Actis part exits India's IDFC for $17m

The private equity firm sold about 21 million shares of IDFC in an open market transaction at INR53.15 each, a slight premium to the previous day’s closing price of INR52.75. The buyers were not identified. The sale leaves Actis with 16.3 million of the 37 million shares it held in March 2016, according to the company’s most recent annual report, about a 1% stake.

IDFC was founded in 1997 to support infrastructure development in India. It provides end-to-end financing and project implementation services and has supported more than 200 projects. The company’s alternative asset investment arm, IDFC Alternatives, is raising its fourth fund, which reached a first close of $100 million earlier this year and is expected to reach the $300 million target by the end of 2017.

In the past year IDFC has been seeking to expand the footprint of IDFC Bank, which it created in 2015 through the spin-out of its lending business. Its moves in this direction include the purchase of Grama Vidiyal Micro Finance, a non-banking finance company (NBFC) backed by Elevar Equity Advisors and MicroVest Capital Management. The bank also joined Arpwood Investment Advisors, Gaja Capital and Evolvence India Fund to invest INR1 billion in micro-finance institution and NBFC Suryoday Micro Finance.

For the year ended March 2016, the company reported revenue of INR2.3 billion, up from INR100 million the previous year. Over the same period profit grew from INR99 million to INR1.6 billion.

Actis has been an investor in IDFC since 2010, when it joined Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional to commit INR8.4 billion through an institutional placement of convertible preference shares. The firm claims to have helped the company to improve its risk management processes and to measure the benefits of renewable energy projects.

Earlier this year the GP closed its fourth emerging markets energy fund, Actis Energy 4, at the hard cap of $2.75 billion. The vehicle will seek control investments in electricity generation businesses offering scale, diversification and growth, as well as market-leading electricity distributors.

Actis plans to devote the majority of the capital to building renewable energy platforms in which the firm packages together revenue-generating energy assets that it has developed and sells them to acquirers. The GP has four such platforms worldwide, including India-based Ostro Energy.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Open market
• PIPEs
• Financials
• Infrastructure
• India
• Actis Capital
• NBFCs