Ropes & Gray Wins ALB Japan "Debt Market Deal of the Year" Award

On Sept. 25, Ropes & Gray’s Tokyo-based team received the ALB Japan "Debt Market Deal of the Year" award in Tokyo.  The awards recognize the outstanding performance of private practitioners and in-house teams in Japan and around the region.  The team was honored for its work representing Kioxia Holdings Corporation (formerly Toshiba Memory Corporation), the world leader in memory solutions, on the refinancing of numerous tranches of debt and preferred equity.  Our Tokyo private equity team previously advised Bain Capital in its approximately $18 billion acquisition of Toshiba Corp’s memory chip business  – understood to be the largest deal in Japan since 2011, as well as both the largest private equity and leveraged finance deal ever seen in Asia. 

The Ropes team advised the client in obtaining approximately $13 billion of financing in the form of senior secured debt and preferred share financing, and the use of those proceeds to repay the existing senior secured debt and to redeem approximately $5.5 billion of preferred shares from over fifty shareholders, including Apple, Seagate, Kingston and Dell, which participated in the original transaction acquiring Kioxia from Toshiba. 

A cross-office team of Ropes & Gray lawyers was led by private equity partners Tsuyoshi Imai, Ben Morris, Saeko Inaba and included private equity counsel Kaori Fukazawa (all of Tokyo), and more than two dozen attorneys and legal support personnel based in firm offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

The award is the latest in a series of recent recognition for Ropes & Gray’s Tokyo office.  Most recently, Mergermarket Japan named Ropes & Gray “Private Equity Legal Adviser of the Year” as part of its Japan M&A Awards earlier this year.  The team also received multiple awards for advising the Bain Capital led consortium’s initial $18 billion buyout of Toshiba’s memory chip business, including The American Lawyer’s “Dealmakers of the Year” award in 2019, and the ALB’s “Japan Deal of the Year” in 2018.