Limited partners don’t always feel as if they have enough time or resources to evaluate GP-led secondary processes, and in general they feel that private equity is taking up more of their bandwidth, a survey by Coller Capital shows.

GP-led secondaries are an increasingly mainstream part of the PE market, with two-thirds of North American LPs and three-quarters of European LPs reporting that they have experienced one or more GP-led secondaries processes in their portfolios. Almost half of LPs expect time and resource constraints to cause headaches in future GP-led secondary transactions, according to Coller Capital’s Summer 2019 Private Equity Barometer.

GPs are beginning to explore potential secondary transactions earlier on with their existing investors, in part out of respect for concerns over time constraints, according to Eric Foran, a partner with Coller Capital. While a GP may believe that 20 business days is an appropriate amount of time for an investor to receive notification and review a fund restructuring, that can cause difficulty for bandwidth-constrained LPs.

“An LP needs to digest a lot of information, and then potentially re-underwrite a new investment if there is a rollover or reinvest option,” Foran said. “If they’re learning about the transaction for the first time at the start of a 20-day period, then that is a lot of work to process.”

Read the full article, as published by Buyouts, here: https://bit.ly/2MQUzFi

A majority of PE investors expect returns in the asset class to decline in coming years, and a growing percentage are beginning to vet potential partners on their ability to drum up deals.

GPs and LPs expect returns to decline, and both are concerned about competition for deals and high purchase prices for companies, an eVestment survey shows. But LPs are more pessimistic: 41 percent of investors said they were very or extremely concerned with competition for deals, compared with 25 percent of fund managers.

“Competition for deals was the number one concern for both fund managers and investors,” said Graeme Faulds, director of product for private markets at eVestment. “From the investors’ perspective, there is concern about the amount of dry powder in the market, and that is probably what’s driving this concern regarding the competition for deals.”

Competition took a much more prominent place among industry concerns compared with 2018, when survey respondents ranked it as the fourth-highest concern.

Check out the full story, published by Buyouts: https://bit.ly/2RibZcD

Whit Matthews is a senior investment director at Aberdeen Standard Investments. He spoke with Buyouts about Aberdeen’s approach to spinouts, independent sponsors and first-time managers.

What types of emerging managers get your attention at Aberdeen?

There are typically two types of emerging managers in this market. You have the groups that spin out of another firm. They have track record attribution, they’ve all worked together before – it’s a directionally clean story, and those managers tend to get traction quickly and raise successful funds in relatively short order.

At the other side of the world, and there are more of these types of managers, you have the professionals that haven’t run a firm before, they haven’t managed a portfolio before, and maybe they they haven’t worked together before. In those types of situations, operating as an independent sponsor and proving out your ability to drive deal flow, get deals done, and work with your new partners under a new umbrella is something that a lot of LPs want to see.

Check out the full interview, as published by Buyouts: https://bit.ly/2ImzGxp

Makena Capital is a perpetual-capital manager that commits about $600 million a year to PE. Buyouts spoke with Managing Director Brian Rodde, who oversees portfolio management and manager selection in buyouts and VC, about first-time fund commitments.

Some LPs, pensions in particular, try to mitigate the risk of first-time funds by committing lower amounts and by betting small parts of their portfolio on emerging managers. What’s your view?

We want to make sure that every investment we make is impactful to our portfolio. We don’t think it makes any sense to make a smaller commitment to a smaller fund [just to avoid] being too concentrated within that fund.

Check out the full article, as published on PE Hub: https://bit.ly/2KT7aoQ

APT Fund Advisory, a new placement agent, is trying to connect smaller global GPs following niche strategies with large North American investors.

The New York firm is helping raise five funds: a Brazilian early-stage venture technology fund, a European consumer-buyouts fund, an energy-and-minerals operator fund, and a tech-focused private credit fund that lends against enterprise value rather than Ebitda. All funds are targeting $500 million and below, and two are first-time funds managed by experienced investors.

The funds’ specialized nature speaks to a growing place for sector specialists in LP portfolios, said partner Terry Wetterman.

“LPs have gotten more comfortable with more and more specialized managers going after niches, so long as they’re getting at opportunities in a proprietary way, or they’re able to add some kind of value that a generalist wouldn’t,” Wetterman said.

Read the full article, as published by Buyouts: https://bit.ly/2xkkfzA

Doug Cruikshank is head of fund financing and Hark Capital at Aberdeen Standard Investments, where he leads credit funds that make NAV loans to older PE funds’ portfolio companies. Cruikshank spoke with Buyouts about the evolving liquidity market within PE.

How is liquidity evolving in the PE market, and where does Hark Capital fit within that evolution?

As asset classes mature, which is what  PE Is continuing to do, they get more liquid., and they get more liquid in more spots along the chain. The chain goes everywhere from the very beginning, where capital call line banks provide liquidity early, on all the way to the end of the chain, which deals with secondaries.

We just provide another piece in that chain, after the investment period of a fund but before the fund really gets to the end of its life and doesn’t have any more assets. We’re a natural extension of the liquidity improving across this asset class, and we think that that’s positive for both the LPs and the GPs.

Check out the full interview, published in Buyouts: https://bit.ly/2Ioigkg

Why they won: 9.7x multiple and 43% IRR, revenue increased 15x over a seven-year hold

When L Catterton in 2011 acquired a majority of Zarbee’s Naturals, it bet it could build a new growth category that took advantage of long-term consumer trends around brand authenticity, health and wellness, and investing in children’s products.

When it sold the company to Johnson & Johnson Consumer in 2018, after expanding Zarbee’s from a line of honey-based children’s cough syrup into a market-leading provider of natural over-the-counter products, that bet paid off – to the tune of a 9.7x gross multiple and a 43 percent IRR.

L Catterton co-CEO Scott Dahnke said the deal reminded him of a quote from the 1980s TV show “The A-Team”: “I love it when a plan comes together.”

Check out the full article, as published by Buyouts: https://bit.ly/2Xj4ebK