Gridiron Capital Tops Newly Launched HEC Paris – DowJones Private Equity Ranking of MidMarket Buyouts

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Launched today, the HEC Paris - DowJones MidMarket Buyout Performance Ranking analyses the firms which generated the best performance for investors participating in the Mid-Market segment

The first HEC Paris – DowJones MidMarket Buyout Performance Ranking is a follow – up study to the already established, and informative HEC - DowJones Large Buyout Private Equity Performance Ranking which lists the world’s large Top Private Equity (PE) firms in terms of aggregate performance.

In this new ranking, HEC Paris Professor Oliver Gottschalg, the study’s main author, wanted to address the lack of attention given to companies and investors targeting MidMarket firms which, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, are businesses with pre-tax earnings between $5 million and $250 million. The ranking lists Private Equity firms who cumulatively raised between 1-3B USD over a decade in terms of aggregate performance based on all their buyout funds raised between 2008 and 2017.

The companies which topped this first edition of the ranking are Gridiron Capital, Novacap and Parthenon Capital.

To obtain a most accurate picture of PE and their investments, the authors drew from a variety of available databases and performed a number of cross-checks of the information using preqin PE fund performance database as the primary database for fund performance information, and information directly provided by PE Firms to HEC Paris for the purpose of these rankings.

In total, HEC Paris Professor Oliver Gottschalg analyzed performance data from 517 PE firms and the 991 funds they raised between 2008 and 2017 with an aggregate equity volume of $1.5tr.

The MidMarket Buyout Ranking

Rank	Firm	Performance Score
1	Gridiron Capital	3.77
2	Novacap	2.68
3	Parthenon Capital	1.87
4	Oaktree Capital Management	1.45
5	Water Street Healthcare Partners	1.42
6	The Sterling Group	1.30
7	Sentinel Capital Partners	1.16
8	Linden	1.13
9	JLL Partners	1.12
10	Altaris	0.97
11	BV Investment Partners	0.82
12	Arsenal Capital Partners	0.79
13	CBPE Capital	0.75
14	Quadrant Private Equity	0.67
15	Quad-C	0.63
16	Egeria	0.62
17	Cortec Group	0.60
18	Wind Point Partners	0.57
19	Ridgemont Equity Partners	0.56
20	Seidler Equity Partners	0.53

According to Prof. Gottschalg, “mid-market buyouts are a particularly interesting area of Private Equity, but investors typically have (even) less visibility into who the best performing fund managers are than in the larger buyout space. This new ranking addresses this problem and puts a spotlight on those players who generated the strongest returns over a decade of fund vintages.”

Sponsored by advisory firm PERACS GmbH (now part of MJHudson), Prof. Oliver Gottschalg has developed a proprietary methodology that makes it possible to comprehensively assess the aggregate performance of all funds managed by a Private Equity Firm. The basis for this assessment is the performance of each fund, measured in terms of three complementary performance measures: IRR, DPI (cash-only return multiple) and TVPI (a return multiple that considers accounting values of ongoing investments). Prof. Gottschalg assesses performance in each measure both as absolute values and measured against the corresponding performance benchmark, leading to 2*3=6 performance indicators.