Considered as India's one of the largest homegrown private equity firms, India Value Fund Advisors (IVFA), unveiled its new brand identity. IVFA will be now known as True North (Managers). The new brand was unveiled in Mumbai in the presence of the tennis legend Andre Agassi.
Meanwhile, True North’s identity will continue to encompass the core values that the organisation stands for i.e.; The Right Way. Since its inception, the firm has been at the forefront of building admired, enduring and socially responsible businesses across economic cycles. In 2017, as IVFA becomes True North, it has also announced realignment of its sector focus.
True North has now restructured its business and investment management teams as per sector specialisations namely financial services, consumer, healthcare and technology products and services. The firm over the years, has developed deep-rooted expertise in sectors like healthcare, consumer focused industries (like media and entertainment, radio taxi, retailing, food services) and financial services. It will now add technology products and services to its portfolio.
According to Vishal Nevatia, Managing Partner of True North, “Our brand is at the cusp of new beginnings, and we are looking forward to an exciting future ahead of us. With the renewed sector focus, we will continue to build admired businesses across the four sectors. Moreover, this transformation from IVFA to True North comes at the right time when the sector teams are ripe with the expertise and experience gained over the last 17 years, with most members having invested across 2-3 economic cycles.” “Our name has changed but our values remain intact which defines the core values and principles that have molded the functioning of our company for more than a decade,” he commented on the key developments at True North.
In recent years, True North’s deep understanding and knowledge of its key sectors have started to yield multiple benefits ranging from - becoming preferred PE partner for entrepreneurs/investors; sourcing investments; and ability to analyse, evaluate and due-diligence potential investments better.
The company is recognised for its expertise in executing control transactions in India’s mid-market, which is otherwise dominated by minority and PIPE deals. With this philosophy and business model, in the last 17 years, the firm has worked with over 30 businesses and invested over Rs 8,000 crore of equity capital. These businesses were able to grow revenues and EBITDA at 25 and 20 percent respectively, during their partnership with True North. Since inception, the firm has created 45,000 new jobs and generated Rs 12,000 crore and Rs 1,600 crore in incremental Sales and EBITDA respectively.
True North, formerly India Value Fund Advisors or IVFA was established in 1999 with a focus on investing in and transforming mid-sized profitable businesses into world-class industry leaders, built on the strong foundation of True North Values. Steered since its inception by Vishal Nevatia, True North has built deep knowledge and skills in the Indian markets and has successfully launched five separate investment funds with a combined corpus of over US$2 billion.
BW Reporters
The author is associate editor at BW Businessworld
