An innovative approach to Private Equity investing
2 PILLARS OF CERES’ DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH
1/ OPERATIONAL AND SECTOR VALUE-ADDED APPROACH
-
Operational experience: our Partners are former CEOs of SMEs with transactional experience. Having managed companies ourselves, we understand in depth the entrepreneur’s expectations and constraints.
-
Sector specific management experience: we invest if we have operational experience in a sector to be able to bring tangible value on specific topics (e.g international development, digitalization,…) based on management's needs.
-
Focus on a limited number of companies: so that we have time to assist management teams on an ad hoc basis, defined with management.
-
Engaged & International CERES INVESTORS CLUB: we aim at customizing our investors base for each investments based on sector and geographical reach to be able to bring value added based on management's needs.
==> Unlike usual LPs in PE funds, our investors are selected for their capacities to understand specific sectors and potentially bring value.
2/ PATIENT CAPITAL THANKS TO
AN EVERGREEN HOLDING
-
Our philosophy : Investors like Ceres should not impose external timing constraints to our companies. The value creation timing of our companies drive our exit. Not the other way around.
-
No timing constraints on investment decisions : “sorry, as an investment does not yield quick enough results before our exit, you shall do it with the next PE fund” vs “If it makes sense, let’s do it and postpone exit”
-
No timing constraints on Reinvestments: “sorry, we can not finance the build-up as our fund’s investment period is over” vs “Yes we can reinvest at any time (no limited investment period).”
-
No constraints on Exit timing: No defined fund life time and no need to sell an asset too early to show profitable exits to raise a new PE fund
==> We sell when it is the right time and can hold investments for 10 years
Ceres’ approach is rare in the PE world as we aim at bringing together "the best of both worlds":
-
What we have experienced while managing SMEs and
-
What we learned from the generalist PE funds who supported us