Google News Kansas’ QTS Realty Trust to go private in $10 billion Blackstone deal; shares soar
by SOURAV D | VIEW 1520
On Monday, Blackstone Group Inc., the largest alternative asset manager around the globe having had $619 billion worth of assets under management to-date, had issued a statement on Monday saying that the New York City-based investment firm had been exploring an option to take a Kansas-based data centre operator QTS Realty Trust Inc private in an all-cash $10 billion deal, as a sharp shoot-up in pandemic driven work-from-home employees continued to surge demands of cloud-based services. According to financial terms of the deal, Blackstone’s infrastructure unit Blackstone Funds alongside its non-traded real-estate trusts and other long-term capital vehicles, would pay $78 for each share of QTS Realty Trust Inc., representing a premium of roughly 21 per cent as of Friday’s Wall Street closure. On top of that, following announcement of the deal, shares’ prices of Kansas-based QTS which had claimed to have over 7 million square feet of data centre space in North America alongside Europe, soared as much as 21.18 per cent to wrap up the day at a record closing high of $78.15 per share, while equity value of the takeover deal stood at $5.37 billion based on QTS’ 68.9 million outstanding shares.
Blackstone to take QTS Realty Trust private in $10 billion all-cash deal
Blackstone, in tandem, was quoted saying in the statement that the $10-billion all-cash acquisition deal would likely to be concluded over second half of the year, while leading US lenders such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs alongside Germany’s largest lender Deutsche Bank Securities and UK’s Barclays had been acting as advisors for Blackstone on the deal.
Jeffries and Morgan Stanley had been the leading overseers of the deal for QTS.