China Fund News reporter Wu Jun and Ren Ziqing
Recently, Dong Chengfei, a top-tier fund manager, “running away” to join Ruijun Asset has caused a stir. After gathering the “Three Musketeers of Xingquan”, Ruijun is also regarded as a tens of billions of platform private equity in the industry. In the early years, there were Jinglin and Gao Yi, and in recent years, Panjing and Yude, etc., more and more managers choose platform operation.
Industry insiders believe that platform-based private equity is composed of a number of fund managers with different investment styles. It has the characteristics of resource sharing, collaborative cooperation, independent decision-making, and self-discipline. This is the advantage of platform-based private equity. Under the first mode, the collaboration and cooperation within the company will also face certain challenges. It is worth thinking about how to ensure the stability of the team and achieve efficient resource sharing.
Say goodbye to solo mode
In February of this year, Dong Cheng, the former deputy general manager of Industrial Securities Global Fund, informally joined the private equity firm Ruijun Asset, and reunited with his old colleagues Du Changyong and Wang Xiaoming. It is understood that Ruijun’s asset management scale has exceeded 20 billion yuan. Chairman Du Changyong is responsible for the company’s overall development and strategy, Wang Xiaoming serves as chief investment officer, Dong Chengfei serves as research director, and general manager Miao Junwei is responsible for affairs other than investment research.
In the second half of last year, Wang Yawei’s “love disciple” Cui Tongkui jumped to join Panjing Investment, which also attracted attention in the industry. Panjing Assets has also formed a tens of billions of private equity platform of four investment managers Zhuang Tao, Chen Qin, Xiao Ming and Cui Tongkui.
Farewell to the single-player model, platform-based private equity has developed rapidly in China in recent years. For example, Gao Yi Assets brings together well-known fund managers such as Deng Xiaofeng, Feng Liu, and Sun Qingrui, and Jinglin Assets has investment managers such as Gao Yuncheng, Jiang Tong, Jin Meiqiao, etc. Both of them have now grown into giants of 100 billion yuan. In addition, rookie Yude The investment has five fund managers including Jin Tianzhen, Cai Jianjun, Feng Chao, Li He and Zhao Hongxu.
The so-called platform-based operation of private equity, Xia Fan, vice president of Xueqiu, said that it mainly refers to the fact that the relevant private equity managers have multiple core investment managers. achieve sharing. Compared with traditional private equity, there is usually only one core investment manager. The investment style of platform-based private equity can be more diversified, and the dependence on a single fund manager is also greatly reduced. Platform-based private equity often presents many core investment managers and involves many segmentation strategies. two characteristics.
Xia Fan believes that the reason why private equity is trying to operate on a platform is that, on the one hand, any investment strategy will have a performance cycle. The prosperity and adversity of asset classes or investment strategies will bring about cyclical fluctuations in financial aspects such as company fundraising and performance rewards. , and a company with multiple strategies and multiple investment managers may better smooth the impact of market cycle fluctuations on the company’s development; on the other hand, in recent years, there has been a trend of institutional polarization in the private equity industry. The resource endowment will have obvious advantages over the small and medium-sized private equity that has just started, and the platform-based private equity can integrate resources more efficiently and better form internal synergy to face external competition. “For many investment managers who have just turned private, choosing Joining the platform-based private equity means that you can focus more on investment instead of many management matters, which is very attractive to many research players.”
Shi Mengjiao, director of the Risk Control Department of Golden Axe Investment Research, said that at present, more private placements choose platform-based operations. First, it can reduce the dependence on a single fund manager. Looking back at the past, the performance style of A-shares has been constantly switched. If the market environment is not suitable for the style of fund managers, products Poor performance, if there are multiple fund managers with complementary styles, they can increase product diversification, expand market adaptability, and increase the company’s strategic capacity to a certain extent; second, due to the balance between management and investment, with the increase in management scale, management The number of affairs is gradually increasing. If the platform is operated, different personnel will be responsible for management, research, investment and other positions, which will help investment managers not be burdened by management and make better investments.
Platform expansion expands the boundaries of private equity management
At the beginning of this year, the total scale of the private equity fund industry exceeded 20 trillion yuan, and at the same time, the number of private securities investment fund managers with tens of billions of dollars exceeded 100.
There is a saying in the industry: if the scale of private equity funds exceeds 10 billion, it is difficult to have excess returns relative to the market. Xia Fan said, observing the performance of long-share private equity funds in 2021, we can see that the average return of private equity funds with a scale of more than 10 billion yuan is only 5.3%, while private equity funds with a scale of 5 billion to 10 billion yuan can achieve 14.2%. % rate of return, the scale of the decline in private equity performance is evident. “In response to this phenomenon, many private equity firms try to achieve a double harvest of ‘scale’ and ‘performance’ through changes in corporate structure. One fund manager can’t manage too much money, so many star fund managers are hired. Is private equity just fine? Breaking the limit of scale and getting bigger? In actual operation, we also see that more and more top-notch institutions are using similar methods to achieve their own scale expansion.”
Rong Hao, a wealth management partner at Pai Pai.com, also believes that from the perspective of industry development, platform-based operation is the result of increased industrialization after the scale of private equity has grown. From the perspective of the company, the management boundary of a single fund manager will inevitably conflict with performance, scale, risk control, etc. The platform-based operation can focus on longer-term development and be consistent with the interests of multiple parties.
Xia Fan believes that there are generally two modes of platform-based private equity: one is to bring together a number of fund managers with different investment styles, sharing the company’s middle and back-end resource system, each investment manager can manage products by himself, and build a platform based on Different personality cognitions, such as Gao Yi; the other is the portfolio manager model advocated by the Capital Group in the United States. Each portfolio is divided into multiple managers, and each manager will share ideas with peers , but has complete discretion over part of the investment portfolio, so that everyone can make independent decisions while giving full play to the synergy and complementarity between industries, enriching the investment diversity of a single product. This model usually does not emphasize certain An investment manager’s contribution is platform capability.
Yin Tianyuan, research director of Chaoyang Perpetual Fund Research Institute and Sunflower Investment FOF, said that platform-based companies have gathered the strength of multiple fund managers to make them similar to public offerings, which can provide customers with diversified products, which is conducive to the rapid growth of the company.
Xie Shiqi, a researcher of the private equity fund of Jinzhang Investment, a subsidiary of Geshang, said that from the disadvantage point of view, platform-based private equity may be affected by unreasonable equity allocation and inadequate incentive mechanism, resulting in unstable fund managers.