Asia's private equity firms grappling with fund-raising slump

For more than 20 years, Indonesian private equity firm Northstar Group was emblematic of Southeast Asia’s boom.

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Backed by TPG Capital, it raised more than US$2.7 billion (S$3.5 billion), with a pledge to invest in the region’s best firms.

But in 2025, between the country’s faltering outlook and a scandal that sank a flagship investment, its founders struggled to continue. By June, it sold key funds to US investment firm Ares Management for just US$6 million, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News and people familiar with the matter.

As global investors gathered in Singapore for conferences and annual general meetings in September, Northstar was raised as an exemplar of Asia’s steep challenges.

At a time when private equity players in the region should be thriving amid the perceived decline of US exceptionalism, they are instead weathering one of the harshest capital winters in recent memory as investors remain on the sidelines — India and Japan standing out as rare exceptions.

During the opening panel of SuperReturn Asia’s second main conference day, the moderator asked attendees at the Marina Bay Sands convention centre to raise their hands if they had made fresh commitments to new funds or companies in the last 12 to 24 months or if they planned to do so within the same timeframe ahead: a solitary arm went up for both.

“There is not a lot of private capital. We all know, based on that show of hands, that fund raising last year was 10 per cent of what it was in 2021,” Mr Gunther Hamm, president of China-focused Hopu Investment Management, said on stage. “Structurally, valuations are going to be low and they’re going to stay low.”