PERMIRA, a private equity firm, has held a final closing for its latest buy-out fund Permira VII (P7), reaching its hard cap with total commitments of 11 billion euros (approximately US$12 billion).

P7 will follow Permira’s long-term strategy of investing in market-leading businesses that benefit from strong and resilient underlying growth drivers. The fund will continue to deploy across Permira’s key sectors of technology, consumer, financial services, health care, industrial tech and services.

The fund was strongly supported by existing investors. In addition, a substantial number of new relationships across multiple geographies made commitments to P7. Tom Lister, co-managing partner at Permira, says, “We are pleased to have achieved such a strong fundraising and particularly to welcome new investors and geographies alongside our existing relationships.”

Kurt Björklund, co-managing partner at Permira, adds, “We are encouraged by the opportunities that our sector teams and geographic offices identify and have confidence that we can continue to build on our track record, although discipline remains paramount given the challenging environment for investing.”

In Asia-Pacific to date the firm has deployed 3.27 billion euros (approximately US$3.6 billion) across a number of investments including Arysta LifeScience (Japan), Galaxy Entertainment (Macau), Grobest (Taiwan), I-MED (Australia), Sushiro (Japan), Topcast (Hong Kong) and Tricor (Hong Kong).

Alex Emery, head of Asia at Permira, says, “We believe that there is a significant opportunity for Permira, across our 5 core sectors, to invest in high-performance companies that will benefit from our capital and expertise, to help them become both pan-regional as well as global players in their markets.”

Emery adds, “We see considerable opportunities across all types of companies, ranging from family-owned businesses who may be looking for expansion capital or helping them to address succession planning issues, through to carve-outs from major corporations and opportunities in the secondary investment market."

Fundraising for P7 commenced in January 2019. P7 has already committed to two new investments, and earlier this year Permira closed its US$1.7 billion Growth Opportunities Fund dedicated to minority equity investments in fast-growing and typically tech-enabled businesses.