Controversial US buyout powerhouse TPG aiming for £7bn listing

Private equity giant TPG is aiming for a valuation of as much as £6.9billion when it floats on the stock market. 

The US investment firm, best known in the UK for being part of a trio which bought Debenhams before its collapse, plans to price its shares between £20.69 and £22.89. 

The Texas group, which has also backed firms such as Uber and Spotify, will sell around 28.3m new shares on the New York Nasdaq exchange. 

Existing owners – though not its billionaire founders David Bonderman and Jim Coulter, or boss Jon Winkelried – will sell another 5.59m. 

Bonderman and Coulter along with former Goldman Sachs banker Winkelried own 240bn shares which if sold would be worth £5.5billion. 

TPG has said it will use the £648million it hopes to raise to buy out some of its partners, leading to a windfall for certain top staff. 

The firm is one of the few major US buyout firms which is not already public. The likes of KKR, Apollo and Carlyle have all seen their shares soar. 

Blackstone is the industry’s largest players, valued at £111billion. 

But TPG has cut a controversial figure. Its buyout of Debenhams, with CVC and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity, is often cited as a disaster – after they sold the department store chain, it was left in such a weakened state that it collapsed. 

TPG revenues surged in the nine months to September to £2.9billion, from £417.2million a year earlier, while profits jumped by more than five times to £1.3billion. TPG now manages around £80.6billion. 

Floating would eventually give Bonderman and Coulter the chance to sell out.