Blueprint: Apollo’s Asia real estate equity wind-down, Partners’ big retail bet in Europe, the best of our Look Ahead 2024 coverage

Apollo’s Asia real estate equity mission over

It is the end of an era for private equity giant Apollo Global Management’s Asian real estate equity business after the departure last week of Ian Cohen, the Hong Kong-based partner who led it, according to a filing with the Hong Kong Securities & Futures Commission. His departure, one of many recent exits from the Asia real estate equity team, brings to a close a strategy that has been in place since 2010, when Apollo purchased the real estate business of investment bank Citigroup. After a stuttering start including a leadership change, the firm eventually raised two pan-regional opportunity funds – 2017’s Apollo Asia Real Estate Fund and 2021’s Apollo Asia Real Estate Fund II – collecting more than $1 billion in equity in the process. Now, with the final dollar of Fund II understood to have been deployed, the platform has been left in the hands of an asset management team with no plans for successor vehicles. Not that Apollo’s interest in Asian real estate is over – it is further understood the firm expects to be an active lender in the sector instead, according to PERE coverage.

Partners hits the shops

Who is calling the end for physical retail real estate? Certainly not Zug-based manager Partners Group, which backed a fund to buy 10 retail parks across Belgium and Portugal in the final days of 2023, according to an announcement. The assets – five in each country spanning more than 1 million square feet of retail space – were sold by European convenience real estate manager Mitiska REIM to a vehicle called First Retail Partners, which has a gross asset value of approximately €280 million and counts Partners as an investor, according to Mitiska. Axel Despriet, co-founder and managing partner at Mitiska, described the deal as further proof of institutional support for certain forms of retail property. Adding to the divestment of 25 assets in Romania, the transaction brought Mitiska’s retail exits to about €500 million in December alone, “which is testament to the resilience of the asset class,” he said.

Running up that Hill

GLP Capital Partners-backed pan-Asia private equity manager Hidden Hill Capital continues to tap into Chinese domestic capital with the final close of its second RMB fund. Hidden Hill RMB Fund II raised a total of 8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion; €1 billion) with capital from both existing and new investors including insurance companies, corporate VC firms, and fund of funds, according to a statement. Similar to Fund I, Hidden Hill will invest Fund II’s capital in growth-stage companies with a focus on modern logistics services, digital supply chains, renewable energy, and related technologies. Meanwhile, GCP has also been actively launching several RMB vehicles. In December, it closed its China Income Fund XI with 3 billion yuan of assets under management in partnership with a domestic insurer.

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