Serial blank-check investor Martin Franklin is warning of more pain to come for SPACs, recommitting to his notion that the market for the vehicles is overheated and should be governed by the same guidelines as initial public offerings.
“A lot of these companies are going to disappear,” Franklin, co-chairman at API Group, said Thursday in an interview on Bloomberg TV. “I’ve been saying this for quite some time that it was going to end badly and now it is. The reality is that we’re not finished because you’ve got a lot of companies that went public that had no business going public.”
Franklin was one of the early SPAC pioneers, raising money for blank-check acquisitions as early as 2006 and taking companies including Nomad Foods Ltd. and hedge fund GLG Partners public.
The recent pullback in special purpose acquisition companies follows a booming couple of years for the vehicles, which raise money from investors with a view to merging with an unidentified private company to take it public. The once-niche market had been seen as a way to help companies get a public listing while avoiding some of the disclosure requirements of an IPO, attracting all kinds of deep-pocketed financiers, celebrities and athletes.
Banks who helped drive the boom have been distancing themselves from the process as regulators float guidelines that would expand liabilities for anyone who advises a SPAC on a listing or merger. This year, 66 SPACs have raised just $11.5 billion on U.S. exchanges, compared with 317 that had raised $102 billion at this point in 2021, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“The SPAC model itself in certain formats makes sense,” said Franklin, though he added that the potential new rules would remove a lot of what makes SPACs attractive to their potential acquisition targets.
“You want a SPAC to give a target company an advantage of going public than a traditional IPO route,” Franklin said.
Franklin also talked about Nomad Foods, where he acts as co-chairman alongside Noam Gottesman. Both Franklin and Gottesman filed 13D paperwork on the company Wednesday, including language that the pair “intend to evaluate, consider and assess potential transactions,” which could include strategic alternatives such as as a merger, delisting, change in corporate structure or dividend policy.
Franklin said in Thursday’s interview that he and Gottesman view Nomad as “mispriced,” and “wanted to review what our alternatives were.” The company’s shares climbed 6.2% at 1:15 p.m. in New York, giving Nomad a market value of about $3.5 billion.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.