Brookfield Raises $12B for Private Equity Program

Canadian investment giant Brookfield Asset Management closed its Brookfield Capital Partners VI flagship global private equity program, raising $12 billion in what the firm termed its largest private equity fund.

“Our global deal pipeline remains robust during this current period of market dislocation, which is creating significant large-scale opportunities that suit our operationally intensive investment approach,” Anuj Ranjan, president of Brookfield’s private equity group, said in a release.

In addition to Brookfield’s $3.5 billion commitment to the fund, the fund’s partners include institutional investors such as public and private pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, financial institutions, endowments and foundations, and family offices.

So far, the fund has committed approximately $4 billion to acquire six “market-leading businesses.”

Last month, Brookfield and French bank Société Générale announced a strategic partnership to originate and distribute high-quality private credit investments through a private investment grade debt fund. The initial fund will launch with 2.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in seed funding at its inception and is targeting a total of 10 billion euros over the next four years.

According to Brookfield, the seed fund will focus on two strategies: one concentrated on real assets credit within the power, renewables, data, midstream and transportation sectors, and the other on fund finance.

According to a survey from investment data firm Preqin, more capital is expected to flow into private equity in the next 12 months despite a generally pessimistic outlook for returns over the short term.

The survey found that more than one-third of respondents plan to allocate more capital to private equity in the next 12 months, with 84% of those investors expecting to do so before the end of the year. According to Preqin, this is despite more than half of investors believing private equity to be currently overvalued and one-quarter expecting performance to be worse in the year ahead than the previous 12 months.