Private equity/Agilent When the chips are down

Less than a week after completing the second-largest leveraged buyout ever, Silver Lake is back participating in another technology LBO. It is teaming up with fellow private equity firm KKR to buy Agilent’s chip business for $2.7bn. That may be smaller than the $11bn SunGard deal. But it may in fact be harder to earn a decent return on. It is not hard to see why Agilent is selling the business. The US tech group will be getting rid of a unit whose results have been particularly volatile. Agilen...