Friday, June 12, 2026  ·  Covering: Mon–Fri this week

France's telecom market just went from four mobile carriers to three: Bouygues, Orange, and Free-Iliad agreed to carve up Patrick Drahi's distressed SFR for €20.4B ($23.5B), one of Europe's biggest telecom deals in a decade. Ingredion struck a $5.0B all-cash take-private of UK ingredients maker Tate & Lyle at a 59% premium, while Apollo and Blackstone closed a record $35B chip-backed financing for Anthropic — the largest private-credit AI infrastructure deal ever. Markets cooled this week as hot jobs data revived rate-hike chatter heading into next week's Fed meeting, even as SpaceX's tokenized share sale drew $150B of demand.

DEAL #1

Bouygues, Orange & Free-Iliad to Carve Up SFR — €20.4B Deal Shrinks France to Three Mobile Carriers

Telecom / TMT

ENTERPRISE VALUE€20.35B (~$23.5B)

SPLITBouygues ~42% / Free-Iliad ~31% / Orange ~27%

BUYER ADVISORSAdvisors TBD

SELLER ADVISORS (ALTICE FRANCE)Advisors TBD

ANNOUNCEDJune 6, 2026

EXPECTED CLOSEH2 2027, subject to regulatory approval

Patrick Drahi's heavily indebted Altice France agreed to sell SFR — France's #2 mobile carrier — to a consortium of its three rivals, who will divide SFR's customers, network, and business units among themselves rather than run it as one company. The deal effectively dismantles SFR as a standalone competitor, consolidating France from four national mobile operators to three. Break-up fees range from €100M to €2B depending on how the deal might unravel, signaling both sides' conviction (and the regulatory risk ahead).

Why it matters for recruiting: This is a four-to-three telecom consolidation — historically the hardest type of deal to get past European antitrust regulators (think O2/Three UK, which EU regulators blocked in 2016). Be ready to discuss why regulators might allow this one (SFR is financially distressed, arguably a "failing firm" defense) versus why they might not (higher prices for consumers in a market with one fewer competitor). The three-way carve-up structure is also unusual: each buyer absorbs a different slice of assets, which means three separate integration plans and three different synergy cases rather than one. And the seller-side context — a heavily levered owner unloading a struggling asset — is a good entry point into discussing distressed M&A and how debt overhang forces sales. Bloomberg ↗ CNBC ↗

Ingredion to Acquire Tate & Lyle for ~$5.0B — All-Cash Take-Private at a 59% Premium

Industrials / Consumer

TRANSACTION VALUE~$5.0B (595p/share, all cash)

PREMIUM59% over undisturbed price (May 13 close)

BUYER ADVISORS (INGREDION)J.P. Morgan

SELLER ADVISORS (TATE & LYLE)Goldman Sachs & Greenhill (joint lead); BofA & Citi (joint advisors/brokers)

ANNOUNCEDJune 8, 2026

STRUCTUREUK scheme of arrangement (take-private)

Ingredion — a US maker of starches and sweeteners used across packaged food and beverages — agreed to buy London-listed Tate & Lyle for 595 pence per share in cash, a 59% premium. Tate & Lyle makes specialty ingredients like sweeteners, fibers, and stabilizers that go into everything from soft drinks to baked goods. Combining the two creates one of the largest global food-ingredient suppliers, giving the merged company more scale to negotiate input costs with commodity suppliers and pricing with food giants.

Why it matters for recruiting: This is a textbook cross-border take-private of a UK plc by a US strategic — a good chance to learn the UK Takeover Code basics: "Rule 2.7" firm offer announcements, schemes of arrangement (vs. a US-style tender offer), and the role of a "corporate broker" (BofA and Citi here), a UK-specific advisory role that doesn't really exist in US deals. The 59% premium is also a great discussion point: ingredients businesses are "boring" but generate defensive, recession-resistant cash flows — exactly what strategics pay up for when rates stay elevated and growth is scarce. Practice walking through why an undisturbed price baseline (May 13, pre-rumor) is the right reference point, not the day-before-announcement price. Ingredion IR ↗ SEC 8-K ↗

Apollo & Blackstone Close $35B Chip-Backed Financing for Anthropic — Largest Private Credit AI Deal Ever

Leveraged Finance / Private Credit

DEAL SIZE$35B (debt + equity)

STRUCTURESPV buys Broadcom chips, leases to Anthropic; debt repaid from lease cash flows

LEAD SPONSORSApollo Global Management & Blackstone

CREDIT ENHANCEMENTBroadcom residual-value guarantee on senior tranches

ADVISORSAdvisors TBD (Morgan Stanley reportedly involved, unconfirmed)

ANNOUNCEDJune 9–10, 2026

Apollo and Blackstone agreed to provide $35B of debt and equity to a newly formed special purpose vehicle (SPV) that will buy Broadcom's AI chips and lease them to Anthropic for roughly 1 gigawatt of new compute capacity — part of a broader plan with Broadcom to deploy 20+ gigawatts through 2028. It works like aircraft leasing: the SPV owns the hardware, Anthropic pays rent, and that rent services the debt, with Broadcom backstopping senior lenders if the chips' resale value falls short of expectations.

Why it matters for recruiting: This is the lev fin story of the year — asset-backed structured finance applied to AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale. Interviewers love asking about "off-balance-sheet financing": this SPV/lease structure keeps tens of billions of capex off Anthropic's balance sheet while giving Apollo and Blackstone a claim backed by a physical asset (the chips) plus a Broadcom credit backstop. Know the difference between cash-flow lending (lending against a company's earnings) and asset-based lending (lending against a specific asset's value) — and the key risk here: AI chips depreciate fast, so the "residual value" backing this debt is itself a moving target. This deal is also Exhibit A for how private credit is muscling into territory once reserved for syndicated bank loans. Axios ↗ PE Wire ↗

DEFENSE / AEROSPACE

The Pentagon launched its "Low-Cost Containerized Munitions" program, striking agreements with Anduril, CoAspire, Leidos, and Zone 5 to test missiles starting this month, plus a separate deal with startup Castelion for at least 500 Blackbeard hypersonic missiles a year. Separately, BlueForge Alliance won an additional $400M to keep building out the submarine supply chain — defense-tech and shipbuilding capacity remain priority spend areas. Military Times ↗

TECH / TMT

SpaceX's tokenized share offering closed Thursday with roughly $150B of investor demand — double its initial $75B target — with tokenized shares set to begin trading on Bybit's spot market Friday. The order book is a striking signal of how much private capital wants exposure to AI-adjacent tech mega-caps, even as public AI stocks wobbled this week. MSN ↗

INDUSTRIALS

Carlyle agreed to sell Flender — a German maker of gearboxes and drivetrains for wind turbines and industrial machinery — to Triton Partners (terms undisclosed), five years after carving it out of Siemens. It's a clean exit for Carlyle and a continuation of industrial PE rotating capital through power-transmission and wind-supply-chain assets. Carlyle ↗

HEALTHCARE / OTHER

GSK agreed to acquire Nuvalent for $10.6B, picking up two late-stage lung cancer drugs (zidesamtinib and neladalkib) currently under FDA review. It's part of a record $106B+ year for biopharma M&A, with Gilead, Merck, and Lilly also active as Big Pharma races to fill patent-cliff gaps with acquired pipelines. CNBC ↗

M&A / LEVERAGED FINANCE

$77B of leveraged loans and $22.6B of high-yield bonds have priced so far in 2026 across 54 and 20 deals, respectively, as M&A-driven issuance starts to replace refinancing volume. Most new LBO loans (84%) are still pricing inside SOFR+550, but spreads could widen 25–50bps as private credit absorbs strain from BDC redemption requests. The $35B Anthropic financing and the Triton/Flender buyout both show private credit's appetite for large-cap deals isn't slowing despite those cracks. Capstone ↗ PitchBook ↗

TOPIC: ASSET-BACKED PRIVATE CREDIT, USING THE $35B ANTHROPIC CHIP FINANCING

The Apollo/Blackstone/Anthropic deal is a great vehicle for showing you understand how lending against a specific asset differs from lending against a company's cash flows.

How to bring it up: "I've been following the Apollo/Blackstone financing for Anthropic's chip buildout — it's a useful example of asset-backed private credit, where the debt is secured by the chips themselves rather than Anthropic's cash flows. The interesting part is the residual-value guarantee from Broadcom, which addresses the biggest risk in that structure: how fast AI hardware depreciates…" Let the interviewer pick up the thread from there.