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In today’s edition, we have a scoop on Blackstone-backed Candle Media, which is slashing costs, reor͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌  ͏‌ 
 
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July 2, 2024
semafor

Business

Business
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Liz Hoffman
Liz Hoffman

Hi, and welcome back to Semafor Business.

Fifteen years of free money warped markets. Near-zero interest rates from 2008 to 2022 meant that the most conservative investors, instead of buying ultrasafe Treasury bonds at 4%, had to buy slightly riskier corporate bonds to get that return. That pushed the corporate-bond people into junk bonds, the junk-bond people to stocks, the stock people to venture capital, and the venture capital bros to crypto.

Things aren’t, of course, quite that tidy, but in aggregate that’s where the money went, chased to dodgier edges of investing by a risk-free rate that just didn’t pay. It’s what people mean when they talk about “moving out the risk curve.” Here is a 2012 press release from Barclays advising people to literally do that.

For private-equity firms, the next step out that curve was growth equity — same fish (equity), different pond (young companies, instead of established ones). KKR raised $688 million for its first such fund in 2016 and then $2.2 billion in 2019, the same year that Blackstone launched a competing business. “Firm typically known for its buyout and credit strategies now trying its hand at growth-stage investing,” was a typical headline from those years, that one about Permira.

Today’s story is about a company launched into that moment. Candle Media was a darling of the content bubble, to be sure, but it also benefited from Blackstone’s inching out that curve. In 2021, the Wall Street firm gave two former Disney wunderkinds $1 billion and set them on an acquisition spree to create an independent studio to feed Netflix and Apple and Amazon. It was growthy and buzzy and basking in a celebrity halo — this in an industry that, for most of its history, prided itself on streamlining operations and reengineering balance sheets.

Well, Candle is now streamlining its operations and reengineering its balance sheet, which is the subject both of today’s scoop and Ben Smith’s and my sit-down last week with its co-CEOs, Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs.

Programming note: We’re off on Thursday for the holiday, so we’ll see you next week. Happy July 4 to everyone but the dogs.

Buy/Sell
Yara Nardi/Pool/Reuters

➚ BUY: Paris. The premium that investors demand to own French government bonds eased from their highs after the first round of parliamentary voting suggested that neither the far-right or far-left parties would have a free hand to pass major spending bills.

➘ SELL: Washington. The opposite is happening in US Treasury markets, where higher odds of a Republican sweep bode poorly for deficit control. Yields rose sharply Monday.

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The Tape

How Russian pranksters tricked Jay Powell…Beijing shorts its own bonds… US demands Boeing plead guiltyDa Vinci Code studio up for sale… Salesforce investors reject Benioff’s $20M bonus… Chewy’s ‘Roaring Kitty’ bump is short-lived…

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Ben Smith and Liz Hoffman

Candle’s in the wind

THE SCOOP

Candle Media, the Blackstone-backed firm rolling up Hollywood production companies, is moving to slash costs and reorganize its grab bag of expensive acquisitions, which include Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine.

One-time Disney heirs apparent Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs founded Candle with $1 billion from Blackstone in 2021, the last year of everything-up-and-to-the-right. Their animating idea was that the new, streaming Hollywood would favor producers who could bring not just projects, but strong brands with social media followings, to studios that were closing the gates around their own shows.

“[That’s] the one thesis that is holding true, though it’s fraying around the edges slightly,” Mayer said in a wide-ranging interview with Semafor at a Tribeca hotel last Friday.

Candle, whose glamorous run of acquisitions included the $900 million purchase of Hello Sunshine, has moved into its green eyeshade era. With costs mounting, the consultancy FTI has spent recent months studying Candle’s spending and its organizational structure and recommending cuts, the pair confirmed.

Now Candle will split into two divisions: Animation projects will be folded into Moonbug, which produces the hit kids’ show CoComelon and is, Mayer and Staggs acknowledged, the clear winner among their investments, accounting for the vast majority of Candle’s profits last year. Most other pieces will move into a live-action division, to be rebranded as Candle Studios, run by Hello Sunshine chief Sarah Harden. That will include production companies Exile, True Stories, and Fauda creator Faraway Road, though its biggest bet by far remains Witherspoon’s company, which produced Hulu’s Little Fires Everywhere and Apple’s The Morning Show.

The reorg isn’t a prelude to a sale, the two executives insisted, but rather an effort to cut costs. Candle launched into a frothy market for streaming shows, and even then paid prices that raised eyebrows. It’s belatedly trying to consolidate back offices to save money.

“We paid at the top of the market,” Mayer said. “Have the financials borne out the way we would like, to have to support the prices that we paid? Probably not.” But he said: “Talk to us in two or three years.”

Gary Doherty/Variety via Getty Images

BEN’S VIEW

Candle was a darling of the content bubble, and executed a remarkable wealth transfer from investors to big-name Hollywood talent including Witherspoon and Will Smith, recipient of a disastrous minority investment. (“The lesson there is key-man risk,” Mayer said. “We’re glad we only took a piece.”)

Now, Moonbug has almost single-handedly saved it. Despite a drumbeat of questions from the industry about the company’s strategy, properties including CoComelon make Candle a powerhouse in children’s media, a great business on YouTube, and has a solid foothold in streaming. ATTN is well-regarded and successful, if in a different business than the rest of its holdings. Candle, Mayer said, is “profitable and growing.”

LIZ’S VIEW

Private equity outgrew its LBO roots years ago. But Blackstone is now in the business of worrying about whether Will Smith slaps somebody on national television. That’s about as far as you can get from pinching pennies at a corrugated cardboard factory, and a sign of how much private equity has changed.

Candle launched with an expensive takeover of Hello Sunshine, which had no profits to speak of and a business that doesn’t scale all that well: Its big hits have all starred Witherspoon, who can only be in so many places at once. It’s a producer-for-hire that has bet on a virtuous cycle of influencers, community, and other buzzwords more often spouted by venture capitalists than their more mature cousins in private equity.

Looking back, Candle feels like the rocket launched right at the end of an economic cycle — growthy and buzzy and built around big personalities at a time when those things were more attractive than they are now, two years into a rates cycle that has brought discipline back to investing.

Candle may yet turn out to be a winner, for all the reasons Ben explains above, particularly the undeniability of Staggs and Mayer. They’re good at this.

More broadly, there’s the question of whether Wall Street can roll up Hollywood the way it has rolled up car washes and opticians. TPG, which made money with CAA, last week announced that it was backing a new talent agency and struck the first in what is expected to be a series of roll-ups and minority investments — a very Candle-like playbook.

But if you ask executives at Blackstone or TPG why their firms haven’t done many acquisitions themselves, they’ll tell you that investing is a talent business and that talent businesses are finicky and mostly immune to the financial engineering and operational tinkering that makes deals successful. As Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs (another place that’s been fairly allergic to M&A) used to say, the assets go up and down the elevator every night.

There hasn’t been a wave of asset manager tie-ups, despite a lot of industry forces pointing in that direction, and it’s because managing talent is, as Staggs told us, “a particular science and art.”

Ben's view on why Hollywood’s eyes are at least as much on Mayer and Staggs as on their company. →


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Mixed Signals

How did the media miss the biggest story in American politics? Many journalists were shocked by Joe Biden’s debate performance. Did the media fail to see the president clearly, ask the wrong questions, or fall for White House spin? In this emergency pod, Nayeema, Ben, and Max welcome spicy takes from top editors and media elites and predict where we go from here, including who might be the most media-savvy Biden replacement (...if it comes to that).

Listen to the full story on Mixed Signals →

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Evidence

BlackRock’s big deal this week has little to do with its core business, the one it’s known for: managing $10 trillion of our money. Financial-data providers like Preqin, which BlackRock is buying for $3.2 billion, are arms dealers, not warlords. They’re more valuable as neutral brokers than as a secret sauce for any one fund manager.

This is about BlackRock’s other business, one that it would like its stockholders to pay more attention to. Its Aladdin software, which lets money managers analyze and spot risks in their portfolios, accounts for a small but growing slice of BlackRock’s revenue, 8% last year. What began as BlackRock’s own central nervous system — this being finance, its name is obviously an insane acronym — was offered to outside firms starting in the 1990s.

Aladdin is to BlackRock what cloud provider AWS is to Amazon: an internal tool that turned into a serious venture in its own right — and one that is in a different, more valuable business than its corporate owner. If stockholders valued Aladdin’s revenue like they value that of S&P Global and Moody’s, it would be worth an extra $10 billion in market capitalization to BlackRock. That’s another way of saying that Aladdin could be more valuable outside BlackRock than inside, which is why every few years, there’s some spinoff chatter that BlackRock quashes quickly.

The other path is to grow it and try to get shareholders to revalue the entire company, bit by bit. Thus this week’s deal. That’s hard to do, and Preqin is a drop in the bucket, but it is strategic M&A at its absolute purest.

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What We’re Tracking
Kyle Terada/Reuters

Selling at the top: ​The owner of the NBA champion Boston Celtics said he’s selling the team. Expect private equity to be all over it: Sports teams are among the hottest assets going, and one of their own, ex-Bain executive Steve Pagliuca, already owns a slice of the Celtics. The price tag here could exceed $5 billion, which would work out to a 12% annual return for Pagliuca since he bought a stake in 2002 — better than the S&P 500.

Bench warrants: Courts will no longer defer to federal agencies, after the Supreme Court struck down a 40-year-old precedent this week. The ruling hands more ammunition to companies and trade groups fighting regulators, and “is going to wind up with more enforcement action being reversed by federal courts,” a former assistant attorney general tells the Federal Drive podcast.

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