CCMP Capital To Seek $3.5B Early Next Year

CCMP Capital Advisors LLC will likely launch its next fundraising effort in the first quarter of 2012, two sources told Buyouts.

The New York-based firm will seek to raise $3.5 billion, a slight uptick from the $3.4 billion fund it raised in 2006 but a fairly ambitious goal considering the difficulty of today’s fundraising market.

The fundraising will be all the tougher because former parent JPMorgan, which committed just under a quarter of the predecessor fund, cannot commit to Fund III from its own balance sheet because of the Volcker Rule in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. (However, it can channel money through funds of funds and other third-party asset management businesses.)

To help diversify its investor base, CCMP Capital in recent years has been cultivating relationships with sovereign wealth funds in Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East; a couple are already performing due diligence on backing the new fund, one source said. The firm will likely hire Credit Suisse to help it raise the fund.

Formerly known as J.P. Morgan Partners and before that Chase Capital Partners, CCMP Capital spun out of the bank in 2006. CCMP Capital does growth equity and buyouts in the consumer and retail, industrial, energy and health care sectors. The firm also has an outpost in London, from which nine investment professionals source deals in Europe, where about 15 of CCMP Capital’s companies are based.

The firm is led by CEO Stephen Murray, who joined the firm in 1989 after working as a vice president in the mid-market lending division of Manufacturers Hanover; and Chairman Greg Brenneman, the former president and CEO of PwC Consulting. The firm has eight managing directors, including Jonathan Lynch, a managing director who joined the firm in 1992 from Prudential Securities, where he was a member of the mergers and acquisitions department; and Richard Zannino, who joined the firm in 2009 after serving as CEO of Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

CCMP Capital has been fairly active as both a buyer and seller in 2011. In July, it took Francesca’s Holdings Corp. public. The retailer of apparel, jewelry and accessories raised $170 million after pricing its shares above the expected range. In August, it sold CareMore Medical Group Inc., a provider of managed health care plans the firm bought in 2006. In May it agreed to buy Medpace Inc., a provider of clinical research services for the pharmaceutical industry, for a reported $500 million.