Last week, the Conference Board of Canada released a major new study on the private equity experience of Canadian business. During the research phase for this report, one of the chief surprises for Conference Board research director Michael Grant and his colleagues was just how few recipients of PE investments were actually aware of this form of risk financing prior to their experience.
Deloitte recently released its latest issue of Global Capital Markets Perspective. It points to widespread activity in 2013 and the prospect for further gains in the months ahead. However, the report also perceives some fragility in trends – and the possibility that growth could be up-ended by sudden shocks. One of the report’s authors is Robert Olsen, a Deloitte partner and national leader of corporate finance at Deloitte Canada. Olsen spent much of his career as a private equity pro.
OMERS Private Equity, the investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, has acquired Caliber Collision Centers Inc – ending recent speculation about the likely identity of the buyer of the ONCAP portfolio company. The sponsor-to-sponsor transaction appears to be a win-win for the two Canadian private equity firms.
When it comes to funding innovation, Québec has been long recognized as a wellspring of good ideas. It might for this reason come as no surprize that Québec’s leading commercialization hubs, MSBiV, SOVAR, Univalor and Valeo, have recently advanced some new strategies for leveraging the market potential of home-grown R&D and technological change.
Canada's Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) and Industry Canada last week released a new study showing that, relative to non VC-backed firms, VC-backed firms grow faster in terms of their assets, number of employees, revenue, sales, wages and R&D expenditures. The good news is that it confirms the highly positive results of previous survey-based studies.
Jennifer Morais, a funds commitment professional who worked at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for around eight years, is joining TPG on the investor relations team, according to four people familiar with the situation.
No matter how tough things get, Canadian VCs are always doing deals and creating value. What’s more, the companies they back are evidently quite successful at creating collateral benefits, such as economic innovation and high-value jobs. That’s the key finding of a new research report published by Canada’s Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) in partnership with Industry Canada and Statistics Canada.
It’s perhaps the dream of most PE professionals to give 100% of their time to doing deals and managing businesses – free of the strictures of the traditional partnership model, and of having to raise a new fund every few years. That dream appears to have been realized by the investment pros managing Banyan Capital Partners. In 2010, the 15-year old private equity firm left behind traditional fund-raising, and entered into a partnership with a single LP, $47 billion Canadian asset manager Connor, Clark & Lunn Financial Group (CC&L).
Doug Pearce, the CEO and CIO of the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, helped introduce alternative investments into the institution's portfolio, and worked to grow that exposure through his career.
Ares Management and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are buying Neiman Marcus for more than $6 billion but their equity check is coming in low.