KKR's Joe Bae elevated to senior leadership role

Bae will share his duties with Scott Nuttall, who was most recently responsible for KKR's credit, capital markets, and hedge funds business as well as its distribution activities. They will assume management of the day-to-day operations of KKR, although Kravis and Roberts continue to lead the firm as co-chairmen and co-CEOs.

Having returned to the US in 2015 for family reasons, Bae retained his position as managing partner of KKR Asia and subsequently took on the global infrastructure and energy real asset portfolio. Under the new leadership structure, he will focus on the firm's global private equity businesses as well as its real asset platforms across energy, infrastructure, and real estate private equity.

Nuttall will also concentrate on areas in which he has already been operating, specifically corporate and real estate credit, capital markets, and hedge funds. He will also take responsibility for capital raising, and the firm's corporate development, balance sheet, and strategic growth initiatives.

"Today's announcement is about the future and ensuring we have the right team and leadership structure to serve our clients and partners for decades to come," Kravis and Roberts said in a joint statement. They paid tribute to Bae and Nuttall as business leaders "with proven track records of managing large teams, building new businesses and driving value for our fund investors and our public unitholders."

Bae, who joined KKR in 1996, started fact-finding missions to Asia in 2004 and formally launched operations the following year. "The growth dynamics were clear. Across our global portfolio companies, there were already about 40 manufacturing facilities on the ground here," he told AVCJ in a 2012 interview. "The question was how do you take advantage of that opportunity as a PE investor and build a sustainable franchise?"

KKR now has approximately 135 executives based in seven offices across the region, and its business stretches beyond private equity into areas such as credit, energy, real estate and capital markets. In private equity alone, the firm had invested more than $12 billion in approximately 55 companies across 10 countries as of June.

KKR closed its debut Asia private equity fund at $4 billion in 2008, and this was followed by a $1 billion China growth fund in 2010. Three years later, the firm raised $6 billion for its second pan-regional fund. In early June, it announced a final close on KKR Asian Fund III at the hard cap of $9.3 billion. The fund is the largest pool of PE capital ever raised for deployment on a pan-Asian basis.

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