Partners Group IPO

Right Said Fred

“This man could sell anything to anyone”, the deal captain on my equity sales desk said to me. “Fredy is a legend I know” I replied.

That was after the initial investor soundings of the Partners Group IPO. I had the final piece of validation I needed. Partners management had just been in to see my smartest London hedge fund financials clients.

But let me start at the beginning. A few months earlier Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch had been appointed as joint book runners on the IPO of this mid-size Swiss private equity fund of funds, which had only CHF10.9bn of AUM at the end of 2005 and 2005 revenues of CHF110m.

Credit Suisse had beaten UBS out to be the Swiss bank on the deal and Zurich bigwig Thomas Gottstein was fronting our ECM efforts, so I knew it was important. Ironically my Swiss sales team and most Swiss buy-side institutions weren’t particularly bullish. The head of Credit Suisse’s …