Greenberg Glusker partner Andrew Apfelberg was quoted in a July 22, 2016 article about sponsor to sponsor asset sales published in The Deal. The article addressed arguments for secondary sales of assets and specifically, secondary buyouts where one private equity sponsor buys a company from another private equity company.

Citing data from the research firm Preqin, sponsor to sponsor transactions have not only remained steady but are growing. In the second quarter, three of the 10 largest announced sales were secondary buyouts, including the quarter’s biggest deal, the sale of MultiPlan Inc. which sold to a consortium of “strategic buyers” for $7.5 billion.

"It's true that strategic buyers are going to win the day more often than financial buyers," said Apfelberg. “Strategic buyers can offer synergies that can help mitigate the risk of acquisitions. Additionally, with stocks at record levels, publicly traded strategics have a ripe currency they can use to finance their acquisitions. Meanwhile, in the reserved spending environment that most public companies have operated in, they often have a good slug of cash on their balance sheets that they can unleash.”

"At the end of the day, it's about the investment thesis," Apfelberg added. If a financial sponsor can find a more compelling one, it's going to pounce.”

From the prospective buyers' perspective, financial sponsors bidding on an asset take comfort from dealing with another sponsor-backed company. "You're not dealing with someone who has never had a real board before," Apfelberg said. "The first guys..." meaning the original financial sponsor, "have them broken in. Then the second guy can come in and kick it up a notch."