The Hindu Business Line : India Fund is Blackstone Group’s star performer

Aiming high
It clocked the highest annualised returns among Blackstone’s major fund categories.
The Fund is the largest India-focused closed-end mutual fund in the US.

Anil Sasi

New Delhi, July 23

If an endorsement of the India growth story was required, here it comes. Blackstone Group’s ‘India Fund’ — a NYSE-listed closed-end fund that invests primarily in Indian equities — has been the private equity major’s star performer, clocking the highest annualised returns among all its major fund categories.

Blackstone — one of the largest PE funds globally with assets of around $78.7 billion under management — reported net annualised returns of 43.9 per cent for its ‘India Fund’ till December 31, 2006. The Fund is the largest India-focused closed-end mutual fund in the US.

The next best performer for the New York-based PE major — another closed-end fund named the ‘Asia Tiger Fund’ that invests in equities across the Asian region — recorded annualised returns of 42.5 per cent.

Blackstone had approximately $1.9 billion of assets under management in these two publicly-traded closed-end funds till March 1, 2007. Blackstone’s other major fund categories clocked relatively lower returns, albeit on a higher asset base and larger number of years since inception. Blackstone’s real estate opportunity fund clocked annualised returns of 29.2 per cent till end-December 2006, while the corporate PE segment garnered returns of 22.8 per cent and the funds of hedge funds category record returns of 11.9 per cent during the same period, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings made by the PE major in the run-up to its successful $4.13 billion IPO.

As on March 1, 2007, Blackstone Group LP had approximately $78.7 billion of assets under management, which included around $31.1 billion in its Corporate PE funds, about $17.7 billion in its real estate funds and $29.9 billion in marketable alternative asset management segment, including about $17.1 billion in 72 different funds of hedge fund vehicles. It had about $1.5 billion invested in mezzanine funds, about $6.9 billion invested across over 450 different debt instruments and around $2.5 billion in two proprietary hedge funds, besides the $1.9 billion under management in the India and Asian Tiger funds.

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