Chinese private equity

Chinese Education Startup Puts Western Teachers on Notice — Wall Street Journal

A Chinese education company backed by U.S. investors including Kobe Bryant is cracking down on how its Western teachers cover politically fraught topics.

VIPKid, one of China’s most valuable online education startups, has put hundreds of its mostly American teachers on notice for using certain maps in their classes with Chinese students, and has severed two teachers’ contracts for discussing Taiwan
and Tiananmen Square in ways at odds with Chinese government preferences,people familiar with the company say. Since last fall, teachers’ contracts state that discussing “politically contentious” topics could be cause for dismissal, according to one reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The moves highlight the balance a Chinese company must strike in fulfilling global aspirations while toeing Beijing’s line. Five-year-old VIPKid is currently in talks to raise as much as $500 million in new funding from U.S. and other investors that could value the company at roughly $6 billion, people familiar with the fundraising said.

 “A company must keep good relations with the government and ideology,” said Peter Fuhrman, chief executive of investment firm China First Capital . “But that can cause friction when you’re also courting foreign investors, expanding business overseas and employing a large American workforce.”

Beijing-based VIPKid says it has more than 60,000 teachers in the U.S. and Canada who teach English to more than 500,000 children ages 4 through 15, who live mostly in China. Teachers work as independent contractors and can earn between $14 and
$22 an hour. They must have a bachelor’s degree, at least one year of teaching experience and eligibility to work in the U.S. or Canada.

Curricula are provided, and teachers give English-language instruction, sometimes using geography or historical figures. VIPKid’s approach is consistent with maps and materials in the Chinese education curriculum, which calls Taiwan a part of China. Textbooks don’t mention the military’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrators in 1989, and discussion of it is forbidden.

A spokesman said VIPKid has “an elevated level of responsibility to protect the safety and emotional development of the young children on our platform.” The company expects teachers to understand cultural expectations, he said, adding it had to “make a difficult decision” to terminate the contracts of “an exceptionally small number of teachers” who “decided to ignore the needs of their students” and “the preference of their parents.”

Western companies including Gap Inc. and hotel giant Marriott International Inc. have been forced to apologize in the past for
online communications, websites or merchandise that angered Beijing or Chinese consumers on issues including Taiwan and Tibet.

Chinese education technology attracted $5.3 billion in investment last year, double the amount a year earlier, according to Dow Jones VentureSource data. VIPKid’s investors include U.S. hedge-fund firm Coatue Management LLC, venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, Chinese social giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and a venture fund co-launched by retired NBA star Kobe Bryant.

The company’s actions have rankled some teachers. Typically, these instructors have displayed maps of the world, including China, that they found on their own. Starting last fall, hundreds began receiving emails or calls from VIPKid stating their maps weren’t aligned with Chinese education standards, people familiar with the matter said. Teachers who refuse to adhere to the map standards could have their contracts terminated, after conversations with VIPKid. Map-related dismissals haven’t happened, said a person familiar with the company.

Will Rodgers, a 26-year-old American teacher based in Thailand, said he discussed Tiananmen Square twice during VIPKid lessons about famous Chinese landmarks. First, he told a 12-year-old student “the Chinese government jailed and killed
many people just for protesting.” He then showed a 15-year-old student photos and video footage of the protest, and his contract was terminated. Mr. Rodgers said he doesn’t agree with VIPKid’s stance, but doesn’t blame the company for ending his contract.

Another American teacher’s contract was terminated earlier this year after he told students that Taiwan was a separate country, according to people familiar with his case. A third teacher received a call from VIPKid after telling a student that Tibet, an autonomous region in China with a history of separatist activity, is a country, during a lesson on China’s neighbors, according to a
person familiar with the matter. He was told on the call he should refer to Tibet as part of China.

People familiar with VIPKid say it monitors classes for missteps over political content. Another person familiar with the matter said the company uses artificial intelligence to determine material students find engaging and to protect them from inappropriate behavior.

Some teachers and VIPKid investors say that education from foreign teachers, even if it is screened, can benefit students because they get exposed to other cultures. Rob Hutter, a founder and managing partner of Learn Capital, an early investor in VIPKid, said the company is trying to take a common-sense approach by teaching uncontroversial content.

“No matter what nation you’re teaching in, there are going to be things that we need to be thoughtful about,” he said. “Even in American classrooms, there are things you cannot discuss.”

“No matter what nation you’re teaching in, there are going to be things that we need to be thoughtful about,” he said. “Even in American classrooms, there are things you cannot discuss.”


https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-education-startup-puts-western-teachers-on-notice-11553160602?mod=hp_lista_pos3


University of Michigan Ross School of Business — Guest Lecture on China Investment, the Perils & Attractions

 

 

I was in Ann Arbor this past week to guest lecture at the University of Michigan Ross Business School. The full video can be accessed by clicking here.

I was invited to speak at the business school by Professor David Brophy, who introduces me at the start. Professor Brophy teaches a winter semester class in Global Private Equity. He began researching and teaching PE at Michigan in the mid-1970s, not long after the field was invented by firms like KKR.

Along with speaking in person to students at the school, my talk was also streamed live to the Michigan Venture Capital Association.

 

Maurice Greenberg, Wall Street Journal.

 

In Today’s China, Paradoxes Still Abound. But So Do Opportunities — Site Selection Magazine

 

In September, China First Capital Chairman and CEO Peter Fuhrman, familiar to attendees at the World Forum for FDI in Shanghai last year, delivered a talk from China to Harvard Business School alumni. Here, with Mr. Fuhrman’s permission, we present excerpts from his remarks.

————–

GDP growth has never and will never absolutely correlate with investment returns.

Any questions? No? Great. Thanks for your time.

Of course I’m joking. But that key reality of successful investing is all too often overlooked, and China has provided all of us over these last 30-some-odd years with a vivid reminder that IRR and GDP are by no means the same animal.

China is, was and will likely long remain a phenomenal economy. The growth that’s taken place here since I first set foot in China in 1981 has been something almost beyond human reckoning. Since I first came to China as a postgrad in 1981, per-capita GDP (PPP) has risen 43X, from $352 to $15,417. China achieved so much more than anyone dare hope, a billion people lifted out of poverty, freed to pursue their dreams, to make and spend a bundle.

China this year will add about $1 trillion of new GDP. Just to put that in context, $1 trillion is not a lot less than the entire GDP of Russia. So who is making all this newly minted money? And how can any of us hope to get a piece of it? Another question: Why, if China is such a great economy, has it proved such a disaster area for so many of the world’s largest, most sophisticated global institutional investors, private equity firms and Fortune 500s?

Turning Inward

Let’s start with the fact that China is a part of the World Trade Organization, but not entirely of it — not fully subscribed in any way to the notion that reciprocity, openness, free trade, level playing fields and equal treatment are positive ends unto themselves. As China has gotten richer it has seen even less and less need to attract foreign capital and foreign investment. That’s a tendency we see in other countries, including obviously some of the rhetoric we now hear in the U.S. — that more of the gains of the national economy should belong to its citizens. But China’s way is different.

The renminbi is a closed non-tradable currency, so getting US dollars into and out of China has always been difficult. China now has the world’s second-largest stock and bond markets, but those markets are largely closed to any investors other than Chinese domestic ones. But China also continues to provide companies going public with by far the highest multiples anywhere in the world.

When I first came to China 36 years ago China was a 100-percent state-owned economy. Twenty years ago the first rules were put in place to allow a private sector to function. Today, according to anyone’s best estimate, it’s about 70 percent private and 30 percent state, and most of the value creation is being provided by that private-sector economy. So in theory there should be very interesting M&A opportunities. But it’s been exceedingly difficult to get successful transactions done. One of the core reasons is that by and large all private-sector companies in China, large and small, are family-owned.

The other thing important to consider is a Mandarin term: guifan. It’s the Chinese way of explaining the extent to which a company in China is abiding by all the rules of the road — the taxes you should pay, the environmental and labor laws you should follow. It’s not at all uncommon that successful private-sector companies in China are successful by virtue of having negotiated to pay little or no corporate tax on profits.

For foreign-owned companies in China it’s an entirely different story. They are by and large 100-percent compliant with the written rules. This has an enormous impact on the operating performance of any company, so you can imagine how potentially skewed the competitive environment becomes. And keep in mind that corporate taxation in China in the aggregate is, if not the highest in the developed world, then among the highest, and the environmental and labor laws are every bit as difficult, rigorous, tough and expensive to implement as they are in the U.S.

China is a country where local government officials are scored on the measurable success of their time in office, and success is overwhelmingly attributed to GDP growth. So it should be no surprise if what they’re trying to do is optimize GDP growth, the percentage of a company’s income that goes back to the government in taxation can have an adverse effect on that. Instead the government will continue to urge its local companies to take the money and, rather than pay tax, continue to invest, expand and therefore build local GDP.

The Hum of Consumerism

The reasons to stay engaged and find a viable investment angle include GDP growth. China’s GDP is likely to continue to grow by at least 6 percent a year. Second, across my 25 years of involvement in China, every one of the predictions of imminent collapse — financial catastrophe, local government debt, bad bank loans, real estate bubbles — have proved to be false. It appears China has some resiliency, and it’s certainly the case that the government has the tools and financial resources to ride out most challenges.

Third has been how effortlessly it’s made the transition that still bedevils lots of Europe, from a smokestack economy to a consumer-spending paradise. At this moment every major consumer market in China is booming both online and offline. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent are now operating as three of the most profitable companies in the world.

How does China have a robust, booming consumer economy and an enormous appetite for luxury brands, yet on average salary levels that are still one-fifth or one-sixth the levels in the US? The simple answer is that almost all the Chinese now living in urban China — about half the population, compared to about 15 percent when I first got here — owns at least a single apartment if not multiple, which is more and more common. The single best-performing asset in history has probably been Chinese urban real estate over the last 30 years. It’s fair to say the average appreciation over the last 10 years is at least 300 percent.

Though China has a population whose incomes on paper look like those of people flipping burgers at McDonald’s, they seem to have the spending power and love of luxury goods like the people summering in East Hampton. Even Apple itself has no idea how big its market is here in China. It’s likely that at least 100 million iPhone 8s will be sold to Chinese over the next year. The retail price here in China is at least 30 to 40 percent higher than in the US, with most phones bought for cash, without a carrier subsidy.

‘You’ll Be Older Too’

So where is it possible to make money in China? One message above all: Active investing beats passive investing every time. What you need to do is either be the owner-operator or be a close strategic partner with one, and stay actively engaged.

There are four major areas of opportunity: Tech, health-care services, leisure and education (see graphic below). The potential for building out a chronic care business in China is enormous. Looking ahead 25 to 30 years, sadly China will likely suffer a demographic disaster. This country will become a very old society very quickly. That’s the inevitable product of 30 years of a one-child-per-family policy. By 2040 or 2050, 25 percent of China will be over the age of 65.

The overall rate of GDP growth is unlikely to ever rival that of a few years ago at 10 to 12 percent a year, but overall what we have is higher-quality growth. People in China are living well. Things should continue to motor along very smoothly at least for one more generation — a generation whose members are better educated, more skilled, ambitious and globalized than their parents.

There’s no denying the reality of what a better, happier, freer, richer country China has become since I first set foot here. I marvel every day at the China that I now live in, even while I occasionally curse some of the unwanted byproducts like heavy pollution in most parts of the country, overcrowding at tourist attractions, bad traffic, and a pushy culture that’s lost touch with some of China’s ancient glories.

China will continue to amaze, inspire and stupefy the world. The Chinese have done very well and will do better. At the same time, those of us investing in China may do a little better in years to come than we have up to now. More of the newly minted trillions in China just may end up sticking to our palms.

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China Investing, The Pain and the Perks — Harvard Business School Global Alumni Lecture

 

It was a delight and a privilege to give a talk on China investing to Harvard Business School’s global alumni organization. If you’d like to see the slide deck, please click here. The audio version of the lecture, done by worldwide webcast,  is also up on YouTube.

The topic was a big one — why have China investment returns so often failed to keep pace with the phenomenal growth in the country’s economy, and can investors do anything to improve the odds of success? Given an hour to discuss, I could only really scratch the surface.

A key takeaway: the past needn’t be prologue. Investing in China may prove less vexatious in the future. In part, that’s because of the growth of a mass affluent consumer market in China, a shift that plays to the strengths of many US, European and East Asian companies and institutional investors. Second, of course, everyone now can learn from past mistakes and misperceptions.

As I said in closing, “China will continue to amaze, inspire and stupefy the world. Chinese have done very well and will do better. At same time, those of us investing in China may do a little better here in years to come than we have up to now. More of the newly minted trillions in China just may end up sticking to our palms.”

 

 

 

Venture Fundraising in Yuan Soars as Investors Target Chinese Tech Firms — The New York Times

 

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China-focused venture capital funds are increasing their bets on local technology companies and a further opening of Chinese domestic capital markets, raising money in the yuan at the fastest pace in five years.

Fund managers have raised 95.8 billion yuan ($14.54 billion) this year through late September in funds denominated in the Chinese currency, which is also known as the renminbi, compared with 56.7 billion yuan in all of 2016. That puts 2017 on pace to be the biggest year since 2012, when 145.8 billion yuan was raised, according to data provider Preqin.

There are currently 78 funds looking to raise as much as another 1.15 trillion yuan over the next couple of years, Preqin said, most of it coming from mammoth-sized state-owned entities and so-called government guidance funds, which seek to foster domestic innovation in different industries from advanced engineering and robotics to biotechnology and clean energy.

 Those include the 350 billion yuan sought by the China Structural Reform Fund, 200 billion yuan targeted by the China State-Owned Capital Venture Investment Fund and a proposed 150 billion yuan for the state-owned Enterprise National Innovation Fund.

The enormous size of the fundraising ambitions of the Chinese state-backed funds means it may take some time before they reach their final goals. The China Structural Reform Fund, which was launched in 2016, has raised 20 percent of its registered capital and its president said in an interview with Caixin Global that funding will be completed by the end of 2018.

“We’re at the all-time highest of capital-raising high water marks, with a tsunami of government-backed entities seeding incubators, VC funds, locally, provincially, nationally,” said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China-focused investment bank China First Capital. “China has a lot of money in its government apparatus. It wants to seed innovation and entrepreneurship and this is how it’s doing it.”

The surge contrasts with the slowdown in seed financing for start ups in the United States, which is down for the past two years. It also compares with flat growth expected for U.S. venture capital fundraising in 2017, according to estimates from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

CATCHING ENTREPRENEURS

Firms such as Lightspeed China Partners, Morningside Venture Capital, GGV Capital and investment and merchant bank Ion Pacific that previously only had U.S. dollar funds are launching their first funds in yuan. Others like Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia Capital China and China Renaissance that have raised funds in both currencies are adding to their yuan cash pile with new funds.

Key to those firms is to not lose potential investment opportunities in sectors closed to foreign investors or miss out on investing with the Chinese entrepreneurs who now want to list their companies locally instead of in the United States.

“Catching the right entrepreneurs in the ecosystem is our number one priority, so currencies to us are just tools, those are the tools that I need to catch these entrepreneurs,” said Harry Man, partner at Matrix Partners China, which has funds in both currencies. “That’s why if you don’t have RMB in your hand, ultimately you’ll be missing 50 percent of the deals. Then you’ll be forced to raise an RMB fund and that’s why everybody is doing it.”

Sequoia Capital China, which backed top Chinese technology firms such as Alibaba Group (BABA.N), is looking to raise at least 10 billion yuan for a new fund, while Hillhouse Capital, an early investor in companies including Tencent Holdings Ltd (0700.HK), Baidu Inc (BIDU.O) and JD.com Inc (JD.O), is targeting about 8 billion yuan for its fund, sources told Reuters.

The investment management arm of securities firm China Renaissance is also adding to its yuan reserves with a new fund worth about 6 billion yuan, according to a person familiar with the plans who couldn’t be named because details of the fundraising aren’t yet public. Ion Pacific is raising 1 billion yuan for its debut fund in the Chinese currency, while GGV Capital is about to close fundraising for its first yuan-denominated fund.

“Some sectors don’t allow foreign investors, so for example, in the culture and media industry you need to apply for certain licenses like video licenses and you need to be a local investor,” said Helen Wong, a partner at Qiming Venture Partners.

“Now the IPO window is open for the local stock market, so that encourages a lot of companies to go for a local listing,” she added, in reference to the increase in IPO approvals by regulators in 2017 that is prompting more companies to start preparations to go public. Previously, a slow approval process and long line of companies waiting for clearance dissuaded many from those plans.

The shift would give an added boost to the Shenzhen and Shanghai bourses. China has had 322 new listings this year, raising a combined $22.9 billion, Thomson Reuters data showed. This already surpasses the 252 for all of 2016, even after the country’s securities regulator slowed the number of weekly IPO approvals in May.

It could also reduce the influence of the Nasdaq and New York stock exchanges, where many Chinese technology companies previously flocked when they went public.

“For the RMB side, you see more companies in restricted sectors like healthcare and media and certain parts of cleantech that needs government support to get started,” said Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital. “You also see companies in the fintech space and a lot of them need a license to operate a business in the financial services industry, so they tend to want to list in China.”

As published in The New York Times.

Why Has China’s GDP So Outpaced IRR?

It’s the paradox at the core of China investing: why has such a phenomenal economy proved such a disappointing investment destination for so many global institutional investors, PE firms and Fortune 500s.

Financial theory provides a conceptual explanation. Investment returns are not absolutely correlated to GDP growth. China will likely go down in history as the best proof of this theorem. China as certainly delivered exceptional GDP growth. In per capita PPP terms, China is 43 times larger than in 1981, when I first set foot in China as a grad student. No other country has ever grown so fast, for so long and lifted so many people out of poverty and into the consumer middle class.

Commensurate investment returns, however, have been far harder to lock in. Harvard Business School’s global alumni organization invited me to give an hour-long talk on this topic this week. It required a quick gallop through some recent and not always happy history to arrive at the key question — does the future hold m0re promise for global institutional investors looking to deploy capital in China.

 For more detailed look at some reasons for the big disconnect between China’s national GPD growth and investment IRR, and some suggestions how to improve matters, please have a look by clicking here at the HBS talk slide deck.

Publicly-quoted shares in Chinese companies have failed by far and away to keep pace with the growth in overall national income. In the alternative investment arena, global PE and VC firms enjoyed some huge early success in late 1990s and first part of the 2000s. Since then, the situation has worsened, as measured in cash returns paid out to Limited Partners. One major reason — the explosion within China of Renminbi investment funds, now numbering at least 1,000. They’ve bid up valuations, gotten first access to better opportunities, and left the major global PE and VC firms often sitting on the sidelines. With tens of billions in dry powder, these global firms look more and more like deposed financial royalty — rich, nostalgic, melancholy and idle.

China this year will add approximately $1 trillion of new gdp this year – that’s not a lot less than the entire gdp of Russia. Indeed, China gdp growth in 2017 is larger than the entire gdp of all but 15 countries. Who is making all this money? Are all the spoils reserved for local investors and entrepreneurs? Can global investors find a way at last to get a bigger piece of all this new wealth?

Overall, I’m moderately sanguine that lessons have been learned, especially about the large risks of following the Renminbi fund herd into what are meant to be sure-thing “Pre-Ipo” minority deals. Active investment strategies have generally done better. With China’s economy well along in its high-speed transition away from smokestack industries and OEM exports to one powered by consumer spending, there are new, larger and ripe opportunities for global investors. In virtually all major, growing categories of consumer spending, Western brands are doing well, and will likely do better, as Chinese consumers preferences move upmarket to embrace high-quality, well-established global household brand names.

Harvard, its alumni and benefactors have a two hundred year history of investing and operating in China. So, there’s some deep institutional memory and fascination, not least with the risks and moral quandaries that come with the territory. The Cabot family, at one time among America’s richest, provided huge grants to Harvard funded in part by profits made opium running into China.

Harvard Management Company, the university’s $35 billion endowment, was an early and enthusiastic LP investor in China as well as large investor in Chinese quoted companies including Sinopec. Their enthusiasm seems to be waning. Harvard Management is apparently considering selling off many of its LP positions, including those in PE and VC funds investing in China.

This looks to be an acknowledgment that the GP/LP model of China investing has not regularly delivered the kind of risk-adjusted cash-on-cash returns sophisticated, diversified institutional investors demand. While China’s economy is doing great, it’s never been harder to achieve a successful private equity or venture capital investment exit. True, the number of Chinese IPOs has ratcheted up this year, but there are still thousands of unexited deals, especially inside upstart Renminbi funds.

While decent returns on committed capital have been scarce, the Chinese government continues to pour billions of Renminbi into establishing new funds in China. There’s hardly a government department, at local, provincial or national level that isn’t now in the fund creation business. Diversification isn’t a priority. Instead, two investment themes all but monopolize the Chinese government’s time and money — one is to stimulate startups and high-tech industry (with a special focus on voguish sectors like Big Data, robotics, artificial intelligence, biotech) the other is to support the country’s major geostrategic initiative, the One Belt One Road policy.

One would need to be visionary, reckless or brave to add one’s own money to this cash tsunami. Never before has so much government money poured into private equity and venture capital, mainly not in search of returns, but to further policy and employment aims. It’s a first in financial history. The distortions are profound. Valuations and deal activity are high, while returns in the aggregate from China investing will likely plummet, from already rather low levels.

Where should a disciplined investor seek opportunity in China? First, as always, one should follow the money — not all the government capital, but the even larger pools of cash being spent by Chinese consumers.

In China, every major consumer market is in play, and growing fast. This plays to the strengths of foreign capital and foreign operating companies. There are almost unlimited opportunities to bring new and better consumer products and services to China. Let the Chinese government focus on investing in China’s future. High-tech companies in China, ones with globally competitive technology, market share and margins are still extraordinarily rare, as are cash gains from investing here.

Meantime, as I reminded the HBS alumni, plenty of foreign companies and investors are doing well today in China’s consumer market. Not just the well-known ones like Apple and Starbucks. Smaller ventures helping Chinese spend money while traveling globally, or obtain better-quality health care and education options, are building defendable, high-margin niches in China. One company started by an HBS alumnus, a native New Yorker like me, is among the leading non-bank small lending companies in China. It provides small loans to small-scale entrepreneurs, mainly in the consumer market. Few in China know much about Zhongan Credit, and fewer still that it’s started and run by a Caucasian American HBS grad. But, it’s among the most impressive success stories of foreign investment in China.

Of course, such success investing in China is far from guaranteed. Consumer markets in China are tricky, fast-changing, and sometimes skewed to disadvantage foreign investors. For over two hundred years, most foreign investors have seen their fond dreams of a big China payday crash on the rocks of Chinese reality.

The rewards from China’s 35 years of remarkable economic growth has mainly — and rightly — gone to the hard-working people of China. But, there’s reason to believe that in the future, more of the new wealth created each year in China will be captured by smart, pragmatic investors from HBS and elsewhere.

 

As published by China Money Network

As published by SuperReturn

YouTube video of the full lecture to Harvard Business School alumni organization

 

 

 

Goldman, Lazard China Dealmakers Decamp for Upstart Funds — Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) — Veteran China dealmakers at Wall Street banks and Western buyout firms are heading for the exits, in search of the more lucrative deals and higher remuneration offered by smaller funds.

Three senior merger advisory bankers from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Lazard Ltd. have resigned within the past month for senior roles at fledgling investment funds, according to people familiar with their departures, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Carlyle Group LP Managing Director Alex Ying left the firm in January after two decades to set up Rivendell Partners, which focuses on mid-sized buyouts in Greater China and Vietnam, other people said.

The moves highlight the increasing challenges big banks face in retaining their top dealmakers in an environment of tighter regulations and shrinking fees. Revenue from investment banking in the Asia Pacific region fell 8 percent in 2016 to the lowest in at least five years, according to data from research firm Coalition. Merger advisory revenue dropped 4 percent, the figures show.

“Deal flow from China has come down considerably — those flows are severely curtailed relative to where they were,” said Henry Tillman, chairman of London-based advisory firm Grisons Peak LLP. “With investment banking revenue declining, people are going to look at their options.”

Imminent departures include Andrew Huang, a managing director advising on Greater China mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs who has resigned to join Chinese private equity firm FountainVest Partners, according to the people. Peter Kuo, a China M&A banker at Lazard, is leaving to help run a technology fund backed by Chinese investors called Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, the investment firm confirmed in response to Bloomberg queries.

Higher Returns

Ellis Chu, head of China M&A at Bank of America, has also resigned and will be joining an Asia-focused fund, the people said.

Spokesmen for Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Rivendell declined to comment on the departures. A representative for Carlyle confirmed Ying’s departure, declining to comment further. FountainVest Chief Executive Officer Frank Tang didn’t answer calls to his mobile phone seeking comment.

Running or working for a smaller, Asia-based fund can offer managers greater independence in decision-making on deals and give them a bigger share of fees and profits from exiting investments. Senior executives at global buyout funds in Asia typically have to share 40 percent to 60 percent of deal fees generated in the region with U.S. and European counterparts, people familiar with the practice said.

Smaller funds are also making more money. Private funds in Asia with assets of $500 million or less had a median internal rate of return of 16.1 percent over a three-year timeframe, compared with 11.5 percent at peers with more than $1 billion of assets, according to data compiled by research firm Preqin Ltd.

High Turnover

“A reason these guys are leaving likely also includes the fact those big firms have been having a challenging time of late in China, which leads to higher work pressure and unusually high turnover,” said Peter Fuhrman, chairman of Shenzhen-based China First Capital. “You can then try to set up on your own, make some deals, hope for success.”

The exits follow other recent moves to smaller outfits. KKR & Co.’s two most senior China executives left in December to form a China-focused investment firm. Richard Wong, an M&A veteran at Morgan Stanley, resigned this month after 16 years to help set up Nexus Point Partners, a China-focused buyout fund started by MBK Partners Ltd. co-founder Kuo-Chuan Kung.

The bankers and their new funds will face challenges when it comes to sourcing China deals. The government is clamping down on money outflows, which augurs poorly for outbound acquisitions. What’s more, competition is increasing from Chinese securities firms. Three Chinese banks ranked in the top 10 advisers on offshore acquisitions by mainland companies since the beginning of 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Among the first buyout specialists to make the leap from big outfits were KY Tang, who left UBS AG’s private equity fund in 2004 to start Affinity Equity Partners, and Michael Kim, who set up MBK in 2005 with five other senior Asian executives from Carlyle. In 2010, TPG Capital lost Shan Weijian, who left to found PAG Asia Capital. The next year, Mary Ma departed to help start Boyu Capital.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/2017/03/30/veteran-china-dealmakers-leave-wall-street-for-upstart-funds

China’s Healthcare Sector a Big Draw for Private Equity Investors — South China Morning Post

 

China’s healthcare sector a big draw for private equity investors

 
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 18 January, 2017

Private equity firms and hedge funds are investing heavily into China’s healthcare industry in a bet on the sector’s upbeat growth potential, fund managers told a Hong Kong forum.

Private hospitals and drug makers are among the bright spots for investors focusing on China, where rising income and an ageing population are boosting the demand for quality medical services.

Private hospitals are set to attract large amounts of capital in the coming decade amid an underdeveloped private medical industry and a shortage of doctors, said investment professionals.

“Healthcare has been the single area that probably everyone can foresee globally an enormous amount of capital and investment,” Peter Fuhrman, chairman of China First Capital told the Asia Private Equity Forum in Hong Kong on Wednesday.

China’s population of individuals aged 60 or older is set to rise 90 per cent to 240 million by 2020, according to the World Health Organisation.

Meanwhile, one consequence of the nation’s one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and officially phased out in 2015, is that the burden of caring for ageing parents will put tremendous pressures on the young generations.

The healthcare sector in China will become a US$1 trillion a year business by 2020, according to a report by consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Among healthcare institutions, private hospitals are set to become the best investment for this sector, said Li Bin, chief executive of Ally Bridge LB Healthcare Fund, a hedge fund that focuses on investing in China and Asia healthcare companies.

However, he said there are problems that will likely hinder the industry’s growth.

Among barriers, Li cited a shortage of quality doctors, the lack of an ecosystem to support the development of private hospitals, as well as the long time frame needed to build up a trusted reputation.

Although about half of the hospitals in the country are private, more than 80 per cent of medical professionals work in the public sector, which offer higher salaries and better career prospects, according to a recent report by Citi.

“Five years ago I said it would take 10 years for private hospitals to mature in China, now I think it would take another 10 years,” he said.

Alice Au Miu Hing from SpencerStuart, an executive search consultancy, said it remains extremely difficult to find experienced private hospital executives with China experience who can speak Putonghua.

“The common approach now is to bring someone from the industry from outside and see if the person can survive in the mainland market,” said Au.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical and biotech start-ups will flourish with China’s emerging middle class seeking better healthcare services.

Judith Li, partner at the life science-focused Lilly Asia Ventures, told the forum that China spends about 6 per cent of its GDP on healthcare, versus an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 10 per cent.

“China has so many white spaces where there is nothing exists, and it’s very compelling,” she said.

“If you can bring it [a drug] from the US, you can then avoid the fundamental scientific risk of developing something that’s completely unavailable.”

http://www.scmp.com/business/article/2063273/chinas-healthcare-sector-big-draw-private-equity-investors

The Big Sort — The Economist

Economist

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“THE vultures all start circling, they’re whispering, ‘You’re out of time’…but I still rise!” Those lyrics, from a song by Katy Perry, an American pop star, sounded often at Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallies but will shortly ring out over a less serious event: a late-night party in Shenzhen to kick off “Singles’ Day”, an online shopping extravaganza that takes place in China on November 11th every year.

The event was not dreamt up by Alibaba, but the e-commerce giant dominates it. Shoppers spent $14.3bn through its portals during last year’s event. That figure, a rise of 60% on a year earlier, was over double the sales racked up on America’s two main retail dates, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, put together. Chinese consumers are still confident, so sales on this Singles’ Day should again break records.

It points to an intriguing question: how will all of those purchases get to consumers? Around 540m delivery orders were generated during the 24-hour spree last year. That is nearly ten times the average daily volume, but even a slow shopping day in China generates an enormous number. By the reckoning of the State Post Bureau, 21bn parcels were delivered during the first three quarters of this year.

The country’s express-delivery sector, accordingly, is doing well. In spite of a cooling economy, revenues rose by 43% year on year in the first eight months of 2016, to 234bn yuan ($36bn). And although the state’s grip on China’s economy is tightening, the private sector’s share of this market is actually growing. The state-run postal carrier once had a monopoly on all post and parcels. Now far more parcels are delivered than letters, and the share of the market that is commanded by the country’s private express-delivery firms far exceeds that of Express Mail Service, the state-owned courier.

China’s very biggest couriers have been rushing to go public on the back of the strong growth. Most of them started life as scrappy startups, and are privately held. But because of regulatory delays, which mean a big backlog of initial public offerings, many companies have resorted to other means. Last month, two of them, YTO Express and STO Express, used “reverse mergers”, in which a private company goes public by combining with a listed shell company, to list on local exchanges. In what looks to be the largest public flotation in America so far this year, another, ZTO Express, raised $1.4bn in New York on October 27th. Yet another, SF Express, China’s biggest courier, recently won approval to use a reverse merger too.

But investors could be in for a rocky ride. Shares in ZTO, for example, have plunged sharply since its flotation. That is because the breakneck growth of courier companies masks structural problems. For now, the industry is highly fragmented, with some 8,000 domestic competitors, and it is inefficient.

One reason is that regulation, inspired by a sort of regional protectionism, obliges delivery firms to maintain multiple local licences and offices. Cargoes are unpacked and repacked numerous times as they cross the country to satisfy local regulations. Firms therefore find it hard to build up national networks with scale and pricing power. All the competition has led to prices falling by over a third since 2011. The average freight rate for two-day ground delivery between distant cities in America is roughly $15 per kg, whereas in China it is a measly 60 cents, according to research by Peter Fuhrman of China First Capital, an advisory firm.

A handful of the biggest companies now aim to modernise the industry. Some are spending on advanced technology: SF Express’s new package-handling hub in Shanghai is thought to have greatly increased efficiency by replacing labour with expensive European sorting equipment. A semi-automated warehouse in nearby Suzhou run by Alog, a smaller courier in which Alibaba has a stake, seems behind by comparison but in fact Alog is a partner in Alibaba’s logistics coalition, which is known as Cainiao. The e-commerce firm has helped member companies to co-ordinate routes and to improve efficiency through big data.

Other investments are also under way. Yu Weijiao, the chairman of YTO, recalls visiting FedEx, a giant American courier, in Memphis at its so-called “aerotropolis” (an urban centre around an airport) in 2007. He was awed by the firm’s embrace of advanced technology. He returned to China and sought advice from IBM on how his company could follow suit. YTO is using the proceeds of its recent reverse merger to expand its fleet of aircraft, buy automatic parcel-sorting kit and introduce heavy-logistics capabilities for packages over 50kg.

There is as yet little sign that China’s regions will begin allowing packages to move freely, so regulation will remain a brake on the industry. More ominously, labour costs are rising. There are fewer migrant labourers today who are willing to work for a pittance delivering parcels. This week China Daily, a state-owned newspaper, reported that ahead of Singles’ Day, courier firms were offering salaries on the level of university graduates.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21710004-chinas-express-delivery-sector-needs-consolidation-and-modernisation-big-sort

Has Yum Worked Out How Fast-Food Firms Can Crack China? — Bloomberg

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Global consumer companies trying to find a business model for China’s burgeoning domestic market will be watching closely as one of the oldest Western brands in the country starts a new strategy.

Yum! Brands Inc., which opened its first KFC restaurant in China in 1987 and also operates Pizza Hut outlets, has been losing market share thanks to a food-safety scare, changing tastes, increasing local competition and a host of other challenges that foreign companies face in China. It carved out its China operations into a separate company, Yum China Holdings Inc., which begins trading today in New York.

Ring-fencing the business, the largest independent restaurant company in China with 7,000 outlets and more than $900 million cash on hand, offers Yum a number of advantages in dealing with a fast-changing market. Yum’s example could provide a road map for other global consumer brands in the world’s most populous nation.

Yum China has issued 386 million shares at $24.36, which puts its valuation at around $9 billion, according to New Jersey-based research firm Edge Consulting Group LLC. The stock rose about 2 percent to $24.85 as of 9:59 a.m. in New York, while Yum Brands gained 0.7 percent to $62.49.

“When their China operations get so big and are clearly catering just to the China market, splitting off could unlock a lot of value for shareholders,” said Shaun Rein, Shanghai-based managing director of China Market Research Group. “If I were an activist hedge fund investor, I would be looking at carving out brands within large conglomerates that are China plays.”

Doing so allows Yum’s management of the China business to tailor its operations and products more swiftly to changing local conditions, such as the menu preferences of diners in different parts of the country, mobile-based payments systems, hiring and other factors.

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It also helps tap Chinese investors willing to pay high premiums for a stake of an international brand’s China operations. Yum sold a combined $460 million stake in its Chinese business to Primavera Capital Group and an Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. affiliate, Ant Financial Services Group, in September.

In recent years, Yum has ceded market share to local competitors because it was slow to react to market changes, said Rein.

“They didn’t make corporate decisions quickly enough, such as in adopting mobile payments, or adapting to consumers wanting more premium offerings,” Rein said. “Their ability to deal with the more complex environment here was held back by the lack of knowledge, the slowness of the U.S.”

Localization of offerings at KFC and Pizza Hut outlets in China will be an important component of the firm’s strategy for the country, Yum China Chief Executive Officer Micky Pant said at a briefing Tuesday in Shanghai. The company plans to increase investment in new outlets across its brands and does not plan to raise more capital, he said.

An activist hedge fund investor upset with the company’s handling of its China business is how Yum China came into being.

After a food-safety scandal in 2014 and cheaper local competition torpedoed Yum’s sales and profit in China, Corvex Management founder Keith Meister in mid-2015 urged the company to split off its Chinese operations — which contribute about half the group sales — saying that the move could generate an additional $16 a share in value for the Louisville, Kentucky-based company.

Yum’s total share of China’s market for fast-food chains dropped to 30 percent last year, from 40 percent in 2012, according to data from Euromonitor International. While sales have been growing again in China in the mid-single digits since late last year, the company has suffered from consumers shifting to healthier options and domestic chains sprouting up with more variety.


Volatility Reduction

Unlike Yum’s U.S. operations, where most of its restaurants are run by franchisees, Yum China directly operates over 90 percent of its outlets and plans to triple the number to more than 20,000 in the long term.

Yum’s spinoff would reduce volatility for its remaining business, while “giving investors with a higher risk tolerance access to a more pure-play China growth story,” said Jonathan Morgan, an analyst for Edge Consulting. “China’s economic slowdown could induce other U.S.-listed restaurant stocks to spin off their China businesses, to protect their core businesses.”

So far, companies with China consumer arms have often chosen instead to sell the division to a local competitor and take a stake in that business instead.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in June sold its e-commerce platform Yihaodian to China’s second-largest e-commerce company, JD.com Inc., for a 5 percent stake in JD. In August, Uber Technologies Inc. surrendered after a year-and-a-half battle with Didi Chuxing and agreed to sell its business in China. It departed the country in exchange for $1 billion in cash and a 17.7 percent stake in Didi.

McDonald’s Corp., meanwhile, is seeking to sell its 20-year mass franchise rights for China and Hong Kong for a reported $2 billion.

Starbucks Corp. is the only other major U.S.-listed food and beverage chain in China beside Yum, which owns and operates its outlets, numbering 2,400 stores across 110 cities.

China, Starbucks’ largest international market, represents the most significant opportunity for the company, said a company representative. The company has no intention to change its operation model in the market, according to the spokesperson.

Jackpot Valuations

“What we’ve seen across various industries is that foreign players eventually pull out or find a local partner,” said Hong Kong-based S&P Global Ratings’ restaurant and retail analyst Shalynn Teo. “It’s the local market knowledge and local relationships that determine which foreign businesses survive in China, and local players will always have an edge.”

With Chinese investors paying a premium for market share, such deals can prove attractive, said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of Shenzhen-based investment bank and advisory firm China First Capital. “As long as Chinese investors are offering jackpot valuations,

Those that don’t face the need to tailor their businesses to China’s widely diverse and morphing consumer market. Only from March this year did KFCs in China began accepting WeChat Pay; they started accepting Alipay mobile payments in July last year. Yet the country leads the world in the use of such transactions, with four out of 10 Chinese consumers using mobile payments at physical stores, research firm EMarketer estimated.

Starbucks stores in China still do not accept Alipay or WeChat, only Apple Pay, a decision which costs them 5 to 10 percent of sales, estimates China Market Research Group’s Rein.

Starbucks launched its own mobile payment system in China in July, allowing customers to pay with preloaded Starbucks Gift Cards via their mobile devices, according to the company.

As China’s consumer market continues to grow, more overseas companies may consider following Yum down the path of segregation.

“Four out of 10 spinoffs do not generate a return in the first year of separation,” said Edge Consulting’s Morgan. “How Yum China performs will help U.S.-listed companies evaluate their strategic options in China.”

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/yum-s-spinoff-offers-roadmap-for-western-brands-in-china-market

PAG Said to Pay About $250 Million for Chinese School Operator — Bloomberg

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By Cathy Chan

(Bloomberg) — PAG Asia Capital has paid about $250 million for Golden Apple Education Group, a Chinese company that’s been embroiled in legal action brought by creditors of its former owner, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Hong Kong-based private equity firm acquired Golden Apple from Sichuan Harmony Group, a Chengdu-based property developer, the people said, requesting anonymity because the details of the transaction are private. Golden Apple became involved in legal cases brought since 2014 by Sichuan Harmony’s creditors because it guaranteed some of the property developer’s loans, the people added.

The sale of Golden Apple helped resolve legal claims from about 60 individuals and money lenders, some of which had foreclosed on Sichuan Harmony assets, according to an official at Sichuan Financial Assets Exchange, the state-backed entity which was appointed to lead the Sichuan Harmony debt restructuring together with PAG.

“It’s highly unusual for a foreign private equity firm to buy a Chinese company undergoing court-supervised administration,” said Peter Fuhrman, the chairman of China First Capital, a Shenzhen-based investment banking and advisory firm.

The unwillingness of many Chinese creditors to write off part of their loans, a concession needed to restructure debt and give a company a new start, makes such deals “worlds away both in complexity and investment appeal” from other private equity transactions, Fuhrman said.

 One-Child Policy

A spokesman for PAG declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Golden Apple referred to an Aug. 25 media interview posted on the company’s website which said it is partnering with PAG and plans to invest 2 billion yuan ($295 million) in its facilities over the next two to three years. She declined to comment further on the PAG acquisition or on the company’s legal issues.

PAG, co-founded by former TPG Capital veteran Shan Weijian, is buying Golden Apple partly because China’s move to repeal its decades-old one-child policy has bolstered the prospects of the education industry, according to the people. The Chinese government has estimated that the change is likely to add three million newborns each year. Investors have taken note, with venture capital companies conducting 10 fundraising rounds in the first half for startups in the maternity and pediatric market, according to VC Beat Research, which tracks internet health-related investment and fundraising.

   Kindergartens

Golden Apple operates 33 kindergartens and two primary schools, mostly based in Chengdu, with more than 12,000 students, the people said. PAG plans to expand the number of primary schools and develop secondary schooling after acquiring the business, according to the people.

Sichuan Harmony has reduced its outstanding loans from state-backed lenders from 2.5 billion yuan to 1.9 billion yuan, according to the Sichuan Financial Exchange official, who asked not to be identified by name. The company has 4.5 billion yuan of assets and will focus on its medical and community nursing- home businesses, the official added.

The market for online education services in China has also attracted overseas interest. KKR & Co. last year agreed to invest $70 million in Tarena International Inc., which offers in-person and online classes in information technology, marketing and accounting. GIC Pte and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

were among investors putting $200 million into TutorGroup, a Chinese online education platform, in its third round of financing in November. CVC Capital Partners in May sold its stake in Education International Corp., China’s biggest overseas educational counselling service provider, to a consortium led by Chinese private equity fund NLD Investment LLP.

 

ZTO Spurns Huge China Valuations For Benefits of U.S. Listing — Reuters

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By Elzio Barreto and Julie Zhu | HONG KONG

Chinese logistics company ZTO Express is turning up the chance of a much more lucrative share listing at home in favor of an overseas IPO that lets its founder retain control and its investors cash out more easily.

To steal a march on its rivals in the world’s largest express delivery market, it is taking the quicker U.S. route to raise $1.3 billion for new warehouses and long-haul trucks to ride breakneck growth fueled by China’s e-commerce boom.

Its competitors SF Express, YTO Express, STO Express and Yunda Express all unveiled plans several months ago for backdoor listings in Shenzhen and Shanghai, but ZTO’s head start could prove crucial, analysts and investors said.

“ZTO will have a clear, certain route to raise additional capital via U.S. markets, which their competitors, assuming they all end up quoted in China, will not,” said Peter Fuhrman, CEO of China-focused investment bank China First Capital.

With a backlog of about 800 companies waiting for approval to go public in China and frequent changes to the listing rules by regulators, a New York listing is generally a quicker and more predictable way of raising funds and taps a broader mix of investors, bankers and investors said.

“ZTO will have a built-in long-term competitive advantage – more reliable access to equity capital,” Fuhrman added.

U.S. rules that allow founder Meisong Lai to retain control over the company and make it easier for ZTO’s private equity investors to sell their shares were some of the main reasons to go for an overseas listing, according to four people close to the company. U.S. markets allow a dual-class share structure that will give Lai 80 percent voting power in the company, even though he will only hold 28 percent of the stock after the IPO.

Most of Lai’s shares are Class B ordinary shares carrying 10 votes, while Class A shares, including the new U.S. shares, have one vote. China’s markets do not allow shares with different voting power.

ZTO’s existing shareholders, including private equity firms Warburg Pincus, Hillhouse Capital and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital will also get much more leeway and flexibility to exit their investment under U.S. market rules. In China, they would be locked in for one to three years after the IPO.

As concerns grow about a weakening Chinese currency, the New York IPO also gives it more stable dollar-denominated shares it can use for international acquisitions, the people close to the company said.

IN DEMAND

Demand for the IPO, the biggest by a Chinese company in the United States since e-commerce giant Alibaba Group’s $25 billion record in 2014, already exceeds the shares on offer multiple times, two of the people said.

That underscores the appeal of the fast-growing company to global investors, despite a valuation that places it above household names United Parcel Service Inc and FedEx Corp.

The shares will be priced on Oct. 26 and start trading the following day.

ZTO is selling 72.1 million new American Depositary Shares (ADS), equivalent to about 10 percent of its outstanding stock, in the range $16.50 to $18.50 each. The range is equal to 23.4-26.3 times its expected 2017 earnings per share, according to people familiar with the matter.

By comparison, Chinese rivals SF Express, YTO Express, STO Express and Yunda shares trade between 43 and 106 times earnings, according to Haitong Securities estimates.

UPS and FedEx, which are growing at a much slower pace, trade at multiples of 17.8 and 13.4 times.

“The A-share market (in China) does give you a higher valuation, but the U.S. market can help improve your transparency and corporate governance,” said one of the people close to ZTO. “Becoming a New York-listed company will also benefit the company in the long-term if it plans to conduct M&A overseas and seek more capital from the international market.”

China’s express delivery firms handled 20.7 billion parcels in 2015, shifting 1.5 times the volume in the United States, according to consulting firm iResearch data cited in the ZTO prospectus.

The market will grow an average 23.7 percent a year through 2020 and reach 60 billion parcels, iResearch forecasts.

Domestic rivals STO Express and YTO Express have unveiled plans to go public with reverse takeovers worth $2.5 billion and $2.6 billion, while the country’s biggest player, SF Express, is working on a $6.4 billion deal and Yunda Express on a $2.7 billion listing.

ZTO plans to use $720 million of the IPO proceeds to purchase land and invest in new facilities to expand its packaged sorting capacity, according to the listing prospectus.

The rest will be used to expand its truck fleet, invest in new technology and for potential acquisitions.

“It’s a competitive industry and you do need fresh capital for your expansion, in particular when all your rivals are doing so or plan to do so,” said one of the people close to the company.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-zto-express-ipo-idUSKCN12L0QH

Can Xiaomi Reverse Its Slide in China? — CNBC Interview

 

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From King-of-Mobile to possible also-ran in two short years, China’s Xiaomi is struggling to reclaim its spot at the top of China’s domestic phone market. Here’s my interview on CNBC on the tough challenges Xiaomi faces. Nerves are starting to fray among investors who put money into the company less than two years ago at a $45 billion valuation.

To watch the interview, please click here.

 

Fresh Ideas For Making Money in China Private Equity and Venture Capital

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2016 is looking like it may be another year to forget for PE and VC in China.  The problem, as always, is with exits. For years, IPOs in China for PE-backed deals have been too few and far between.  There was initially a lot of  hope for improvement this year. But, prospects unexpectedly turned bleak when the Chinese securities regulator, the CSRC, suddenly reversed course. Not only did they put on hold previously-announced plans to liberalize IPOs by opening a new “strategic board” in Shanghai and to shift to a registration-based IPO system, they also began clamping down hard on the two main exit alternatives, backdoor shell listings and trade sales to Chinese listed companies.

IPO multiples remain sky-high in China. The IPO queue sits at 830 companies, with at least another 700 now lined up to get provincial approval to join the main waiting list. The CSRC did finally announce one liberalization of the IPO regime in China, but it will likely be of little help to the hundreds of PE and VC firms with thousands of unexited deals. Companies based in China’s poorest, most backward areas, the CSRC announced earlier this month, will now get to jump to the head of the queue.

Not for the first time, it looks like PE and VC portfolios may be mismatched with IPO regulatory policy in China. PE and VC firms have of late invested overwhelmingly in two areas. First is healthcare. The industry in China is growing and reforming. But, entry valuations have been bid up to astronomical levels.

In terms of number of deals closed, Chinese tech startups are getting the lion’s share of the attention. China’s online and smartphone population as well as e-commerce industry, after all, are the world’s largest. What’s missing at most of the funded startups are profits or a high-probability path to making money one day soon. Many are using PE money as part of a “last man standing” strategy to win customers by subsidizing purchases. Loss-making companies are still barred from having an IPO in China.

The main building blocks of China’s corporate sector, manufacturing companies and bricks-and-mortar businesses, are both highly out of favor with PE firms.

Amid so much misfortune, where should the PE and VC industry look next to invest profitably in China? What seems most clear is that any strategy linked to short-term IPO exit-chasing, or seeking to intuit the next flux in CSRC policy, has proved fundamentally risky. Some fresh approaches may be in order.

One priority should be on backing companies that can deliver sustainably high margins and positive cash flow over time to support regular dividend payments. Invest more for yield and less for capital gains.

There are such investment opportunities in China. I want to share six here. There are certainly many others. Looking outside the current China PE investment mainstream has other pluses. A troubling term has entered the Chinese financial vocabulary in the last two years, called “2VC”. It means a Chinese company started and run primarily for the purpose of attracting PE and VC money and less about making money from customers. 2VC deserves a detailed analysis of its own, how much it may be warping the investment landscape in China.

GPs and LPs looking for durable margins, scaleability, and a dearth of competition in China could start their search here:

  1. Robotics gearbox. China’s robot industry is hot. By now, about everyone has read the stories suggesting China’s robotics market, already the largest in the world, will boom for decades to come. For now, the investment money in China has gone overwhelmingly into companies that are making simple robots, rather than the robot industry supply chain. This overlooks perhaps the best opportunity of all. Robots rely on sophisticated gearboxes to make parts move. Making and selling gearboxes, rather than the final robot, is where the big margins and demand are. The technology has been around for a while, but the industry is dominated by two big foreign manufacturers, ABB of Switzerland and Rexnord of the US. They make a ton doing it. A Chinese robotics gearbox maker, assuming they get the product right, could immediately roll up sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars, both to Chinese robot makers as well as US, European and Japanese ones. From conversations I’ve had with C Level execs at both ABB and Rexnord, this is the Chinese competition they fear most, but which to their surprise has yet to materialize.  —————————————————————————–
  2. Hospice and specialized late stage care. PE investment in healthcare, especially into biosimilar pharma companies, hospitals and clinics for plastic surgery and dental care has been abundant, averaging well over a billion dollars a year in China. Competition is rampant in all these areas. Late stage critical care, however, has largely gone unfunded. The unmet need in China is almost unfathomably large. There are basically no hospices in China, though some 10 million Chinese die every year, including a surging number from cancers and long-term chronic diseases. There are also 30 million Chinese with Alzheimers and virtually no places offering specialized care. The number of Alzheimers sufferers is rising fast as Chinese longevity surges. Make no mistake, it’s harder to provide this kind of medical care than to do Botox injections. But, anywhere money is easily made in China, it’s getting harder to make any money at all. The biggest provider of specialized high-end late stage care in China is the French company, Orpea. They are doing a great job. I’ve had a close look at their business in China. They too are awed by the scale of the untapped market in China. A big plus: pricing freedom. The business doesn’t rely, as most conventional hospitals and drug companies in China do, on state reimbursement. —————————————————————————————————————————
  3. Dog food and other pet items. When I first came to China in 1981, it was basically illegal to keep a dog or cat as a pet. There was barely enough food to feed the human population and food was rationed. To say the growth in pet ownership since then has been explosive would risk understating things. China is now the third largest dog-owning market globally, with 27.4 million dogs (behind the US with 55.3 million dogs and Brazil with 35.7 million), and the second largest cat-owning country with 58.1 million cats, behind only the US with 80.6 million. China’s pet market will soon blow past that of the US. Everywhere this is presenting great opportunities in pet care, pet food, pet hotels. The US pet food giant Mars has a large chunk of the dog food market here. But, there are still many opportunities to carve out a niche in pet food, both via sales at veterinary clinics and online. The other vast uncharted market: pet insurance.   ——————————————————————————————–
  4. Server storage. Chinese law mandates that the country now has and will continue to have the largest ongoing demand for high-end servers, as well as the software that powers them. The reason: all the major sources of online traffic — Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com, Baidu — must permanently store virtually everything that runs across their network. In the case of Tencent’s Wechat business, that means keeping billions of text, audio, video and photo messages generated every day by its 600 million users. Tencent’s ongoing investment in servers is almost certainly larger than any other company in the world, with the other big Chinese internet companies following closely behind. The growth rate is dizzying. This has created a wonderful profit-center for otherwise troubled chip giant Intel. Its Xeon chips power virtually all high-end servers. No single domestic company has yet emerged to build a sizeable business in storage software, maintenance and integration tailored to the regulatory needs in China. In parallel, there’s also a large market for similar made-at-home software solutions to sell to the Chinese government. They are the reason all this server storage demand exists.   ————————————————————————————————————————————————
  5. Mall-based attractions. Shopping malls in China are in a fight for survival. Clothing retailers, which just two to three years ago took at least half the floor space in Chinese malls, are disappearing. They can’t compete with online merchants offering the same products for one-third to one-half less. The going has proved especially hard for Chinese domestic retail brands, quite a few got PE money back when this sector was hot. Chinese malls need to change, and fast. Their main strategy so far is increasing the floor space allocated to restaurants and movie theaters. Another area with huge potential, but so far little concrete activity, is “edu-tainment” attractions. A prime example is a mall-based aquarium. I was recently shown around one-such mall aquarium in a major Chinese city by its owners, a large Chinese real estate developer. Though they initially knew nothing about aquariums, their design and selection of fish are mediocre, the owner is coining money with over 45% margins. Tickets sell days in advance, not just on weekends, for average of $15 for adults and less for kids. It’s been open and thriving for three years. Every mall they are building now will have a similar attraction. A better operator should be able to push margins higher and roll out nationwide. On average, 55 million Chinese go to the mall each week. —————————————————————————–
  6. Indoor LED vegetable growing.  China has a big appetite for vegetables, about 100 kilos per person per year, or seventy billion tons. Many Chinese, especially the 55% living in cities, have concerns about where and how the vegetables are grown and how they get to market. The worry rises in lock step with per capita income.  Catering to worried Chinese consumers could keep a company in profit for decades. One good idea that’s not yet in China but should be: growing vegetables indoors, using LED lights.The cost of LED lighting has fallen by over 90% since 2010 and will continue to decline, thanks in large part to over-investment in this sector in China. LED efficiency has also nearly doubled over that time. It now costs about the same to grow vegetables indoors with LEDs as it does in well-irrigated farmland. Supplying vegetables to urban China this way has a lot of other advantages, including the ability to provide a secure chain of custody, from the place where the food is picked all the way to the customer’s hands. Lots of models would work in China — large growing areas inside abandoned urban factories to supply better Chinese supermarket chains like Walmart, Carrefour and China Resources, or smaller-scale packages home-delivered or sold through vending machines placed inside high-end residential complexes in China. Organic or non-organic, catering to Chinese picky consumers could keep a company in profit for decades.

Since PE first took off in China in 2005,  China’s economy has grown by almost four-fold. Few GPs in China have done as well in DPI terms. It’s likely not going to get any easier to make or raise money, nor to rack up IPO exits. More than ever, PE firms need to back or incubate ideas to catch and hold some of the new wealth that’s getting created every day in China.

As published by SuperReturn

Chinese Private Equity Funds Are Taking on the World’s Giants — Bloomberg

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Cathy Chan 

July 21, 2016 — 12:00 AM HKT

  • PE firms from China pursue overseas deals at record pace
  • One Italian target says China links are what matter most

Giuseppe Bellandi never imagined that his company, a 30-year-old maker of industrial automation components in the foothills of the Italian Alps, would end up in the hands of a private-equity fund from China.

But when the chief executive officer of Gimatic Srl realized that Asia’s largest economy was key to his firm’s future, and that Chinese PE executives had the expertise to help him grow there, Bellandi jumped at the chance to partner up. Last month, Gimatic turned down bids from Europe and the U.S. in favor of selling a majority stake to AGIC Capital, the PE firm founded by Chinese banker Henry Cai with backing from the nation’s sovereign wealth fund.

“I was really surprised when I realized how strong Chinese private equity firms are,” Bellandi said by e-mail.

China’s PE industry is expanding globally at an unprecedented pace, putting firms like AGIC, Legend Capital and Golden Brick Capital in competition with European and U.S. counterparts like never before. Fueled by China’s growing wealth, investor sophistication and desire to gain exposure to overseas assets, homegrown funds have taken part in at least $16.4 billion of cross-border deals so far this year, exceeding the previous annual record of $11 billion in 2012, according to Asian Venture Capital Journal.

The overseas push marks a coming of age for an industry that just a few years ago was better known for “buy-and-flip” investments in local companies already primed to go public. The approach was so pervasive that Chinese regulators asked KKR & Co.’s Henry Kravis, a private equity pioneer, to lecture domestic players on how to add more value.

This year, Chinese PE firms have participated in the $3.6 billion takeover of U.S. printer company Lexmark International Inc., the $2.75 billion purchase of Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV’s standard products unit and the $600 million acquisition of Oslo-based Opera Software ASA’s web browser business. The sum of overseas transactions so far in 2016 is higher than Asian deals by foreign PE firms for the first time, according to AVCJ.

“These Chinese funds are already beginning to alter the calculus for buyout deals worldwide,” said Peter Fuhrman, the chairman and CEO of China First Capital, a Shenzhen-based investment banking and advisory firm. “It’s about buying companies that, once they have Chinese owners, can start making really big money selling products in China.”

For a QuickTake explainer China’s outbound M&A, click here.

The firepower to pull off such deals comes in part from China’s growing army of high-net worth individuals, whose ranks expanded at the fastest pace worldwide last year despite the country’s weakest economic growth in a quarter century, according to Capgemini SA. Rich Chinese investors are increasingly keen to diversify overseas after last year’s devaluation of the yuan spurred concern of more weakness to come.

“There’s a lot of domestic capital available, obviously looking for a home, and that’s fueling the emergence of these funds,” said Michael Thorneman, a partner at Bain & Co., a Boston-based consulting firm.

It’s no coincidence that the increased focus on international deals comes amid a record overseas shopping spree by Chinese companies, who have announced about $149 billion of outbound acquisitions so far this year. In some cases, PE funds are working with Chinese corporates and financial firms to help structure the deals and amplify their buying power.

For the Lexmark purchase, Legend Capital partnered with PAG Asia Capital and Apex Technology Co., a Chinese maker of ink cartridge chips. On the $9.3 billion takeover of U.S.-listed Qihoo 360 Technology Co., Golden Brick Capital teamed up with Chinese investors including Ping An Insurance (Group) Co.

Domestic Players

“PE funds like us have very experienced teams, who can do the whole thing from deal sourcing to negotiation to due diligence to deal structure,” said Parker Wang, the CEO of Beijing-based Golden Brick, which has invested about $2 billion since it opened in 2014 and also led the purchase of Opera Software’s browser unit.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. The Opera Software deal, for example, was originally supposed to be a takeover of the entire company, but suitors including Golden Brick failed to secure government approval.

Chinese funds are also becoming more active in their home market. They’ve been helped by a regulatory bottleneck for initial public offerings — which encouraged companies to turn to PE firms for financing — and the rise of China’s Internet industry, a business that the government shields from foreign ownership.

Local funds participated in domestic investments worth $48 billion last year, exceeding Chinese deals by foreign PE firms by a record margin, according to AVCJ. The number of active Chinese funds, at 672 during 2013-2015, was the highest in at least five years, according to data compiled by Bain & Co.

For more on one of the latest China PE investments, click here.

Among the most high-profile firms doing domestic deals is Yunfeng Capital, founded by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma. The firm has purchased stakes in Citic Securities Co. and smartphone maker Xiaomi, while also participating in offers for U.S.-listed Chinese companies such as iKang Healthcare Group Inc. and WuXi PharmaTech.

Domestic funds typically have a home-field advantage over foreign firms in identifying promising investment targets, according to William Sun, general manager of Beijing Jianguang Asset Management Co., a PE firm that focuses on the technology industry.

“We’re all optimistic about China opportunities, but we probably have a better grasp of them than foreign funds,” Sun said.

To be sure, overseas players aren’t walking away from China. Some have partnered with domestic PE firms on consortium deals, as California-based Sequoia Capital did with Yunfeng on the WuXi PharmaTech takeover.

Growing Competition

Others have identified niches. KKR has spent about $1 billion on five food-related investments in China since 2008, betting that its global track record in the industry will help it thrive in a country that’s faced several food-safety scandals in recent years.

More broadly, foreign firms may be concerned about rising valuations in China, according to Bain & Co.’s Thorneman. The average PE-backed Chinese acquisition target in 2015 had an enterprise value of about 18 times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, up from about 11 in 2013, according to data compiled by Bain.

“There’s just more competition out there,” Thorneman said. “That translates typically into higher valuations, more competitive deals, and more players pushing prices up.”

Most signs point toward a bigger role for Chinese PE firms both at home and abroad. They controlled the largest portion of an estimated $128 billion cash pile in Asia-focused PE funds at the end of 2015, data compiled by Bain show.

Given that China is still growing faster than most major countries, any PE firm with the ability to help companies thrive there will have a leg up on international competitors, said Cai, the former Deutsche Bank AG investment banker who started AGIC last year and calls it an “Asian-European” PE firm. The fund, which counted Chinese insurance companies among its early investors, has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Munich.

“Few companies nowadays would care about the money or how much you pay them,” Cai said. “They care if the investor can help them break into the Greater China market.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-20/chinese-funds-that-kravis-urged-to-grow-up-are-now-kkr-rivals