The reliance on debt financing

thestreet.com has an interesting piece about the complexities PE firms face due to their heavy reliance on debt financing:

"There is a price of admission," says Brian Hessel, managing partner at Stonegate Capital Management. Indeed, these private equity firms' names recur on the announcements of nearly every deal. "If the private-equity firms disappoint high-yield investors, they will have a harder time later getting good execution on deals," says Hessel, among the potential investors for said deals. "The high-yield debt market for LBO'd companies is "like a huge raw material that they need access to, to go forward."

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Because the private-equity investors are making a huge outlay to take an entire company private, the size of the financing is large; that means the company piles on a lot more debt, which often reduces its credit rating and increases its interest costs. Typically, bond investors don't like LBOs because if the company already has debt outstanding, the new debt is typically senior to the existing debt, which means the "old" bonds those investors might already hold decline in value.

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Private-equity firms aren't going to be generous to bondholders, but they don't want to fall on their face either," says Martin Fridson, CEO of research firm FridsonVision and publisher of Leverage World. "To have a big visible deal like HCA's trade to a discount [i.e., a price below its sale price] would be hugely damaging."
Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, if the HCA deal were priced at the yields the bonds currently trade, HCA might have "saved" roughly $50 million in interest expense per year for the life of the bonds. Making such claims is a bit misleading, because no one knows if investors would have bought the bonds at those elevated prices from the get go.

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Strong demand in the high-yield bond market puts the private equity firms and the companies somewhat in the driver's seat. But the nature of the LBO deal and their reliance on the high-yield bond market means these private equity firms must walk a tightrope. The balance of power gives the bond investor some room to play hard-to-get, and they force the private equity players to exercise some manners. So, even though the high-yield bond market is already frothy, with low risk premiums compared to Treasury bonds, the rally may have more room to go as new deals price at such attractive yields.