Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Henry Kravis, CEO of American private equity fund Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co (KKR) here on Monday.
Before meeting with Kravis, Prime Minister also had a similar one-on-one with Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Boeing James McNerney.
KKR and Co. L.P. (formerly known as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co.) is an American multinational private equity firm, specializing in leveraged buyouts, headquartered in New York.
KKR is operated by its managing partners Henry Kravis and George R. Roberts and a team of approximately 140 investment professionals and 400 total employees, organized into industry focused groups.
KKR has an NBFC arm - KKR India Financial Services, under its umbrella, there are three separate pools of USD 200 million each that offers high-cost structured debt to Indian promoters, corporations and real estate developers seeking liquidity options.
As evidence of its latest investments, KKR has reportedly put Rs 630 crore in Gautam Thapar-owned Avantha Holdings, the holding company of the diversified Avantha Group, as structured credit, linked to the performance of the group's underlying listed companies Crompton Greaves and BILT.
Last October, it also pumped in Rs 550 crore in the holding company of Apollo Hospitals, PCR Investments, as convertible debentures that have an option to get flipped into equity shares in the Chennai-headquartered hospital chain at the end of a five-year tenure. The NBFC business is doubling year-on-year, and KKR plans to shore it up further.
The pure-play Private Equity (PE) operations continue to remain a key leg for the fund in India, having put in USD 1.6 billion since 2006.
Besides having its headquartered in the Solow Building at 9 West 57th Street, Manhattan, New York, it has other offices spread over in U.S. and abroad and it also has an office in Mumbai.
According to media reports as of March 31, 2014, KKR had completed fund-raising for approximately 23 traditional investment funds in the US, Europe and Asia with total committed capital of approximately USD80 billion.
Prime Minister will hold a series of meeting with CEOs of five other companies namely Laurence D. Fink, CEO of American multinational investment management firm Black Rock; Virginia Rometty CEO of IBM; Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric; Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs.
Earlier in the morning, Prime Minister held a breakfast meeting with CEOs of 11 top US companies, during which he is believed to have pushed India's case as the best investment destination in Asia.
Among the eleven CEOs whom the Prime Minister had met were Google's Larry Page; David M Rubenstein of The Carlyle Group; Michael L Corbat, CEO of Citigroup; Doug Oberhelman of Caterpillar; Cargill President and CEO David W MacLennan; Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo; Kenneth C Frazier of Merck; MasterCard President and CEO Ajaypal Singh Banga, AES Corporation CEO Andres Gluski, Charles R. Kaye of Warburg Pincus and Micheal Ball of Hospira - a US-based global pharmaceutical company.
These meetings with the 17 CEOs are expected to last about two hours.
These meetings are a part of Prime Minister Modi's plans to increase the share of India's manufacturing sector to 25 per cent of the GDP from 15 per cent currently. He is expected to assure the CEOs of a red carpet welcome minus the red tape.
Later in the day, he will meet the Clintons, former president Bill Clinton and his wife and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Following which, he departs for Washington in the afternoon to meet U.S. President Barrack Obama.
