Swedish investment house EQT Group has set a hard cap of $14.5 billion for its ninth Asia buyout fund, BPEA Private Equity Fund IX (BPEA IX), according to an announcement.
The actual fund size is dependent on the outcome of the fundraising process, EQT said. It had earlier set the target fund size at $12.5 billion. The predecessor fund, BPEA VIII, had raised over $11 billion in 2022.
In January 2024, i.e. a year after the completion of the merger of EQT and BPEA, the Asia private equity business of the combined entity rebranded as EQT Private Capital Asia.
BPEA IX will likely continue the firm’s active ownership strategy to make control-oriented investments across the Asia-Pacific, focusing on healthcare, technology services, business services, education, financial services, consumer and advanced manufacturing.
Christian Sinding, CEO of EQT, earlier said that now “is a reasonably good time” to raise the firm’s next flagship vehicles, including its Asia fund. He opined that there was just a cyclical element in the industry where “drawdowns exceed distributions”, but he believes this adjustment period will soon be over, given the exit activity going on in the market.
“Internally, we remain laser-focused on exits and performance. We have a large number of exit processes ongoing and in preparation,” said Sinding.
However, Gustav Segerberg, EQT’s head of business development, foresaw that extensions in fundraising will continue to happen. He added that EQT expected its flagship fundraising cycle to be around 3-3.5 years. That allowed the firm to balance between investing in a well-diversified portfolio and having time to realise earlier funds and generate liquidity for clients, he said.
In August, EQT said it agreed to acquire Southeast Asian property technology platform PropertyGuru in a take-private transaction which values the latter at $1.1 billion.
The transaction will be made through BPEA Private Equity Fund VIII, now part of EQT’s Asia investment platform.
