Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Victory Capital has put in a bid to buy UK asset manager Janus Henderson, in a move aimed at gatecrashing an earlier deal agreed with Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management and General Catalyst.
The US money manager said on Thursday it had bid $57.04 a share for Janus in a transaction that would value the British-American group at $8.6bn. The competing offer comes just weeks after Trian and a group of investors led by General Catalyst, a venture capital group, agreed to buy the business for $49 a share, valuing it at $7.4bn.
The surprise move by Victory Capital marks the latest in a wave of consolidation in the global asset management sector. Earlier this month, US fund group Nuveen struck a deal to acquire London-based Schroders for £9.9bn.
David Brown, chair and chief executive of Victory Capital, said the firm and Janus Henderson were “two similarly sized, complementary organisations” and would “create a more competitive platform that would deliver superior value for shareholders, employees and clients alike”.
The proposed deal would give Janus’s shareholders $30 in cash per share, with the remainder paid in Victory Capital stock. The Texas-based asset manager said its plan represents a 16 per cent premium to Trian’s bid.
The combined entity would have a total enterprise value of about $16bn and Janus shareholders would own about 38 per cent of the new group.
The attempt by Victory Capital, carved out from KeyCorp in 2013, to buy Janus would mark its biggest bet yet to bulk up its products from mutual funds to exchange traded funds through an acquisition.
Janus manages about $484bn, meaning a combination would more than double Victory’s size.
Victory Capital has been pursuing a deal with Janus in advance of the investment firm reaching a deal with the Trian-led investor group. It made a $52-a-share cash and stock offer in December. Victory was “Party A” in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that revealed the bid.
Janus rebuffed the approach because of the strength of the existing deal and certainty of closure, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shares in Janus had been trading above the original $49-a-share price tag for the past week, indicating investors were expecting a higher rival bid. The shares jumped 5 per cent to nearly $53 on Thursday.
The busy deals market over the past year has brought with it an uptick in public bidding wars, including Netflix and Paramount Skydance’s battle for Warner Bros Discovery, Pfizer’s fight with Novo Nordisk to buy obesity drug start-up Metsera and Baker Hughes’s successful bid for Chart Industries, gatecrashing an earlier agreement to merge with rival Flowserve.
The modern version of Victory Capital was founded in 2013 from a management buyout of US regional bank KeyCorp’s internal asset management unit.
Victory Capital has dramatically bulked up over the past decade through a series of acquisitions. In 2024, it combined with French asset manager Amundi’s US offshoot, increasing its assets under management by roughly $100bn.
Activist investor Peltz, who was previously Janus’s biggest shareholder with a 20 per cent stake, justified the take-private deal as a move to “de-risk an investment that we believe is highly sensitive to capital market and geopolitical dynamics”.
Peltz first began building a stake in Janus in 2020 and gained board representation in 2022.
Under the terms of the merger agreement with the Trian-led group, Janus is allowed to terminate the deal before June this year if it reaches a superior agreement with another party.
Janus previously said it would retain its presence in London and Denver once the Trian-led takeover goes through. The company declined to comment on Thursday.
About The Author
