Canada pension fund co-invests around $204 mn in India in the June quarter

CPPIB made investments in chemicals firm Sajjan India, insuretech unicorn Acko and non-bank lender Kogta Financial (India) Ltd, it added.

CVC Capital acquired the agro chemicals business of Sajjan India in February for $700 million, out of which, CPPIB paid $120 million to pick up a 17% stake, it said in its quarterly report on Thursday. CPPIB’s investment in Sajjan India was not publicly reported thus far.

The pension fund acquired a 5% stake for $50 million in Acko and a 9% stake for $34 million in Kogta Financial (India) as part of the transactions led by Multiples Private Equity. CPPIB is a general partner in several funds managed by Multiples. It also invested $333 million as a limited partner in Sequoia Capital’s Asia Pacific fundraising, including funds for China, India and Southeast Asia. However, it did not provide a country-wise split. The pension fund also backed Baring Private Equity Asia’s with a $100 million credit investment for its $800 million buyout of IGT Solutions.

In June, Sequoia had said that it had raised $2.85 billion, of which $2 billion was for investments in India and $800 million was for startups in Southeast Asia. Sequoia Capital has raised $9 billion across four funds for investing in China, Bloomberg reported last week. CPPIB also invested $150 million in NewQuest Capital’s latest fund. Secondaries investor NewQuest Capital is owned by the TPG Group, and typically invests one-third of its corpus in India across companies and private equity funds.

Meanwhile, CPPIB reported a net loss of $23 billion and a negative 4.2% for fund returns in the first quarter.

“Financial markets experienced the most challenging first six months of the year in the last half century, and the fund’s first fiscal quarter was not immune to the widespread decline. However, our active management strategy – diversified across asset classes and geographies – moderated the impact on the fund, preserving investment value,” John Graham, president and chief executive, said in a statement.

“The uncertain business and investment conditions we noted in the previous quarter continues, and we expect to see this persist throughout the fiscal year. Our resilient portfolio is designed to create value over the very long term as demonstrated by our continued strong 10-year net return, even as we expect to experience double-digit percentage losses.”

The results were driven by losses in public equity strategies, due to the broad decline in equity markets, it added.

First article