The Carlyle Group, a US-based private equity firm is raising US$1 billion under its Asian growth fund to further expand its investment portfolio in China and India.
Participating in the growth fund as one of its limited partners (LPs) is International Finance Corp (IFC), the private sector investment arm of World Bank. Specifically, it will be committing an equity investment of up to US$25 million, not exceeding 20 percent of its total fund commitments.
Their participation, IFC said, would hopefully encourage other investors in the currently challenging money-raising environment, to increase the institutional investors’ appetite with a reduced risk investment opportunity for emerging markets.
The vehicle known as the Carlyle Asia Growth Partners V, will be a 10-year closed end generalist private equity fund that would target small buyout and late-stage growth capital investments primarily in China, India and opportunistically in South Korea.
Established in May last year, the fund is expected to make 15 to 20 investments with ticket sizes ranging between US$30 million to US$75 million.
Besides, this fund also follows Carlyle Asia Growth Partners IV which was previously launched in 2008 with an investment capital of US$1.04 billion and a geographical focus on China, India, Japan, and South Korea.
Its investment portfolio, however, was heavily focused in China and India, having invested in companies including mining company ArtGo Holding and digital cinema solutions provider GDC Technology in China, as well as engineering device service Cyient and manufacturer of polymer emulsion Visen Industries in India, among some.
Carlyle has even exited one of its India portfolio firms from this fund on last Friday as it sold its entire holding in Edelweiss for Rs 870 crore (about US$124.7 million), making more than three times its initial investment.
Hence, this paved the pathway of their new fund, veering it towards China and India as these two markets alone are expected to take up about US$800 million of the company’s total corpus.
Globally, Carlyle has US$158 billion in assets under management (AUM) across 113 active funds and 168 fund of funds vehicles as of 31 December 2016. In emerging markets, Carlyle manages seven private equity fund families with total AUM of US$11 billion.
By Vivian Foo, VCNewsNetwork
