Actis will on Monday announce it has raised $2.9bn for its new private equity fund to invest in companies across Africa, China, India, Latin America and south-east Asia. The move underlines how emerging market buyout groups are still able to raise cash from investors, while rivals focused on the more troubled markets of the US and Europe are finding fund-raising much tougher. The new fund cements Actis’s place as one of the world’s biggest private equity groups focused exclusively on emerging markets. It spun out four years ago from the UK’s state-owned CDC group, its biggest investor, which put $650m in the new fund. The appeal of EM economies has grown for private equity as they have proven less vulnerable to the credit crunch than the US and Europe. Buy-outs also typically use less debt in emerging markets. But Paul Fletcher, senior managing director at Actis, said his biggest worry was that banks would pull back from emerging markets.
