Tim Sims, co-founder and managing director of Pacific Equity Partners [PEP] – with $9 billion AUM, talks to Forbes Australia’s managing editor Stewart Hawkins about public versus private equity, the debt market, interest rates, why investing in startups isn’t what the firm does, the future of deal cadence and whether we’re now in a “difficult” investment market.
Given the craziness of the past few years, what do you see as the advantages of private equity over public in a volatile market?
Private equity has become an attractive investment class for sophisticated investors globally. Large endowments or family offices might have as much as 50% of their funds in alternatives or private equity. Public equities have a long and well-documented history – we have 300 years of data coming out of the Dutch exchange, a couple of hundred years out of London and more than 200 years from New York.
