Going public with private equity

How are infrastructure funds doing? Venkatachari Jagannathan has a frank talk with IDFC-PE''s Luis Miranda.

Luis MirandaFive years after the IDFC Asset Management Company set up shop, its private equity fund, IDFC-PE, is ready to take off.

IDFC-PE, a wholly owned subsidiary of Infrastructure Development Finance Company Limited, has raised two ten year funds- India Development Fund (corpus Rs840 crore) and IDFC Private Equity Fund II (Rs1990 crore).

Third line - IDFC-PE manages two funds. While the first fund was raised from domestic institutional investors, overseas institutional investors have contributed 75 per cent of the corpus of the second fund.

Today, IDFC-PE is one of the most active funds in the domestic infrastructure sector. "We have split infrastructure into seven buckets — power, oil and gas, telecom, urban infrastructure, rural infrastructure, transport and social infrastructure," says president and CEO Luis Miranda.

While none of its investments have turned bad, there are whispers that the internal rate of return (IRR) in respect of some of its investments is just around 40 per cent. But a tight-lipped Miranda says only that, "I am not at liberty to comment on the percentage you mentioned. The returns depend on being in the right place at the right time, with the right amount of money. We do hope to get as high returns as possible for our investors."