What Are The Drawbacks Of Private Financing?

Private placement (or non-public offering) is a funding round of securities which are sold not through a public offering, but rather through a private offering, mostly to a small number of chosen investors. Generally, these investors include friends and family, accredited investors, and institutional investors. PIPE (Private Investment in Public Equity) deals are one type of private placement. SEDA (Standby Equity Distribution Agreement) is also a form of private placement. They are often a cheaper source of capital than a public offering. Since private placements are not offered to the general public, they are prospectus exempt. Instead, they are issued through Offering Memorandum. Private placements come with a great deal of administration and are have normally been sold through financial institutions such as investment banks. There are minimal regulatory requirements and standards for a private placement even though, like an IPO, it involves the sale of securities. The sale does not even have to be registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company is not required to provide a prospectus to potential investors and detailed financial information may not be disclosed. The sale of stock on the public exchanges is regulated by the Securities Act of 1933, which was enacted after the market crash of 1929 to ensure that investors receive sufficient disclosure when they purchase securities. Regulation D of that act provides a registration exemption for private placement offerings. The same regulation allows an issuer to sell securities to a pre-selected group of investors that meet specified requirements.

Instead of a prospectus, private placements are sold using a private placement memorandum (PPM) and cannot be broadly marketed to the general public. It specifies that only accredited investors may participate. These may include individuals or entities such as venture capital firms that qualify under the SEC’s terms. With increasing frequency retail investors are encountering scenarios in which they are offered an opportunity to invest in a private placement. A private placement – often referred to as a non-public offering – is an offering of a company’s securities that are not registered with the Securities & Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Under the federal securities laws, a company may not offer or sell securities unless the offering has been registered with the SEC or an exemption from registration applies.
Types of Private Placements
There are many types of private placements that companies do to raise funds.
Brokered Private Placement
In a brokered private placement, a brokerage house acts as a middleman between the company and investors. The broker raises the money from clients and directs it to the company. The broker receives a commission in the 6% to 10% range for performing this service. This usually happens when it’s a large financial raise. Or when a small cap company needs the help of a broker to drum up interest. Some brokers have large client bases who like to participate in private placements. Getting access to a large base of investors can make it attractive for a company to go down the brokered financing route. The management teams who have large networks can go down the non-brokered financing route. This way they cut out the middleman (broker) to save on financing costs.
Non-Brokered Private Placement
In a non-brokered private placement, the investors place their money directly with the company. This saves a lot of money on fees for the company. Non-brokered financings are typically done by companies with access to good contacts and networks. They have “reach,” so they don’t need to pay a broker.
Bought Deal Financing (Private Placement)
A bought deal financing is when an underwriter (like a brokerage) decides to buy the whole financing allotment, at a set price, from the company issuing the shares. Those shares are then re-sold to the public or their clients.

How Private Placement Affects Share Price
If the entity conducting a private placement is a private company, the private placement offering has no effect on share price because there are no pre-existing shares. With a publicly-traded company, the percentage of equity ownership that existing shareholders have prior to the private placement is diluted by the secondary issuance of additional stock, since this increases the total number of shares outstanding. The extent of the dilution is proportionate to the size of the private placement offering. For example, if there were 1 million shares of a company’s stock outstanding prior to a private placement offering of 100,000 shares, then the private placement would result in existing shareholders having 10 percent less of an equity interest in the company. However, if the company offered an additional 1 million shares through the private placement, that would reduce the ownership percentage of existing shareholders by 50 percent.
Distinguishing a Private Placement from Other Investments
When an investor decides to purchase shares in a publicly traded company, or for that matter purchase shares in a mutual fund or exchange traded fund (ETF), he or she will have the opportunity to first review a comprehensive and detailed prospectus required to be filed with the SEC. When it comes to a private placement, however, no such prospectus need be filed with the SEC – rather, these securities are typically offered through a Private Placement Memorandum (PPM). The majority of private placements are offered under an exemption from registration requirements known as SEC Regulation D (Reg D). Among other things, Reg D provides certain safe-harbor exemptions to securities registration, and furthermore specifies the amount of money that can be raised in an offering, as well as the type of investor who may be solicited to invest in such a non-public offering. With certain exceptions, only retail investors who meet the accredited investor standard are permitted to invest in a private placement. Rule 501 defines an accredited investor as any person whose net worth exceeds $1,000,000 (excluding their residence), or alternatively who has income in excess of $200,000 per year ($300,000 jointly with a spouse) for the two most recent years. Private placements might involve investing in a company’s stock in the form of shares, preferred stock, or even a debt instrument such as a bond, promissory note or debenture offering. When making an investment in a private placement, you should first receive and carefully review the PPM. The PPM is required to disclose all material facts about the investment. Any misrepresentation or any omission of a material fact necessary to make the statements in the PPM not misleading could give rise to liability where an investor suffers losses and the PPM is misleading or omits certain critical information.

Some Risks and Red Flags Associated With Private Placements
An investor considering a private placement should be aware of their risks and be on the lookout for any potential red flags. In fact, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) has previously issued an investor alert to inform the public about the risks and the potential for fraud and sales abuse concerning private placements. To begin, FINRA has cautioned that by virtue of their limited offering documents (PPM versus more detailed prospectus), private placements will likely only provide prospective investors with limited information concerning a company and its financials. In addition, FINRA has warned investors about the illiquid nature of most private placement investments — before investing, an informed investor should first determine if he or she can allow their money to remain tied up for an extended period of time (usually several years) because private placement securities cannot be easily resold due to restrictions on their resale and the lack of a public market such as a stock exchange on which to sell them. FINRA has also alerted investors to be very cautious of any private placements that you hear about through spam email or cold calling. Often, this is a red flag and a sign of fraud, and an investor should proceed with the utmost caution.
Advantages of Private Financing
Private financing can enhance a firm’s capital structure, save on costs, and improve managerial incentive alignment. In countries with public trading markets, a privately held business is generally taken to mean one whose ownership shares or interests are not publicly traded. Often, privately held companies are owned by the company founders or their families and heirs or by a small group of investors. Sometimes employees also hold shares of private companies. Most small businesses are privately held.
Going Private
Though most companies start out privately held, there are situations in which a publicly traded company becomes privately acquired. This means that a small group of investors purchases all outstanding shares of the company. The company is then privately financed. This transition it known as “going private. ”
Advantages
There are several advantages to private financing:
• Increased capital: Sometimes going private results in a significant injection of capital, because the investors are willing to buy the company’s stock at a higher price than it is trading on the market. They are willing to pay more in order to privately control the firm.
• Administrative costs: It is possible for the company to save administrative costs. Being a publicly traded company entails administrative costs, such as annual reports, registration with regulating bodies, and communicating with shareholders. A privately financed company does not have these costs.
• Managerial incentives: In many instances it is the management which takes over and privately controls the company. In this case, they have a more immediate incentive to improve the company’s performance, because they are investors as well.

• Investor involvement: A publicly traded company’s shareholders are a large, anonymous, and mostly uninformed group. They do not typically know the business, much less the daily operations, of the company and are not in a good position to be productively involved with it. Private investors, on the other hand, can offer expert knowledge, and direct oversight of the company in a way that can benefit performance.

Types of Private Financing Deals – The Leveraged Buyout

A leveraged buyout (LBO) is an acquisition (usually of a company, but it can also be single assets like a real estate) where the purchase price is financed through a combination of equity and debt, and in which the cash flows or assets of the target are used to secure and repay the debt. As the debt usually has a lower cost of capital than the equity, the returns on the equity increase with the increasing debt. The debt thus effectively serves as a lever to increase returns, which explains the origin of the term leveraged buyout (LBO). LBOs use debt to secure an acquisition and the acquired assets service the debt.
Forms of LBOs
LBOs are a very common occurrence in today’s Mergers and Acquisitions environment. The term LBO is usually employed when a financial sponsor acquires a company. However, many corporate transactions are part-funded by bank debt, and thus also effectively representing an LBO. LBOs can have many different forms, such as Management Buyout (MBO), Management Buy-in (MBI), and secondary buyout and tertiary buyout, among others. They can occur in growth situations, restructuring situations, and insolvencies just like in companies with stable performance. LBOs mostly occur in private companies, but can also be employed with public companies (in a so-called PtP transaction, Public to Private).
Common Cause of LBOs
As financial sponsors increase their returns by employing a very high leverage (i.e., a high ratio of debt to equity), they have an incentive to employ as much debt as possible to finance an acquisition. This has, in many cases, led to situations in which companies were “overleveraged”, meaning that they did not generate sufficient cash flows to service their debt. In turn, this then led to insolvency or to debt-to-equity swaps, in which the equity owners lose control over the business and the debt providers assume the equity.
Characteristics
LBOs have become attractive, as they usually represent a win-win situation for the financial sponsor and the banks: The financial sponsor can increase the returns on his equity by employing the leverage; banks can make substantially higher margins when supporting the financing of LBOs as compared to usual corporate lending. The amount of debt banks which are willing to provide and support an LBO varies greatly and depends on the quality of the asset to be acquired–stability of cash flows, history, growth prospects, and hard assets; the amount of equity supplied by the financial sponsor; and the history and experience of the financial sponsor.
Debt Ratio
For companies with very stable and secured cash flows, debt volumes of up to 100% of the purchase price have been provided. In situations of “normal” companies with normal business risks, debt of 40–60% of the purchase price are normal figures. The debt ratios that are possible also vary significantly between the regions and industries of the target. Depending on the size and purchase price of the acquisition, the debt is provided in different tranches:
• Senior debt: This debt is secured with the assets of the target company and has the lowest interest margin
• Junior debt: This debt usually has no securities and bears a higher interest margin

Securities Lawyer

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