Global private equity firm Carlyle is raising $1 billion under its new Asian growth fund largely focused on investing in India and China.
The PE firm has roped in International Finance Corp (IFC) as one of its Limited Partners (LPs) with the private sector investment arm of World Bank committing $25 million to the fund, as per a disclosure.
IFC said Carlyle Asia Growth Partners V, L.P. is a 10-year closed end generalist private equity fund that would target small buyout and late-stage growth capital investments primarily in China and India and opportunistically in South Korea.
The fund is expected to make 15 to 20 investments with ticket sizes ranging between $30 million to $75 million.
It would be a successor to Carlyle Asia Growth Partners IV. Launched in 2008 with $1.04 billion, this fund was focused on investing in China, India, Japan and South Korea. The new fund has veered towards China and India with these two markets alone expected to gobble about $800 million of the total corpus.
This fund had invested in two dozen firms of which a third were in India, including Visen Industries, Cyient, South Indian Bank, Tirumala Milk, VBHC Value Homes, Edelweiss , Dee Development Engineers and Newgen.
Carlyle exited one of its India portfolio firms from this fund on Friday as it sold its entire holding in Edelweiss. It also exited Tirumala two years ago.
Carlyle that has separate teams chasing buyout or control oriented large sized transactions and growth equity deals in India invest in the country out of the two separate Asian buyout and growth funds.
Among other large peers of Carlyle, KKR was reportedly not looking at a growth fund for Asia as it wants to focus on control deals. KKR had previously raised $6 billion under its last Asia fund in 2013.
Globally, Carlyle has $158 billion in assets under management (AUM) across 113 active funds and 168 fund of funds vehicles as of 31 December, 2016. In emerging markets, Carlyle manages seven private equity fund families with total AUM of $11 billion.
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