Apax Partners hires head of Italy to bolster local presence

Conte joins the GP’s office in Milan after 12 years with Trilantic Europe.

Four years after launching its operation in Italy, Apax plans to accelerate its activities in the local market, seizing opportunities in the consumer, healthcare, services and tech and telecom (TMT) sectors, Conte told Unquote.

“Since Fund IX, we have started to explore different geographies, mainly Italy and the Benelux,” he said. “Given the success of our most recent fundraising for Fund X, completed last year, we want to invest even more outside of France.”

Apax held a final close for Apax IX on the vehicle's hard-cap of USD 9bn in December 2016, according to Unquote Data. Apax X closed on USD 11bn in January 2021 and it is making investments alongside the Apax Private Equity Opportunities (APEO), dedicated to life insurance contracts and capitalization contracts for smaller investors.

The Italian market, which Conte considered to be culturally very close to France, offers a number of opportunities that fit well with the GP’s investment criteria, including a number of SMEs active in its four core sectors.

“The ability to be here with an office is very important in order to be closer to entrepreneurs and the local community, increasing the chances of making deals,” said Conte. “It’s quite an active moment in Italy and as we’re now investing Fund X, with an ideal size in terms of equity ticket between EUR 100m and 300m, the country offers a number of potential opportunities within that ticket size.”

He says there is a fair chance that the team will actively start to look at opportunities in the second half of the year, mainly in the healthcare and TMT sectors.

“We will not look below EUR 100m in equity because it becomes too complex to deploy the almost 2bn that we have available within Fund X and APEO fund. So, I would say that the sweet spot is more in the EUR 150m and 200m.”

Conte will join local senior advisor, Francesco Panfilo, who has highlighted since 2018 the importance of the market and particularly investments in small and mid-cap companies. The team’s first investment via Fund IX was Business Integration Partners (BIP), an international IT consulting firm, that the GP sold to CVC Capital Partners in June 2021, after three years.

The firm is still invested with its ninth fund in the Italian company AEB, which provides solutions to improve the quality of wine, beer, and food with natural ingredients including yeasts, tannins, clarifiers, enzymes. The company serves producers of wine, food products and other beverages, oenologists and brewers. Apax invested in the digitalization of the business in the past years and, as it was proven to be very resilient during the pandemic, it is not planning an exit anytime soon.

“Although the oenology sector where it operates suffered during the pandemic, AEB is experiencing very strong growth and we still have some work to do, including in terms of M&A,” said Conte.

Conte, which started his career at Merrill Lynch International Bank in 2006 and worked as an investment manager at Jupiter Finance between 2007 and 2010, will be the second member of Apax’s Milan office. The strategy of the firm is to enhance the team with new hires over the next twelve months.

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