When healthcare specialist
Revelstoke Capital Partners
decided in 2019 that it wanted more time to hold onto Upstream
Rehabilitation, an outpatient physical therapy provider held in its
2013-vintage debut fund, it turned to the secondaries market for capital.
The Denver-based mid-market firm liked the outcome so much that the
following year it turned to the secondaries market again for capital to
hold onto rural communities care provider Fast Pace Health.
“In our particular cases, we wanted the option of providing liquidity to
our investors, locking in a strong return for our fund while at the same
time continuing our successful partnership with management and governance
of the portfolio company,” says Simon Bachleda, co-founder and managing
partner at Revelstoke. “The optimal solution to accomplish these goals was
a single-asset SPV.”
Revelstoke’s experience echoes that felt by many other private equity firms
around the world; namely, how to deal with trophy assets that have
significant equity value creation potential beyond their initial holding
period.
The rise of the GP-led market has been impressive. Sponsor-initiated deals
totalled just $7 billion in 2015 and have grown almost four-fold to $26
billion last year, according to data from Greenhill. This market is
expected to eclipse that of the traditional LP market, and there are signs
this is close to happening. Data from
Evercore
suggest that GP-leds accounted for 50 percent of the total $60 billion that
traded on the secondaries market last year – the first time that LP trades
have accounted for less than half of annual volume.
In recent years, the GP-led market has undergone a rapid transformation –
faster than at any other period in this sector of the market’s existence.
The latest iteration of the GP-led market – and the one that has
participants the most excited – is the development of single-asset deals:
sponsor-initiated secondaries processes involving sole assets or sometimes
portfolios with more than one asset but which are highly concentrated.
The advent of this market has heralded a sea change for both secondaries
buyers and financial sponsors alike. Today, a GP with a prized asset who
feels the company could benefit from the firm’s continued ownership of it
can tap secondaries capital to enable it to do so, while providing an exit
to any LPs who would prefer to take cash and allowing any LPs who still
wish to remain exposed the ability to do so.
“The next five years is going to be the most exciting period of time for
the GP-led market,” says Jon Costello, former head of
Stone Point Capital’s sponsor solutions business. He estimates the opportunity for
single-asset deals in the US alone is worth at least $50 billion annually.
“At the supply side, you’ve got all the highest-quality globally branded
sponsors interested in doing these deals, whether it’s
Hellman & Friedman,
Blackstone
or
TPG. This is now part of their normal, regular way toolkit for dealing with
successful companies as an alternative exit option.”
Ted Cardos, a partner in Kirkland & Ellis’s investment funds practice,
says such processes are becoming so common that he has increasingly come
across repeat GP clients.
“A lot of GPs are now doing this for the second, third time, which means
they know what to expect from the process,” Cardos says. He cites
PAI Partners
as a well-known example of a GP that has successfully closed two notable
secondaries transactions. This increased familiarity means that
transactions now can move faster than when participants were feeling their
way through earlier deals. “The scaling of this market is going to be very
exciting in 2021.”
This rise has attracted new players to both the advisory side and the
buyside of the market. In the past eight months alone, at least six firms
including Rothschild, Guggenheim Partners and Jefferies have launched
advisory units to capitalise on this growing trend.
One entrant is Goldman Sachs, which is positioning as a co-advisor on
concentrated GP-led deals and which hired a secondaries expert from Lazard
last year to help its push into the area.
“The way LPs and secondaries firms look at the world is, they’re very
focused on comps,” says David Kamo, who runs Goldman’s secondaries advisory
business. “They’re very focused on prior transactions, what kind of EBITDA
was used, how do people think about the adjustments, how do people think
about the industry, is there cyclicality? Am I going to buy this business
and have it marked down the next quarter because the S&P trades off?”
Goldman’s M&A expertise and research means it can add value to such
processes, Kamo says.
Further evolution
On the buyside, there are signs that competition is about to become even
more intense. On a fourth quarter 2020 earnings call in January, Blackstone
president and chief operating officer Jonathan Gray said the private equity
giant had launched a dedicated GP-led secondaries fund to invest alongside
managers who want to hold onto assets for longer, which will be managed by
its Strategic Partners secondaries unit.
For Michael Woolhouse, who ran CPP Investments’ global secondaries unit for
five years before joining TPG last summer to lead a GP-led team there, the
LP and GP-led markets have evolved to a point where they are very different
businesses. Underwriting in the LP business – what Woolhouse refers to as
“a good business but predominantly a diversified market exposure” is
“almost unnecessary”, he says.
“If you’re buying 65 different fund interests with 1,000 underlying
companies, you don’t need deep underwriting capabilities as the largest
position is only 1-2 percent of the portfolio. It is fundamentally a macro
investment. It’s a top-down underwriting decision, it is not bottom up, it
is not company level,” Woolhouse says.
The future of GP-leds is increased sector expertise, he adds. “This market
is craving specialisation. The underwriting capabilities and people that
you need – it’s a totally different business on the GP-led side when buying
a single company.”
John Rife, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton who advises on secondaries
deals, agrees. As capital becomes tighter and there’s more competition
around fundraising, more niche buyers will emerge, similar to the evolution
of the direct buyout market, he says.
“For new market entrants, having a niche can sell better, and I think we’ll
see that on the secondaries side as well,” says Rife.
“The slightly smaller or medium-sized fund managers that we talk to are
really curious to learn more about those [GP-led] liquidity solutions”
Nico Taverna, Mill Reef Capital
The shift to single or highly concentrated portfolios has made it easier
for insurers to underwrite such deals, and the use of reps and warranties
insurance as a way to bridge the recourse gap is likely to increase, Rife
adds.
As GP-led processes become more common among large-cap, high-quality
managers, it is inevitable that secondaries market technology for these
deals will filter down into the mid- and lower-mid-market, say industry
sources. One firm targeting opportunities in this part of the market is
Mill Reef Capital, a Zurich-based firm founded by former Schroder Adveq and LGT Capital
Partners executives.
According to Nico Taverna, one of Mill Reef’s founders, there are more than
1,200 GPs in Europe alone with fund sizes smaller than €300 million, and
many of them are keen to explore optional liquidity processes.
“The slightly smaller or medium-sized fund managers that we talk to are
really curious to learn more about those [GP-led] liquidity solutions,”
says Taverna. “Fundamentally these managers have the same challenges – they
might have a great asset which needs some additional time for the full
value to be extracted or they have a fund which is reaching the end of its
fund life. What we offer to these managers are the same solutions as the
larger secondary firms on the large end of the market.”
Counter points
For all the GP-led market’s growth, there are potential hindrances. A
marquee deal failing to close could chill the market, putting a pause on
its expansion, and sponsors running processes on lower-quality assets or
assets which are too young could also stymie growth, says Stone Point’s
Costello.
Dushy Sivanithy, managing director and head of secondaries at
CPP Investments, has similar concerns. He says that while both the quality of the GPs
participating in the market as well as the attractiveness of the underlying
companies are exciting developments, it is important that managers explore
secondaries processes for the right reasons.
“One thing that concerns me is making sure there is sound logic for GPs to
engage in a transaction,” says Sivanithy. “While the secondaries market has
proved it has a robust appetite for deals, we will be wary to avoid
situations where we don’t believe a GP has the right motives or alignment.”
Another concern market participants have is the extent to which buyout
managers who raise capital to invest in GP-led deals will be accepted as
LPs in their competitors’ funds if they invest in continuation vehicles.
Buyout firm X backing a GP-led process involving Buyout firm Y would gain
access and information to the latter’s data room and secret sauce, the
theory goes.
Information barriers can go some way in addressing this problem [of one
buyout GP investing in another buyout GP’s continuation fund], sources say,
while others point out it’s not necessarily the end of the world having
another GP as an LP in your fund and that co-GP relationships can
potentially be symbiotic.
“Some GPs may be ok with the idea of another GP having a seat at their
table if they can add value,” says Phil Tsai, global head of secondary
advisory at UBS. “Working with a buyout shop that uses its specific
industry knowledge to help a portfolio company may not necessarily be a bad
thing.”
“As an industry, private equity is generally conditioned to sell its best
performers as early as possible, realise a gain and provide liquidity to
its investors,” Bachleda says. In cases where there is room for significant
value creation past the initial holding period, the secondaries market and
single-asset SPVs in particular can create a win for LPs, portfolio company
management and the GP alike, he adds.
“The significant supply of capital and liquidity in the secondary market
makes a GP-led secondary process a competitive and viable form of exit.”
This article appears as part of sister publication Private Equity
International’s March
GP-led Secondaries Special.
To access more of Private Equity International’s global private
equity news and data, visit their website
here.