Shares of Swiss-headquartered private markets asset manager Partners Group suffered a sharp drop after reports that it had capped withdrawals on one of its leading evergreen private equity funds. The shares plunged as much as 16% after the initial news before recovering.
Withdrawals from its $8.6 billion Global Value SICAV fund were capped at 5% of net asset value after redemption requests reached 9.8%. The news also triggered knock-on sell-offs in the shares of leading listed private assets firms, including Ares Management Corporation, Blackstone, Carlyle Group and KKR.
“The industry has experienced a period of heightened volatility across open-ended evergreen fund flows,” Partners Group said in a statement on June 4. This trend started in private credit vehicles and has recently spilled over to private equity.”
Evergreen fund vehicles have been characterised by many commentators as a means of addressing liquidity problems in private assets as fund managers encounter growing difficulties achieving satisfactory outcomes. With more extended time horizons, these funds can in principle await better opportunities, as well as retain more remunerative assets for longer.
Partners Group’s statement reconfirmed expected gross new client demand of some $26 billion-$32 billion for 2026 across a range of strategies, including evergreen funds. The company said it has a typical 5% redemption threshold on the evergreen funds.
The share decline was a “massive overreaction,” Fredy Gantner, co-founder of Partners Group, told Swiss media. According to Gantner, the sell-off reflected broader concerns over the industry as a whole rather than company-specific issues.
He also countered recent allegations by Grizzly Research, a financial research firm and activist short-selling hedge fund, which released a report claiming that up to 40% of investments in the firm’s evergreen funds were mismarked. Partners Group had condemned the allegations and threatened legal action.
With assets under management of $185 billion, the company has long been esteemed as one of the most solid and reputable investors in the private assets space. For it to run into difficulties of this kind is particularly telling, and suggests significant challenges in the investment proposition as a whole, whether real or perceived.
The share decline suggests that investors in listed private markets firms are cognisant of the industry’s recent difficulties in achieving exits, and are very aware of potential challenges to its business model. Partners Group may have been caught out by broader scepticism perhaps better directed to the primary funds it invests in.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment further to Asia Asset Management.
