Asia focus for the Bertelsmann billion

The Financial Times today devotes a good deal of attention to Bertelsmann's new private equity tie-up where it is reported to be injecting €500 million into a €1 billion fund together with Citigroup and Morgan Stanley's p.e. arms. The main story is behind the subscriber-only firewall here but there is summary of it on Reuters here.

What caught our eye was not the company's interest in Thomson Learning, although that's interesting enough at $5 billion. It was the Bertelsmann's suggestion that the fund would be used "to invest in media businesses, especially in Asia and the United States but also Europe". We wonder what they might look at in Asia. The FT suggests they're looking at 5 - 10 deals totalling €20 billion. There aren't many €2 billion deals to be done in Asia, let alone €4 billion.

MSNBC is carrying the FT's linked column which is headlined "Bertelsmann makes friends with locusts". This notes that, following the withdrawal of IPO plans, there had been question marks about the company's capacity to do big deals. This seems a clever way around the lack of access to capital through public markets....and the private equity star continues to rise.