A Long-Term Investor
Perceva is a Paris-based independent private equity firm, focusing on companies facing challenges: turnaround situations (financial or operating difficulties), spin-off or carve-out of larger corporations, and other special situations.
Private Equity – an Optimistic Landscape
Perceva contributes significant equity amounts each year to support French companies who have been weakened or need to address a challenge. The special situation can arise from various issues: inability to fix operational issues, improper monitoring of performance, loss of a major market, an overleveraged balance sheet, a required strategic repositioning, a separation from a large group, and so on.
Being the shareholder of a special situations company requires specific short-term management skills combined with a long-term focus. Any repositioning requires the ability to deal with periods of stress or crisis. Managing these crucial moments implies that the company and its partners benefit from careful attention, close support and adequate resources. Perceva has developed a unique 20-year experience which translates into fast and efficient decision-making, adapted to the companies’ tight deadlines. Perceva provides both resources and expertise to address short term priorities: cash monitoring and management, and restoring relationships with key stakeholder (suppliers, clients, creditors, employees). When it comes to analysing issues, and identifying solutions, time management is critical. The short-term focus is on loosening the constraints that weigh the company down, to unleash the companies’ development potential.
Perceva’s objective is to reposition companies on sound fundamentals across all functions, in order to make sure all key processes are run efficiently and each company has the best possible teams. This will require for example the reinforcement of the marketing department to better target nextgeneration products, a significant overhaul of manufacturing and logistics to bring service rate & quality to best-in-class levels, or the implementation of tailored reporting tools to better monitor the performance. The goal is to create sustainable industrial value.
Communication with management teams is frequent, through regular meetings around cash forecast or operations reporting, and also through ad hoc discussions of action plans in a projectmode approach.
Perceva currently manages two funds, totalling €350 million raised from international and French institutional investors. Portfolio companies are France-based industry leaders with strong brands, and most of them have a significant export business, as well as plants or subsidiaries abroad.
The private equity market in France has been good lately. French investors (AFIC) recently advertised high or record-high numbers for S1 2016. On Perceva’s segment, the deal flow remains steady with a mix of private companies, subsidiaries of large corporations, and troubled LBOs, providing numerous good opportunities to choose from.
A business is like a sports team – it constantly evolves. Perceva’s approach is to listen, motivate and allow a company to establish long-lasting recovery drivers. Our teams share the same values around work, personal commitment, respect towards others, integrity and courage.
In terms of the future, Perceva is actively investing its second fund, which has had a very good start with three promising deals: the carve-out of French door manufacturer Keyor (from Masonite), the carve-out of lingerie leader VFB (from Fruit of the Loom), and the takeover of the leading bedding activities of Cauval.
Company: Perceva
Name: Jean-Louis Grevet / Franck Kelif / Christophe Ambrosi
Email: jean-louis.grevet@perceva.fr / franck.kelif@perceva.fr / christophe.ambrosi@perceva.fr
Web: www.perceva.fr
Address: 32 avenue de
l’Opéra, 75002 Paris, France
Phone: +33 1 42 97 19 90
