Mubadala Investment Co., Abu Dhabi, is looking for long-term partners as it expands its allocation to Asia, its head of healthcare, direct investments, said.
The sovereign wealth fund is most active in the private equity space compared with its other asset classes and typically works with partners on opportunities globally, Mina Hamoodi said during a Sept. 19 panel discussion at the Milken Institute Asia Summit held in Singapore.
The fund is particularly active in healthcare-related opportunities, and has a group of 20 people focus on the sector and related subsectors, she said.
“On a day-to-day basis, they're looking to originate transactions across those subsectors. And so when we work with our partners, we're able to be very agile and nimble and move very quickly,” she said.
“We also have functional experts within the group, like in digital or cyber security that we look to also bring in and lean in, as we lead value creation plans across our portfolio companies. And so partnership has really been embedded in sort of the way we operate,” she added.
As the fund looks to make a big push in Asia, it is “looking to find like-minded investors who are equally committed to establishing the companies for sustainable long term growth and success, and we're looking to do this directly with them,” she said.
The sovereign wealth fund, with $302 billion in assets, previously said it planned to double exposure to Asia to 25% of its portfolio by 2030. In August, it acquired a large part of UCB Pharma’s China business alongside CBC Group for $680 million.
However, deals of such size are difficult to find, Hamoodi said. “The opportunity to deploy really large scale capital are actually more limited. So everything we're doing in the West —we're deploying tickets of $500 (million) to a billion dollars — those opportunities are few and far in between in Asia.”
“We have to do a lot more work in order to deploy the same amount of capital in Asia versus in the West. And so it just goes back to how important it is to have the right partners in each of those geographies to take on that mission jointly,” she said.
In February, the fund worked with TPG to acquire an undisclosed stake in Manipal, India’s second-largest hospital chain, from Singapore state investment company Temasek, which had a S$389 billion ($300.5 billion) portfolio as of March 31.
TPG has $229 billion in assets under management.
“Ganen (Sarvananthan) and his team from TPG have actually been fantastic partners to us, not only in Asia, but globally. So Manipal was really alongside TPG and Temasek, and we're really excited to continue to scale that business across India,” Hamoodi said.
Mubadala also has exposure to South Korean businesses particularly in medtech and is looking for opportunities in Japan even though it has not made an investment in the country yet.
“(Japan has) the world's most rapidly aging population... I think it's 30% or so of the population that are aged 65 and up, and declining (birth) rates as well. So I think that trend will only continue. So there we're spending time on anything around long term care and elderly care and remote monitoring technologies to really address some of those pain points and the rise in demand,” she said.
