Article by Ulf-Henrik Kull and Tommy Holmström
This article first appeared in Europe Buyout Review 2003
Finland poses a challenging but extremely interesting market for the private equity industry. While this is mainly due to global factors, there are also some particularly noteworthy domestic features.
During recent years, Finnish private equity firms have had to work extremely hard on their fundraising. The slowdown of the global economy has significantly reduced opportunities for traditional investors to invest in private equity funds, i.e. the domestic financial institutions. The reasons relate mainly to the general reduction in value of their investment portfolios and as the permissible proportional allocation on investments is restricted, a general slowdown effectively reduces commitments to private equity investments. However, there has been a lot of debate on the conservative investment guidelines of Finnish financial institutions and the fact that their investments do not
