Six large deals of over USD 100 million each resulted in a 50 per cent year-on-year jump in the total venture investments in the country in October to USD 3.1 billion, a report said Monday.
The total investments by private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) funds in 2018 have gone up to USD 25.2 billion, only USD 1 billion short of last year's record inflows, consultancy firm EY said in its monthly report.
October saw Warburg, Temasek, Softbank and a few other investors pump in USD 1.3 billion in the Africa business of Bharti Airtel for a 28.4 per cent stake, Xander's USD 350 million buyout of Phoenix's Hyderabad office project and Advent's USD 326 million buyout of Manjushree Technopack, it said.
"While PE/VC deal activity in July-September was weak, the strong start to the fourth quarter is encouraging. Despite the underperformance in open market exits, PE/VC exit activity continues to remain robust with support from strategic and secondary deals," said Vivek Soni, national leader for private equity services, EY.
He, however, was quick to add that investors are less bullish as compared to the beginning of the year on factors like upcoming state elections, the 2019 general elections, the evolving bad-loan situation and the developing situation around select non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).
Buyout deals continue to outperform with USD 806 million recorded across four deals, compared with USD 54 million in one deal in October 2017 and USD 500 million across three deals in September 2018, the firm said.
The mainstay of investing continues to be growth, it said, pointing out that it accounted for 86 per cent of all investments in October with PE/VC investments at USD 1.8 billion in 13 deals.
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Telecom was the favourite among sectors courtesy the Airtel deal, followed by real estate (USD 364 million in two deals) and financial services (USD 334 million in eight deals), it said.
Blackstone's USD 1-billion exit from business process outsourcing player Intelenet resulted in the overall exits doubling to USD 1.4 billion in October over the same period last year.
Funds raised USD 641 million for investing in India, compared with USD 31 million in the same period last year, it said, attributing the sharp rise to USD 313 million raised by Motilal Oswal PE.