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20070515 Private Equity Cerberus deal for Chrysler

It’s only a decade after Daimler Benz’s historic, quote, “merger of equals”, with Chrysler, the German-American marriage is essentially over. Daimler Chrysler announced today that it’s selling most of its US division to Cerberus Capital, a New York-based private equity group. The deal for 80% of Chrysler is valued at $7.4 billion, though most of that money won’t be going to Germany. Our coverage of the story begins with NPR’s Jack Speer. （首先看到这里的 marriage 的用法，唏嘘不已。）

Back in the late 1990s, Daimler had big plans to go global, and it was willing to pay. The company laid out $36 billion to acquire Chrysler. When the merger was announced, there was a lot of talk about synergies and complementary product lines .Jürgen Schrempp was Daimler’s chairman at the time. （这里 synergy 的用法值得关注，原指增效作用，加上后面的 complementary 的意思，有点“强强联手，优势互补”的味道。）

“We will have the size, the profitability, and the reach to take on everyone.”

And here’s then Chrysler’s chairman Robert Eaton.

“Each company was a strong competitor, very profitable, and could have grown independently. Together we believe the potential is literally unlimited”.

But fast forward to today and you have the story of a marriage that went awry. At a news conference in Stuttgart this morning, Daimler Chrysler’s chairman Dieter Zetsche acknowledged the expected synergies of putting the two companies together never materialize. And there was another painful admission. Zetsche had to acknowledge that Daimler would actually be paying Cerberus to take Chrysler off its hands. （首句的 fast forward 有意思，“快进”，回顾完了历史，回到现实。 Go awry 用得很普遍，中文里的“走形，变了味道”。 Stuttgart 刚获得德甲冠军 … ）

“The transaction will result in a net cash outflow for Daimler Chrysler of 0.5 billion Euro.”

So even though Cerberus is paying $7.4 billion, the transaction will cost Daimler more than half a billion dollars us. That’s because most of the money is being invested in the new Chrysler, and what remains isn’t enough to cover certain expenses that Daimler will have.

“Yes it’s the case not unlike, you know, the dilapidated car in your front yard that you actually pay the guy to take it away.” （ dilapidated 第一次见到是在新编英语教程，当时好像是表示书用的很破旧，还有一个 dog-eared. 这里提到的回收废品垃圾的概念，也许以后在阅读中会经常见到，可能对很多国人都是新事物。）

Kevin Tynan is an auto industry analyst at Argus research. He says Chrysler’s mounting losses and its huge overhang of pension and health care liabilities made it impossible for Daimler to get much money for its American division.

But Cerberus, a private equity firm, known for aggressively cutting cost and turning around troubled companies, obviously thinks that it can succeed where Daimler failed. John Snow, the former US treasury secretary and now Cerberus’s chairman, joined Daimler officials in Stuttgart today. （简单的 turning around 就可以表示“扭亏为盈”，值得收藏。）

“We are delighted and pleased to have come through this. As the successful bidder we’re well positioned to put Chrysler back on top.”

It’s not clear what Cerberus plans to do to rein in Chrysler’s cost structure, though David Cole, chairman of the center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan, says what emerges will almost certainly be a much smaller company. （ rein in 是形象的说法，想像自己在骑马就明白了。相反的意思可以用 runaway ，具体请查阅词典。）

“Their objective, very clearly, in private equities, is making money. It’s not benevolence for dealers or workers. It’s making money, and they are gonna try to do what is necessary to assure that kind of financial return.”

Cerberus may plan to get those returns by eliminating jobs and reducing retiree pensions, but it didn’t announce those things today. If that is the plan, it’s likely to mean more pain for Detroit, but many analysts say such cuts are necessary if the US automobile industry is to fend off growing competition.

20070515 impact of PE

From NPR, it’s Day to Day, a closer look now at the deal announced today to sell Chrysler. This is a big deal more than $7 billion, but may be also a big bargain, compared to the $36 billion Daimler-Benz paid for Chrysler 9 years ago. This will be the first time that one of the Detroit’s big three carmakers will not be owned by a major industrial company. The new boss at Chrysler is a private equity firm. Marketplace’s Bob Moon is here.

Bob, welcome back. There has been a lot of talk recently about private equity investment, and now we have this iconic company Chrysler being taken out of public hands. What are private equity companies all about exactly and why are they making these huge takeover deals now?

Well, Alex, the bottom line here is that there is a massive amount of cash floating around out there- investment money, literally tens of billions of dollars, this comes from places like big pension funds and wealthy investors, and they are looking for companies to invest in. You can think of these outfits. Cerberus, for example, the firm that’s buying Chrysler, or the Blackstone group or the Carlyle group, think of them as huge pools of money. They specialize in going out, finding these troubled companies, or maybe just companies that are turning as much of a profit as they could be, and they buy these firms from the public shareholders and take them private. That means that they don’t have to make a public accounting to shareholders. And they aren’t concerned about what each and every quarterly profit says. They can make, hmmm, they can take more risks and make more investments in the short term, doing things that would turn a company around. （这几段难度不大，其中有些知识性的东西稍加关注吧，比如 Blackstone, 更有名的是 Carlyle ，中国人熟知的凯雷。看了朋友们给的版本，有个小问题， And they aren’t concerned about what each and every quarterly profit says. 这里一定是 they aren’t ，上下文意思是说他们“不计较某一季度的具体盈利情况”。）

I do wonder if Daimler can’t make money---they are a car company---if they can’t make money with Chrysler, how will a group of private investors do this and what it’s gonna mean for the workers?

Well, you know, I can understand why that would be a concern of years. It wasn’t too long ago that we had this picture of private equity investors from Hollywood, an image of corporate raiders who were looking to go in and take over big companies and sell them off in pieces, and no where was that more dramatically portrayed than in the movie Wall Street. （谢谢有朋友听出来这里的 corporate raiders ，远比所谓 corporators 要更符合意思。）

“I thought you that were gonna turn Bluestar around, not up-side-down.”

“You're walking around blind without a cane, sport.”

“Why do you need to wreck this company? ‘Cause it’s wreckable, all right?”

（这段我也参考了 Wall Street 电影的剧本才更明白，有些口语化的说法一直不是本人的强项，具体请参见 http://sfy.ru/sfy.html?script=wall_street ）

Hard to believe that that movie came out twenty years ago, and a lot has changed since then. We don’t see as many hostile takeover attempts as there were back then. These days private equity companies tend to work with the firms that they acquire. In the case of Cerberus buying Chrysler, for example, the investment from right upfront, is vowing that its approach is fundamentally long-term, and it says it’s prepared to make the investments that support the turnaround plans that Chrysler’s current management have .Now we’ve been hearing from Chrysler management before this deal was announced that those turnaround plans already included big job cuts, but union leaders in this case say they’ve essentially seen the writing on the wall here, and that is in the best interests of the union members to do this.

Thank you, Bob Moon of Public Radio’s daily business show Marketplace. It’s produced by American Public Radio.