As to speculation, I'll add my $0.02 - it's a sport I enjoy as much as the next Photrian, so heck, why not.
There are a couple of common rationales for acquiring a business, including (not limited to):
* Expansion of a current/existing business, e.g. through complementary products or market access
* Take out the competition by simply buying them
* Gain control over key supply chain links; e.g. takeover over of a strategic supplier or distributor
* Extract some key asset(s) and discard the remains; esp. if the entity has a large sum of cash or cash equivalents
* Chop it up into more promising parts that are suspected to do better on their own, perhaps leaving undesirable assets and (esp.) liabilities in a dog part that's essentially discarded
* Let it run free as it has done before because you expect it'll continue to generate attractive dividends
Roughly speaking there's a continuum of how intensive the new owner will be involved. This ranges from entirely hands-off on the one hand - a bit like you'd buy shares as a private investor, and (usually) how your pension plan invests in entities. The other end of the scale is total assimilation/integration of the new business or extremely detailed restructuring.
It looks like Kingswood is in the business of settling somewhat in the middle, but more towards the hands-off part of the spectrum. It seems to me that they're the kind of investor that is basically on the lookout for companies that are inherently promising and decently structured, but that run into barriers that allow them to be more profitable and/or to grow. In such a situation, a party like Kingswood can mobilize capital for new investments, and (perhaps more importantly, but also less visibly from the outside) suggest changes and offer advice related to strategic management.
In the process, an owner like Kingswood will generally formulate financial goals for the entities they own and periodically evaluate and re-negotiate these goals with executive management of the entity (Alaris in this case). Depending on how well the owned entity performs, the new owner may decide to intervene more or less intensively. E.g. in the case of Alaris with its two business units, it's conceivable that
IF at some point performance is not as desired
AND it's clear that one BU is doing quite well but the other is posing a ballast, the owner might decide to enter a process of splitting up the business.
What they have in mind exactly is something a firm like Kingswood will generally not publicly state, for the simple reason that they're not required to by anyone. Moreover, they may not have decided yet and may want to watch how Alaris fares in the next period (e.g. a year or 18 months) to see how it really does - so far, Kingswood has obviously done their due diligence, but that's still looking backward and quite different from being able to observe directly and intimately how Alaris really fares.
So my expectation is that in the next year or so, there's not going to be very major news in relation to Alaris. After that, it's a different story and it'll depend on what's really happening inside Alaris. That will be the more interesting phase of the process for external stakeholders.
The Venture Capitalist hires a famous person as their spokesman, makes a splash when issuing stock, and then pockets the sale of stock profits and forgets about the firm.
That's the Hollywood version of it. The real world of course works differently in 99.9998% of the cases.
actually, companies can jump to a different juridiction all the time. not on topic for alaris, but my Pension investments once included a Canadian Company by the name of "Great lakes Power" located in Gatineau Quebec. I still have shares in that but it is now Known as Brookfield Renewable energy, located in the Bahamas.
That's not the same as "jumping to a different jurisdiction". I don't know the details of the transactions involved in the firms you mentioned, but from a distance, it sounds like the common route of assets (which may be entire business entities) being acquired by a new owner that happens to be in a different place. In that case, the entity doesn't really move. Only the assets do. These assets (and liabilities) often include customer/investor-related aspects, which is why they affect you and you see different names on your pension papers than before.
In general, moving a business doesn't happen much. The regular way is you create a new entity in the target location and then transfer assets to that entity, leaving the original entity an empty/emptier shell. It's less complex and especially much more flexible than attempting to move an entity.
In the case of Alaris, the acquisition by a US entity changes nothing about Alaris' location. It's a bit like if you're an American and you decide to buy a house on the French Riviera. The house remains in France; it doesn't all of a sudden become US territory governed by US law. So the new owner is still subject to paying French taxes, adhering to French labor law etc.
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