I have a question on acquisition finance, if anyone can help. Apart from debt and equity, what are the other forms of financing a M&A?
It's basically just debt and equity, but those can work in a few ways.
Most straightforward is cash, which you use to buy out the equity and might raise by borrowing and attaching debt at various points in the capital structure. Generally speaking the acquirer will think of their own cash as the 'equity' component of the deal and the rest as debt, but some of the cash raised by way of debt could and often will go towards purchasing the equity held by the seller. Hope that makes sense.
Equity and debt instruments can also be used as acquisition consideration in their own right. If you're a public company making an acquisition, you may provide your own shares to the sellers as part of the deal - this reduces your cash consideration and can be very attractive if your shares are trading well and you think that the company you're buying will be a substantial boon to your balance sheet, as dilution concerns won't be huge - ideally existing shareholders end up with more total value even if their holding is diluted.
You can also use debt instruments like some kinds of bonds or commercial paper. Essentially, in the process of buying out existing shareholders you agree that the company you are buying will owe them a bunch of money at fairly high interest. These are basically in lieu of cash and let you gear up to a level that banks or bond underwriters might not be willing to facilitate - though restrictive covenants in loans (common) or bonds (currently less common) may limit your ability to do this. This kind of paper leverage used to be very popular in PE LBOs, I don't think it's as common these days but maybe people just talk about it less cause it's kind of dodgy.
I guess if you're a public Corp you could also issue your own bonds to sellers to pay for an acquisition but I would imagine that's not attractive from a capital perspective unless you're a megacap corp taking over another megacap corp. There may be tax reasons to do this in some cases, but I'm not sure.