Avendus Private Equity Investment Advisors Pvt Ltd, the private equity arm of the leading investment bank Avendus Capital, has completely exited its holding in Camlin India Pvt Ltd, a leading stationery maker with about 3.2X returns on its investment. The private equity firm which invests only in public listed companies and adopts a private equity approach to invest in public equities bought into Camlin India at a market price of Rs 22 around 18 months back. The stock price of the stationery major closed at Rs 76.05 at BSE on Monday.
The private equity firm deploys capital through secondary market instruments in 10-12 under-researched small cap and mid cap listed companies with market capitalization of less than $500 million. The PE arm of the investment bank completely exited its holding towards the end of May.
Incidentally, it was only during end of May that Camlin announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement with Kokuyo S&T Co of Japan under which the latter would acquire 50.3 per cent of the Indian company for an estimated value of Rs 360 crore. The investment in Camlin was one of the initial investments of Avendus PE Investment Advisors Pvt. Ltd which has also invested in companies like TTK Prestige Pvt Ltd, a leading kitchen appliances company.
The asset management firm recently closed its second fund at Rs 200 crore with all monies raised from domestic high networth individuals. It foresees to raise a fund every year and is targetting a corpus of $100 million (Rs 450 crore) for its third fund by the end of this year - which will be a mix of domestic and international capital. From the third fund, it will invest in firms with the market cap of upto Rs 5,000 crore or $1.1 billion.
