Carlyle holds final close on $3.6bn for long-term fund

Alice Tchernookova
20 October 2016

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International private equity house The Carlyle Group has held a final close on $3.6bn for its Carlyle Global Partners fund.

Established in late 2014, the fund is Carlyle's first long-dated fund, with a lifespan in excess of the industry standard of 10 years plus extensions. According to the GP, this should give investors a potential for attractive returns and net asset value appreciation over a longer-time horizon than usual private equity funds.

The 13-person team working on Carlyle Global Partners will be co-headed by Eliot Merrill, who has been part of Carlyle for 15 years and who previously focused on US buyout activity; and Tyler Zachem, who joined Carlyle in 2015 from Broad Sky Partners, where he served as CEO and founding partner. It includes Carlyle members already working on other buyout funds within the firm, as well as new joiners.

The fund will be managed from New York and London. Carlyle could not yet be reached for comment.

Investors
The GP said it received commitments from "a number of long-standing Carlyle investors", alongside other new investors.

Investments
The fund will invest alongside owners and management teams in sectors and geographies that complement other Carlyle private equity funds, the GP said in a statement. The fund has a flexible investment mandate, with no particular sector or location focus. It will seek returns over a longer term, thus enabling it to partner with family businesses, management teams and corporates over a longer period of time.

Aside from direct investments, the fund will also seek co-investment opportunities, with tickets that can amount to $500m per deal. Four investments have already been identified for the fund, representing $1.1bn of equity committed in total. Three of them are now completed: Global Jet Capital, a global provider of financing services to the corporate and private aircraft market; Content Partners, an aggregator of intellectual property for the entertainment and media sector; and NEP Group, a global provider of outsourced broadcast and live event production services. The fourth should occur in November and targets Schoen Klinik, a German operator of speciality hospitals.

People
The Carlyle Group – William Conway (CEO, chief investment officer); Eliot Merrill, Tyler Zachem (co-heads of Carlyle Global Partners).