Super Sized | Portico Advisers

Earlier this month I spoke with an MD at one of the largest private markets advisory firms about the landscape of managers in EM. While discussing the consolidation of capital in fewer, larger EM funds, he raised the question of whether this dynamic is a function of greater distributions from these funds.

While the data were too close to call in The Mid-Market Squeeze (DPI of ~0.5x across fund size segments), I decided to run a fresh analysis incorporating greater granularity on fund size and vintage year. The figure below shows that EM funds >$1B (orange) are not reliably distributing cash at higher rates than smaller EM funds (shades of blue). In addition, they are generally underperforming their >$1B peers in Asia, Western Europe and the United States (shades of grey).

All in all, I’m not convinced that distributions from larger funds are driving industry consolidation. That said, analyses based on Cambridge Associates’ benchmarks do have their limitations. A fund-by-fund analysis may very well tell a different story.

In any event, this is one of several topics I’m looking forward to discussing next month in a closed-door session with ~100 LPs at the Private Equity Research Consortium Conference. I’ll be on a panel exploring “Global Markets for Buyouts and VC” with Professor Steven Kaplan from Chicago Booth, as well as representatives from Warburg Pincus and Adams Street Partners. Here’s hoping for an interactive, no-holds-barred session.

Alla prossima,
Mike

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Indonesia’s First Startup IPO

Last month’s newsletter asked the question: Who Will Make Money in EM Venture? This month, we learned that Indonesia’s first IPO by a startup was … not venture backed.

“The path that startups take is normally to look for venture capital, angel investors and so on … We feel that by taking the IPO route, that’s the method that is the most fair and transparent,” said Jasin Halim, CEO of O2O e-commerce firm Kioson. Throwing shade on VCs, he continued, “Let the market value our company.”

And so it did, at an issuance price of IDR300 / share with a book that was 10x oversubscribed. It promptly proceeded to shoot the moon.

Regulators stepped in and temporarily halted trading this Tuesday (16 Oct.) to allow for a “cooling off” period. It resumed trading on Wednesday and closed at IDR2,650 / share. #9bagger

🎉

If the valuations for startups that go public trade at a premium to those held in private hands, Indonesia may be in store for a redux of the pre-IPO craze that hit China a few years back: alchemy in the form of public-private multiple arbitrage. The China parallel is a sentiment I heard from VCs in Jakarta over the summer, and though I’m always skeptical of comparisons to China, this is a space worth watching.

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SoftBank

The PwC / CB Insights Q3 data are in and SoftBank, managers of the $93 billion Unicorn Bailout Fund—sorry, Vision Fund—took the top three spots on the league table for largest deals in the United States, and the top four spots on the league table for the largest global deals (Grab, WeWork, Flipkart, Roivant Sciences). And they’re just getting warmed up!

In other news, last month SoftBank placed a $20 billion bond sale (in 7- and 10-years), with the 10s priced at 5.125%. Market participants’ comments in the FT’s write-up of the sale should be preserved for future historians so that they fully appreciate the degree to which, in 2017, all caution had been thrown to the wind:

Everyone is asking the same question: what am I investing in here? Am I investing in a company’s operations or am I providing unsecured financing to fund equity contributions to the Vision Fund?

My view is that bond investors are thoroughly unimpressed, but they’re being sucked in by the price. I find the whole structure of the Vision Fund completely perplexing, but as it’s my job to make money, we were in the [order] book.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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(SME) Death and Taxes in India

Saurabh Mukherjea of Ambit Capital is a bit of a downer on the impacts of New Delhi’s economic reforms on India’s (relatively unproductive) small businesses:

My reckoning is that for a substantial number of SMEs, their margin was tax evasion. As the government steps up forcing people to comply with GST, a lot of small businesses that managed to stay in the shadows will find themselves sucked into the tax net. Either their profitability will be vastly diminished — or it will go away completely.

How many companies globally would lose their margin if they actually paid taxes? I wonder.

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Heavy Stuff

Last month the New York Times ran a provocative piece tying Nestlé to the rise of obesity in Brazil, which they followed up with an in-depth article on KFC in Ghana [full disclosure: Mike is a shareholder of NYT]. Regardless of one’s views on who / what is culpable for the deteriorating health of Brazilians and Ghanaians, (I mean, processed foods are certainly part of the problem), the fact is that Brazil and Ghana are not exceptions: lifestyle diseases are increasing rapidly across the emerging markets.

To wit, obesity rates are skyrocketing in each EM region (see below for a sampling). In China, the number of obese adults (≥ 30% body mass index, or BMI) has compounded at 9% since 1976, growing from ~3 million to more than 80 million, while the number of overweight adults (≥ 25% BMI) grew 7x over the period to nearly 400 million. There are more overweight adult Chinese than there are people in the United States and Canada combined. Astonishingly, on a global basis, the number of obese children and teenagers has increased 10-fold over the last 40 years.

Calories

In a similar vein, the number of deaths due to diabetes is growing rapidly. While roughly 62,000 people in Europe and the United States died from diabetes in 2015, representing a 6.4% increase on the figure for 2000 (entirely driven by Americans), nearly 600,000 died across EMs, representing a 64% increase over the same period (see below).

Lifestyles

It’s not solely multinationals that are driving the ubiquity in unhealthy eating habits and processed foods. Private equity firms have been enablers of these trends, tapping into the “emerging consumer” through deals in FMCG, quick service restaurants (QSR), etc. For example, Thomson Reuters data show PE firms have invested in 61 EM QSR companies over the last decade.

That said, you can’t say PE firms aren’t also investing in potential solutions—GPs inked twice as many deals (138) in hospitals and clinics over the same period. Nevertheless, one wonders about the firms that are “investing across the lifecycle”—selling obesity-inducing foods to local populations on the front end, and lifestyle disease solutions on the back end. A fairly perverse way of creating demand where none should exist, no?

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From the Bookshelf

In the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions. But for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.

— Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Random House: 2014).

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