Published by Deal Street Asia – 15th December 2016
Global private equity (PE) firm CVC Capital Partners is looking at setting up a presence in India and is in the process of hiring senior executives for the same, said two people aware of the development.
“They are looking to establish their presence in India and are in the process of hiring a senior person to head the India operations. They are in discussions with a select set of private equity professionals for the same. The hiring is expected to close soon,” said one of the two people cited above, requesting anonymity as the talks are private.
Apart from hiring a India head, the PE firm is also looking to hire one or two more people, he added.
CVC Capital, which raised its CVC Fund I in 1996, has since raised commitments of more than $85 billion for various PE equity and credit funds, according to the firm’s website.
The firm is currently investing from its flagship funds CVC Fund V and CVC Fund VI. It also manages two Asia-dedicated PE funds—CVC Asia III and CVC Asia IV.
The latest Asian fund has a corpus of $3.5 billion and was raised in 2014.
Across all its active funds, CVC is currently invested in around 50 firms across Europe, US and Asia.
CVC Capital Partners declined to comment on the development.
While it might be a late entrant in the Indian market, the PE firm is not entirely new to India.
In August, The Economic Times reported that CVC Capital Partners was one of the global private equity funds competing to acquire a significant minority stake in leading big data analytics firm Mu Sigma at a $1.1-1.2 billion valuation.
In May, Mint reported that the PE firm had evinced interest in buying business process outsourcing firm Minacs Ltd, in a deal worth $500 million, from Capital Square Partners Pte and homegrown PE firm CX Partners Llp.
Last year, the firm was also involved in the acquisition battle of London-listed Serco Plc’s Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) unit, formerly called Intelenet. The company was eventually acquired by American PE major Blackstone Group.
CVC’s plans to enter the Indian market come at a time when themes like “buyout” and “credit” have seen strong traction in the Indian PE space and which form a major part of the PE firm’s investment thesis.
According to recent study conducted by turnaround consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal’s performance improvement group, over the last three years, control deals or buyouts have shown a significant increase in India with controlling stake deals increasing to 30% of the overall deal value in H1 2016 compared to about 8% three years ago.
In H1 2016, buyouts showed strong momentum, with the total number of deals and deal value at 14 and $2.44 billion, respectively, data from PE and VC database Venture Intelligence shows.
Buyout deal value more than doubled from $1.14 billion in the same period last year.
The top buyout deals in 2016 include Blackstone Group Lp’s $1.1 billion acquisition of a majority stake in listed IT firm Mphasis Ltd, Kedaara Capital and Swiss PE firm Partners Group’s purchase of mortgage lender AU Financiers for about $140 million and Abraaj Group’s $221 million deal to buy Care Hospitals.
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