PE investments in April-June fall 16%

New Delhi, July 1: Private equity firms invested about $3,602 million across 129 deals during the quarter ended June 2016, a decline of 16% over the same period a year ago. According to early data from Venture Intelligence, a research service focused on private company financials, transactions and their valuations, there were 169 PE deals, worth $4,278 million in April-June of 2015.

The latest figures take the PE investments in the first six months of 2016 to $7,492 million across 298 deals.

These figures include venture capital investments, but exclude PE investments in real estate.

There was also dearth of bigticket deals during the June quarter as only six PE investments worth $100 million or more were reported compared with 11 such transactions in the same period last year.

“Mega deals in the Internet and mobile companies were noticeable by their absence in the latest quarter - even compared to the immediate previous quarter when companies like BigBasket, CarTrade and ShopClues had attracted investments of over $100 million each,” noted Arun Natarajan, founder of Venture Intelligence.

The largest PE investment announced during the June quarter was Blackstone’s $1.1 billion buyout of the majority stake held by US-based Hewlett Packard Enterprise in IT Services & BPO firm Mphasis.

Meanwhile, sovereign Wealth Funds like Singapore's GIC, Abu Dhabi's ADIA and Malaysia's Khazanah participated in mega investments for companies like the renewable power-focussed Greenko Group (which raised $230 million from ADIA and GIC) and analytics BPO firm Fractal Analytics ($100 million from Khazanah).

“Despite the cooling off in Internet & Mobile sectors as well as more recent international developments like Brexit, the increasing commitments being made by truly long-ter m investors like sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and buyout funds portend well for the second half of the year,” Natarajan added. PTI