Goldman Sachs, AlpInvest lead Cinven’s Barentz secondary

Lead buyers have emerged for Cinven’s single-asset continuation fund process, which will extend the London-headquartered buyout firm’s hold of global life science ingredients distributor Barentz.

Goldman Sachs Asset Management acted as lead buyer on the transaction while Carlyle’s AlpInvest Partners took a junior lead position, sources said.

LP elections for the transaction were due at the beginning of March, according to one of the sources. Pricing for the continuation fund – which is around €850 million in size – was in the mid-90 percent of net asset value range, the source said. The deal saw some LPs roll “in significant size,” according to another source.

Cinven, Europe’s fifth-largest private equity firm according to the PEI 300, commenced a process last summer, Secondaries Investor reported last year. It is understood that Cinven had explored secondaries buyer appetite for a GP-led deal in the fourth quarter of 2022, though that did not ultimately go ahead.

Evercore is understood to be advising on the process. Spokespeople for Cinven, Evercore and AlpInvest declined to comment while no one from Goldman Sachs responded to a comment request Friday.

Cinven invested in Netherlands-headquartered Barentz in 2019, according to its website. Barentz then acquired Canada-headquartered Pestell Nutrition, a distributor in specialty ingredients for the animal health, animal nutrition and pet food markets in 2021.

The buyout shop closed its eighth flagship vehicle in January on €13.2 billion above its €12 billion target, according to PEI data. The vehicle is around 27 percent larger than its predecessor, which closed on €10.41 billion in 2019.

While GP-led pricing fell in 2023 versus 2022, over 70 percent of GP-led transactions were priced at or above 90 percent of NAV, according to Lazard’s Secondary Market Report 2023. Around 54 percent of single-asset continuation funds by volume priced at par or above NAV last year “illustrating continued strong appetite for trophy assets,” the report found.

GP-led secondaries volume accelerated in the second half of last year with $34 billion transacted on, bringing 2023’s total to $50 billion, according to Evercore’s 2023 Secondary Market Update. Single-asset deals represented 45 percent of GP-led deal volume – that compares with such deals representing 52 percent of the $48 billion of GP-led volume seen in 2022.