Instead, general partners found themselves surrounded by rivals hunting for investors who kept a low profile at gatherings like SuperReturn Asia. The ratio felt like it was 10 fund managers to one investor at one event, several participants said, while a family office executive added they’d been on both sides of the money for more than a decade and never seen such aggressive efforts to raise cash.
When private equity fund managers descended on Singapore for two weeks of conferences culminating in the Formula 1 Grand Prix, many were expecting it to rain money.
The stage was set for pension funds, family offices and other institutional investors to deploy more of their record cash piles into the Asia-Pacific region — the world’s fastest-growing private equity market over the past decade — at some of the city’s first mask-free conferences since the pandemic.
