already written a fourth-quarter 2026 closing into the term sheet. On paper this is the kind of asset that clears quietly and leaves no trace. The buyer … Read more
Imagine a tollbooth beside a city gate. Everything that enters the city passes through it, and the booth’s owner collects the toll. One day the lord decrees that his close kin may no longer own tollbooths. The booths go on sale, merchants crowd in, and the largest one is bought by the lord’s nephew, a … Read more
Inside the walls live the nobles who have held the castle for generations. Outside the gate stand strangers who have calculated its worth more precisely than the nobles ever did: what each stone is worth, how much can be borrowed against it, what remains if it is broken up and sold. In 1988 Wall Street … Read more
Imagine an old customs house at the mouth of a harbour. Every ship that puts to sea passes in front of it, and the toll is collected per vessel regardless of what the cargo is worth. The customs house builds no ships, carries no cargo and does not sink in a storm. Then the family … Read more
In South Korea, Entas is remembered by its restaurant signs. Gyeongbokgung is the private-room charcoal-grill chain where two families sit down for a formal betrothal dinner; Sapporo and Goguryeo are the after-work and neighbourhood names. Now that the company appears to be on the market, its books show a different face. The largest share of … Read more
What does a buyer actually pay for an insurer when the seller is the one writing the cheque? In OK Financial Group’s Yebyeol Insurance acquisition, the seller was the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC), and the asset was a South Korean non-life bridge insurer in full capital impairment. The KDIC did not ask bidders for … Read more
A store chain can own its signs, its leases, its customer list and its sales ledger, and still not own its margin. That is the structural question behind Borletti Group’s acquisition of Pinalli, the Italian beauty and fragrance retailer sold by H.I.G. Capital and its founding family in September 2026. When the party that generates … Read more
Picture a buyer who is not short of money but is bound by a ratio, and who has agreed to expand the shop in the same month. The buyer registers half the house in its own name. A long-standing associate buys the other half. The two sign an agreement: when conditions they have set are … Read more
A company whose largest operational headache is weekend traffic at the entrance ramps of its malls in Hanam and Goyang does not belong in a sentence about the biggest acquisition in Hollywood history. Yet the sentence is not a typo. Shinsegae Property, the Korean developer behind the Starfield chain, is building a KRW 9.5 trillion … Read more