The Business Times
This article originally appeared in The Business Times (Singapore)
After surveying another year of disappointing results from their merging market investments in 2013, many private equity (PE) investors who had enthusiastically piled into the big developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (the BRICs) are rethinking their emerging market strategies.
As we discuss in Bain & Company's 2014 Global Private Equity Report, the problem PE faces in emerging markets is stark: General partners (GPs) are failing to deliver on the job their limited partners (LPs) hire them to do-to generate market-beating returns. Indeed, returns of emerging market PE funds have been trending lower for nearly a decade. Even the best performers' results have dropped steadily from their vintage peak.
These are not the results that LPs signed on for when they shifted their attention to the fast-growing emerging BRIC economies from the deteriorating conditions for PE in the advanced economies after 2008. Emerging market funds raised since the financial crisis have underperformed their developed market counterparts. Although these vintages are still very immature and have booked few realisations of gains, their interim results are disappointing.