Many mid-market companies have not made a full recovery from the pandemic and they now face challenges from inflation, supply chain dislocations, and war in Europe. These factors have contributed to a significant increase in Special Situation opportunities.
Watch time: 4 minutes, 20 seconds
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Adam Phillips: To complement our existing more liquid strategies, BlueBay is raising a five-year locked-up vehicle to do more illiquid-type special situations investing with a focus on the European mid-market, primarily because we think the mid-market is less competitive and will offer more opportunities. We're looking to raise €500 million in a five-year locked-up vehicle with a three-year investment period and a two-year harvest. We will focus on three key sub-strategies. Firstly, stressed, where we're looking to invest in cheap bank debt or bonds in sustainable cap structures. Secondly, distressed, where we're looking to buy deeply discounted bonds or bank debt, knowing or anticipating that a company needs to do a full-blown restructuring, and where classically we'd end up owning part of the company at the back end. And lastly, rescue financings, where we're looking to lend to stressed or distressed companies, structuring loans at the top of the capital structure with security, with highly advantageous lending terms.
And what's our philosophy? We're focused on the European mid-market for a specific reason. We believe that Europe is the epicenter of stress and distress globally, and therefore, we are more likely to see more opportunities in Europe than we are elsewhere in the world. Secondly, we're focused on mid-market companies because mid-market companies are less diversified by product and geography, they have less access to the capital markets, and they're more reliant on the banks. And all the evidence shows that the banks are tightening lending standards across Europe and the US. Many of our competitors have become very large indeed, and really only want to invest at least $100 million per deal, which means that they can't focus on smaller cap structures. Because we can focus on smaller cap structures, we see far less competition and therefore believe we can make even higher returns.
And what do we think the market opportunity is? We believe Europe is the epicenter of stress and distress, mainly because we believe many companies, particularly mid-market companies, have encountered a perfect storm of issues over the past three years, starting with COVID, where companies had to borrow more money to survive. Companies were then confronted with supply disruptions, hyper energy inflation, commodity inflation now feeding through to wage inflation, and an interest rate cycle that would have caused disruption on its own. The two main sources of opportunity for the special situations team is the high yield bond market and leveraged loan market, and the European banking system. In terms of the high yield bond market and leveraged loan market, the first thing to say is that these markets are now twice the size that they were at the end of the global financial crisis. The markets have forerun the default cycle, so there are literally hundreds of bonds trading at significantly below par. The second source of opportunity is the European banking system. European banks fund €7 trillion of lending into the European economy. Non-performing loans are rising, and the banks are no longer set up to deal with non-performing loans like they were in previous cycles. The final point is that the banks are well-capitalized, which means that they can sell non-performing loans earlier than they have done in previous cycles.
Key points:
In our judgement, the mid-market is less competitive and offers more opportunities.
We are looking at companies undergoing stress, distress and rescue financing.
We believe Europe is the epicenter of stress globally, mainly because companies have encountered a perfect storm of issues.