The Wall Street Journal
Citic Capital Holdings has closed a $113 million maiden fund to invest in small to medium-sized businesses across China, coming in short of a $150 million target.
The smaller sized vehicle reflects general partners’ struggle in attracting fresh capital from limited partners as it becomes harder for them to exit portfolio companies and return cash to investors. In China, fund managers’ ability to offload investments has been seriously impeded by a frozen initial public offerings market.
There have been no domestic IPOs so far this year, which in the first quarter alone meant Chinese venture fundraising shrunk markedly. The amount of new capital raised by VC firms in the first three months of the year dropped to $442 million, compared with $1.27 billion in the same period a year earlier, data from VentureSource, which is owned by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of this newsletter, showed.