VIDEO: Stephen Pagliuca of Bain Capital

"The Bain Capital model that started out 30 years ago was built on the premise that you could take analytical consulting skills and apply that to grow and build great businesses," he said. "That applies to more than just private equity. It applies to venture capital; it applies to picking good companies for a stock portfolio; it applies to evaluating good debt opportunities."

In addition to private equity, Bain invests in public equities and venture capital, as well as offering credit and absolute returns products. However, while other global PE firms have diversified their operations in order to build up asset bases with a view to going public, Bain has no such aspirations.

"There are different reasons that PE firms go public. One of the main ones is if they have a couple of founders who need liquidity. We have a broad spread of ownership at Bain Capital and a large group of partners so there is no need for partners to get liquidity," says Pagliuca.

As a private entity, Bain is also unburdened by the bureaucracy that comes with a public listing, which allows it to move quickly when required. The private equity firm examined the possibility of an IPO in terms of whether it would present a competitive advantage. Buyout firms that opted to list cite having a pool of capital to draw upon that lies outside of their funds as advantage enough, but Bain disagrees.

"We see a great advantage of being private, staying low key, and really making the stars of our business the management teams, not us," Pagliuca adds.

Regarding private equity opportunities, he expects the current round of global funds to be 25-30% smaller than their predecessors - a function of there being less debt around post global financial crisis to oil the wheels of large leveraged buyouts. However, he is bullish on Asia, with Bain's recently raised second pan-regional fund coming at $2.3 billion, more the twice the size of its predecessor.

"We have many people in the region and, economically, Asia really is the future. [Bain's exposure to the region] is going to model GDP. Right now, China is the second-largest economy so I would expect that, as Bain Capital builds in China, it will probably become the second largest market for us, and as things roll, maybe equal to the rest of the world."

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