Employee Buyout - EBO
There are two types of employee buyout. One represents employees taking control of a company. Another runs with employees not being employees any longer. Kind of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of finance.
In the first type, a group of employees pool their resources (and probably borrow money) to buy a majority ownership in the company they work for. Usually, this bet involves management taking control of a struggling company.
In the second form of employee buyout, staff levels are cut by offering certain workers a bunch of money to...go away. This usually happens in situations where a group of employees operate under a union contract (so that firing them outright is difficult) or if certain individuals have a contract that prevents them from being cut (you might notice this happen to your favorite sports team...we're looking at you, Carmelo Anthony).
The company then offers a severance package to entice employees to walk away. The employees can then bank the money and move onto another job (or take up fishing, etc., depending on their personal situation). Meanwhile, the company suffers through a large expense in the near term, but lowers its operating costs moving forward. The hope is that the firm will make up the money in the long run.
See: MBO. See: Management Buyout. See: LBO. See: Leveraged Buyout.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is MBO v LBO?17 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is an m b o versus
and lbo Okay let's Get their letters right first And
n b o is a management buyout Ngos on their
own aren't all that common But in a given company
inside management might own same thirty percent of the stock
They might partner with another investor who owns a twenty
percent or more And then they might borrow say fifty
percent in debt and take the company private fixit pivot
tweak live with bad quarters for a while without wall
street yelling at him And then they might sell the
company cell or whatever Maybe take it public again will
The distinctive feature here is that the company is already
in place Management is doing the deal and more often
than not essentially all the net worth of the management
will be in the company leveraged when the embryo is
completed And that level of financial commitment really keeps the
team focused Because if things don't work out when they
lose everything your house their car in there Slinky collection
All right next up we have an lbo which is
a leveraged buyout and it just refers to the practice
Of taking on debt to buy a company sometimes with
same management sometimes with different players like an lbo is
a bigger venn diagram set than the embryo thing Well
in an lbo the same basic thing happens But in
a whole bunch of cases management is tossed out The
company wouldn't be quote vulnerable unquote to an lbo Had
management done a good job and kept the company trading
or valued at a high multiple where it would then
be almost impossible to make the risk reward scenario workout
in taking out a whole lot of debt to get
company bought and then turned in the right direction Instead
new management in lbo is usually brought in and resembling
moses noah and other biblical characters and their perceived greatness
and there's a stone tablet with a new set of
commandments Thou shalt be profitable or something like that Arguments
are had at the board level and eventually either the
lbo works and the company has taken public again or
sold for a big price Or it isn't and wrath 00:02:06.63 --> [endTime] has had