Stefan Kaluzny, founder of Sycamore Partners, details the investment thesis behind the firm's $17 billion acquisition and carve-out of Staples.
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Kaluzny: Staples' US retail stores matched their 2017 profitability in 2021
“This year, Staples retail stores will have the same two hundred million of profitability that they had four years ago when everyone forecasted zero, and that is still in a pandemic where we're underperforming.”
Insight
Kaluzny: Private equity and credit teams must remain strictly separate
“We need to supplement the trading and debt skills because that is a business of many decisions with imperfect information rather than few decisions with, in a perfect world, perfect information. I believe that those teams need to be different and need to be se…”
Disclosure
Kaluzny's biggest regret: sticking to value and missing the recent growth boom
“Candidly, the single largest investment regret I have is having traditionally been a value investor, not having recognized the power of growth over the last five years. And pivoting our portfolio to embrace those models at what appeared to me to be relatively …”
Insight
Kaluzny: Business decisions are driven by honor, fear, or self-interest
“Thucydides described the causes of war. Wars are always fought out of honor, fear, or interest, and if you take that and take a step back and take the drama of war out of it for a moment and think about people, and candidly think about investment decisions, an…”
Insight
Kaluzny: Outsized PE returns require matching manager and company lifecycles
“We believe that companies are organisms, that have their own life cycles. They grow, they mature, they decline, they get sick, they get better. They're a series of things, and they have their own life, and candidly, chief executives or management teams also ha…”
Disclosure
Sycamore passes on viable buyouts unless they have hand-picked leadership ready
“In the absence of having that close relationship with someone who is going to lead the company and who we feel is just right, we have not always chosen to take risk on just an asset or just a company where the company's fine, or maybe the company's terrific, b…”