Publications

Report | March 2011

This report takes a closer look at a crucial aspect of private equity (PE), namely the ability of PE firms to exit from their investments in a manner that crystallizes the value created over the period of their ownership. Specifically, it considers exits from private equity1 investments in Asia’s two largest emerging markets, China and India.

The aim is to increase the transparency of this asset class by providing an overview of the market and trends over time, highlighting differences between China and India, and delving deeper into a sample of detailed data provided by INSEADs inaugural panel of limited partners (LPs).

The report highlights the large number of exits in both markets, the authors observed about 12502 in this study, and how the speed of established exits (IPOs, M&As) continues to accelerate, thereby boosting investor confidence in Asia’s two largest emerging markets, and fuelling the growth of the asset class through fund raising and investing.

The authors show a divergence between the exit channels favoured in China (IPOs) and India (M&As), and how this has impacted overall exit size, as well as the influence of public market cycles on exit timing. As far as possible – given the limitations of a database relying on public data – they attempt to provide some indication of the broader performance of PE exits benchmarked against relevant public market indices.

In both China and India the authors find a lower-than-expected correlation between PE returns and public market returns, pointing to company- and investment-specific factors as the main drivers of performance in these markets. This analysis is complemented with an in-depth look at realised vs. unrealised returns, drawing upon data from our LP panel.

The report serves as the baseline research for a study that will be updated on an annual basis in the future, offering private equity investors in China and India increasingly valuable insights into the development of a fast-changing asset class