Phillipa Healy: Hi, I'm Phillipa Healy. And today I'm joined by Michael Lukin, Managing Partner at Roc Partners. Mike, Roc has been providing private market solutions to investors for over twenty-five years. Can you tell me over this time how the offering has evolved?
Michael Lukin: Yeah, thanks Phillipa. Roc really started kind of as a division within Macquarie Bank in the late nineties. It was really the start of Australian superannuation funds looking at alternative investments.
Macquarie saw the opportunity to build out a capability in that space. So I joined Macquarie nineteen nighty-nine really at the start of private markets investing in Australia since that time, we've really grown the business and in twenty fourteen we did a management buy-out of the business out of Macquarie to form Roc Partners.
We now manage about nine billion dollars in assets on the management, fifty-five people spread across the Asia Pacific head office in Sydney, but offices in Melbourne, Shanghai and Hong Kong as well.
Our clients are still institutional in the majority. Although we're doing more and more kind of work for high-net-worth groups, foundations, endowments, family offices and increasingly offshore as well. So US investors, Asian investors as well as our traditional Australian investors as part of our group of investors. We started off as a funds business investing in private equity funds doing secondaries, co-investments and really as the market has developed we've got more and more sophisticated strategies within our offerings. So, from a purely fund selection offering to undertaking secondaries in mature funds to offering co-investments alongside top-tier private equity firms.
We then saw an opportunity to move into agriculture as a bit of white space and something our clients really wanted us to support. So, the lack of options around agricultural investment in Australia, we really feel that white space on behalf of a lot of Australian super funds and we've grown that business now to over two billion in assets on the management. Since that time we've offered a number of other strategies more recently things like private credit again a great white space in the market here predominantly bank lending in this market versus, the US and Europe where you see non-bank lending is a big part of private equity debt supply.
And most recently we've built a direct growth equity strategy. So as private equity firms got bigger and bigger there's more and more space at the bottom of that kind of market for someone looking to deploy ten to twenty million dollars of equity into businesses looking for growth. And in particular in that space, we're looking for businesses and not only can generate financial return but also some social benefit as well, so it might be export opportunities for Australia, it might be regional development or it might be a simple as job creation in some of these some of these businesses.
So that's really the Roc story as it is today. I'm sure we'll continue to grow and develop new strategies as we see opportunities and really respond to our investor base in seeing what types of investment opportunities they're looking forward to supplement their existing portfolio.