Monday, May 9, 2016
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Impact Investing - A promising start
Welcome to GPEI’s Impact Investing thread. The intent of this area
is to tease out questions of interest, curious and/or significant developments
and proffer, now & then, insights and answers into this emerging investment
space. There is no presumed monopoly on good ideas so if a forum for discussion
emerges, so much the better.
To start, perhaps a tentative definition of how we at GPEI see the
world of ‘Impact Investing’. This is not intended to be
prescriptive, but an attempt to at least frame the subject for discussion.
Impact Investing: for some, Impact is the dominant partner in the pairing, to
others, Investing is. Not surprisingly, we see Impact as the necessary
condition and Investing as the active condition. Impact is the effect of an
investment dollar on measurable, socially beneficial goals or metrics. Investing
is the deployment of capital for an expected positive return. Hence together,
‘Impact Investing’ is an element or sector within the spectrum of socially
responsible investing that seeks to deploy capital for an acceptable level of
risk adjusted return while concurrently having benefits environmental and/or
social terms. Clearly this is an attractive and potentially powerful
concept.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Impressions from PE on the Road – Europe
One of the
great things about INSEAD is its global set up and global reach. Therefore we
envisage one stream of this blog to deal with topics on Global Private Equity.
By this we don’t mean another aggregation of how big the industry is or how
much money was invested but rather local market developments that together
shape the worldwide private equity industry.
Let’s start with a look at Europe - having just spent the last three
months on the continent alternating between (too) short spells of holiday and
working on a variety of PE related topics. In the latter capacity my colleagues
& I met with a large number of senior PE professionals on trips to London,
Paris and Munich plus at two conferences on our campus in Fontainebleau and a
family office gathering in the South of France (well, not all work).
These
meetings, while somewhat biased by the people we approached, chance encounters
and an oversampling from our senior alumni in the industry, nevertheless
provided a fairly representative sample of GPs at the larger end of the buy-out
space. The one observation that stands out is a clear bifurcation of the
industry across the PE life cycle – let me share a few comments that were
frequently raised:
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
GROWING WITH GROWTH EQUITY
INSEAD’s center for
Private Equity – GPEI for short – is the first stop for PE industry players looking
to connect with our school. We wanted to give the center’s fast growing
community a chance to interact & engage with us on a regular basis – so
welcome to our new PE Blog!
When
it comes to transparency, clarity and access to information, the lords of Private
Equity (PE) excel as masters of the opaque. Complete transparency, a potential
competitive handicap of the public company, is not required of the unlisted.
Both the equity and the information related to it are indeed PRIVATE!
The recipe for Growth Equity investing takes a dollop of the aforementioned opaqueness, stirs in the uncertain environment of an emerging market and then seasons liberally with entrepreneurs and investee companies who are unlikely to entertain the mere suggestion of surrendering a majority stake in their firms. The result is a potentially explosive mix. An acquired taste undoubtedly. - Welcome to the world of Growth Equity.
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