New Delhi, Aug. 21 -- American private equity firm TPG has struck its seventh liquidity move from its Indian portfolio since January, generating spectacular returns on its investment and taking its total harvest to nearly $700 million this year.

The alternative investment firm, which invests in India via several of its platforms including TPG Capital, the secondaries-focused TPG NewQuest, the social impact-oriented The Rise Fund and TPG Growth, has sold two-thirds of its 9.9% stake in hospital chain operator Aster DM Quality Care Ltd on the secondary market.

This comes after it made an exit move with a modest outcome and a few others with benchmark-beating returns. In the latest transaction, TPG encashed Rs 4,451 crore ($465 million). It has scored an internal rate of return (IRR) of 75% in rupee terms and 66% in dollar terms, as per VCCircle estimates.

The share sale comes soon after the PE major rolled over its stake in Quality Care India Ltd, the operator of Care Hospitals, to Aster DM as part of a merger plan first announced in November 2024.

TPG had originally picked over a 95% stake in Care Hospitals around seven years ago when it brought the healthcare portfolio of the now-defunct Middle East and North Africa-focused investment group Abraaj under its fold in a newly created avatar Evercare.

TPG's Evercare platform picked up the Care Hospitals stake for an estimated Rs 840-850 crore, VCCircle has gathered. Evercare later pumped in an additional Rs 660 crore into the hospital operator in 2022.

Evercare exited the hospital chain a year later, selling its majority stake to PE giant Blackstone and rolling over its remaining stake to another TPG fund.

Care Hospitals was valued at Rs 6,150 crore then on a post-money. Blackstone had put in around Rs 4,425 crore through a fresh issue of shares and secondary purchases from Evercare to take around a 72% stake, according to regulatory disclosures reviewed by VCCircle.

Evercare more than doubled its investment and churned out an estimated annualised return of 30% in rupee terms and a 24% IRR in dollars, much above the 20% and 15% benchmarks, respectively.

Two years ago, Aster DM inked a deal to acquire Care Hospitals. The transaction gave TPG around a 10% stake in the combined entity and Blackstone a 30.7% stake. Shares of Aster DM have risen since then. The shares touched a one-year low of Rs 519.80 apiece in early April, in line with a broader stock market decline after the US-Iran war broke out, but have bounced back almost 46% since then.

The hospital operator currently commands a market capitalization of around Rs 66,380 crore. This is almost three times Aster DM's standalone valuation at the time of the merger announcement with Care Hospitals and is also 67% higher than the combined value of the two companies.

Other exits

TPG's latest liquidity move follows its partial exits from a clutch of other healthcare portfolio companies like Manipal Hospitals, Solara Activa Pharma Sciences and Dr. Agarwal's Health Care. The PE firm topped the benchmark by a wide margin when it sold shares worth Rs 1,210 crore in eyecare chain Dr Agarwal's. It marginally beat the benchmark in its partial exit from Solara.

In January, TPG sold part of its stake in Fractal Analytics through its IPO with tepid returns. The same month, its secondaries arm NewQuest sold a small chunk of shares in Shadowfax. TPG NewQuest divested a bigger portion of its stake in Shadowfax earlier this month with high returns.

Overall, the TPG group has likely collected a total of about Rs 6,610 crore, or almost $695 million, through these seven monetisation moves, according to VCCircle estimates.

In addition, TPG's The Rise Fund plans to sell a stake in digital lender Fibe via the company's IPO. The PE firm also intended to exit SK Finance but the non-bank lender's IPO has stalled.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from VC Circle.