Apollo Global Management Inc. APO -0.07% has hired Craig Farr as a senior partner to lead its capital-markets business, a sign of the investment giant’s push to expand the array of companies whose businesses it finances.
In the newly created role, Mr. Farr will oversee the origination of new debt- and equity-financing opportunities, the structuring of deals and the distribution of pieces of those deals to different investors through a process known as syndication. He will report to Apollo Co-Presidents Scott Kleinman and James Zelter.
Private-equity firms initially hired capital-markets professionals, often from banks, to help them arrange financing for their own deals as they grew in size and complexity.
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In the years since the 2007-08 financial crisis, capital-markets businesses have become major sources of fee revenue for big publicly traded firms as they finance more transactions in areas where banks no longer operate because of regulatory hurdles. These can include lending to deals for rival buyout firms and financing companies with nontraditional needs.
Mr. Farr was a senior adviser at Carlyle Group Inc. CG -0.90% from 2017 to 2019, helping the firm’s credit business grow and assisting it with its own expansion into capital markets. Before that, he was head of credit and capital markets at KKR & Co., helping to build the firm’s capital-markets business into a global, full-service debt-and-equity shop and a major source of fee revenue.
Before joining KKR, Mr. Farr spent 12 years at Citigroup Global Markets Inc. where he was a managing director and served as co-head of North American equity capital markets.
Unlike KKR, whose big balance sheet recently helped it to play a significant role in the initial public offering of entertainment company Endeavor Group Holdings Inc., EDR -0.97% Apollo isn’t likely to be leading big IPOs anytime soon. With a credit business that accounts for about 70% of its $461 billion in assets under management, it will continue to focus on providing creative financing solutions—be they debt, equity or some combination of the two—tailored to meet the needs of the companies it partners with, Apollo officials said.
Apollo already has more than 3,500 financing relationships, with only a relatively small portion of those being companies its private-equity funds own. The firm has provided loans to finance sizable deals, such as the $1.4 billion merger of newspaper publisher Gannett Co. with GateHouse Media parent New Media Investment Group Inc. GCI -0.38% in 2019.
Apollo has also formed partnerships with big corporations to help meet their needs, including leading a group of investors that earlier this year took a 49.9% interest in Anheuser-Busch InBev BUD -0.42% NV’s metal container plants in the U.S. for roughly $3 billion. The deal allowed AB InBev to satisfy its shareholders by paying down debt while retaining control of the plants. Apollo got a stake in assets with long-term, stable cash flows, something its insurance clients, and other institutional investors, crave.
Last September, Apollo led a group that took a 49% stake in a large real-estate portfolio from Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. The deal gave Apollo and its co-investors access to long-term rental-income streams and resulted in $2.7 billion in proceeds for ADNOC to invest in its core business and strategic-growth initiatives.
In an example of its reach, Apollo said at the time that the transaction required no borrowing and was placed entirely with insurance and pension-fund investors.
Write to Miriam Gottfried at [email protected]
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Appeared in the May 18, 2021, print edition as ‘Apollo Hires Credit Veteran to Head Capital-Markets Business.’
