At a time when many buyout shops are branching out into new businesses like real estate, hedge funds, debt funds and the like, Martin Halusa, the head of London private equity firm Apax Partners, is going in the other direction.
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A Financial Times
story profiling Apax's strategy goes into detail about how the London-based firm is differentiating itself from its American counterparts in key areas such as starting new business lines, selling stakes in the partnership and even its dealings with the debt markets. Chief among Halusa's concerns is skepticism about whether there are any advantages to diversifying across different forms of alternative investments. The FT quotes him as saying:
"We don't have any of the extra debt, infrastructure, real estate or hedge fund activities that the big US groups have. I don't think that being in all these different businesses means you are more competitive in just one of them -- in this case private equity. On the contrary, we actually benefit from being focused and specialized in one area," he says. "American firms have gone down the route of building very impressive diversified alternative asset management groups, but I don't see obvious synergies across different asset classes."
Halusa is the second British private equity dealmaker to warn against the dangers of straying away from pure-play private equity. Last week, Terra Firma's Guy Hands issued a similar warning in a letter to limited partners. - George White
See Halusa interview from the Financial Times
See related story about Hands from Dealscape
