Masters of the universe? Not even close. The first big non-financial leveraged buy-out to be struck outside Japan since the collapse of Lehman Brothers shows the formerly swaggering heroes of private equity in a whole new light: politic, deferential, glad to be of use.
Fittingly, the show has reopened a long way from Wall Street: in Seoul, where Kohlberg Kravis Roberts has won an auction for Oriental Brewery, Anheuser-Busch InBev's South Korean beer business. The transaction itself bears only passing resemblance to the blockbusters of old. For starters, it is for a unit of a public company rather than the company itself. Second, even though the parent is in a fair amount of distress – labouring under a $61bn gross debt pile and with a number of auctions under way round the world – KKR is paying a pretty full enterprise value of $1.8bn, or 10 times last year's earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Global brewers are trading between seven and eight times.
True, that number includes $50m of cash and $300m of financing from the seller, which would cost KKR a lot more to obtain on the open market. But Korea's beer market is a heavily regulated duopoly that the government can easily make three; the withdrawal from the bidding of Lotte Group, the domestic conglomerate seen as the natural buyer for OB, suggests that Lotte may have liberalisation in mind.