(Bloomberg) — Italy’s appeal for international investors in private markets is growing, according to Blackstone Inc.’s country Chairman Andrea Valeri.
Traditionally a laggard in luring foreign capital, the nation is attracting more investors drawn to its stable regulatory climate and the ingenuity of its entrepreneurs.
Increasing regulatory certainty has “improved the perception of people like us that are bringing foreign direct investments into the country,” Valeri said at the Bloomberg’s Future of Finance conference in Milan on Thursday.
What “institutional investors like us are really focused on is regulatory stability,” said Valeri, who’s also chief investment officer for Blackstone Credit and Insurance’s private credit business in Europe and APAC. “Italy in this regard has been on a very steady growth trajectory.”
While banks remain dominant, Italian companies are now opening up to non-bank lenders, with private credit funds often partnering up with domestic banks to deploy capital.
Private-Public Partnerships
Italy was slightly behind in private credit, said Cecile Mayer-Levi, head of private debt activity at Tikehau Capital SCA, but partnerships with banks are well established.
“We have a constant balance with the banks, which really we consider our partners and not only our binary competitors,” she said. “It’s much more of a convergence between the two solutions.”
The country has historically presented some hurdles to private credit lenders, as domestic regulation requires funds to finance deals as bonds rather than loans, a cumbersome procedure. But Italy is catching up with other European private credit markets, with funds putting more efforts into sourcing domestic deals, partially because competition for deals has toughened elsewhere in Europe.
Private equity is also an area of growth, with KKR & Co. recently closing a €22 billion deal ($24.6 billion) for the acquisition of a majority stake in Telecom Italia SpA’s Netco.
“It’s a great country to invest here because there are a lot of very good companies and the market here is not as competitive as other markets,” according to Giampiero Mazza, head of Italy at CVC Capital Partners, a private equity firm. “You can create your own ideas.”
–With assistance from Francesca Veronesi.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
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Publish date : 2024-10-04 13:06:26
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