FB Roundup Paetongtarn Shinawatra, Mark Bezos, Gautam Adani
Paetongtarn Shinawatra named Prime Minister of Thailand
Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of billionaire and former leader Thaksin Shinawatra, has been appointed prime minister of Thailand.
The country's youngest leader – she is 37 – she is also only the second woman to become prime minister of the Southeast Asian nation. The first was her aunt Yingluck Shinawatra who was prime minister between 2011 and 2014.
She faces a difficult time in office. First of all, she has the unenviable job of trying to revive an export-heavy economy that has stalled. Last year, the Thai economy grew only 1.9%, and analysts have trimmed their outlook for this year. The World Bank is projecting that gross domestic product will grow only 2.4%.
More to the point, it will be a challenge to hold her coalition government together. Although Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai party came second in last year's election, it made a deal with the royalist-military establishment to take power. Although they are not natural bedfellows it was a move that pushed the Move Forward party into opposition.
Paetongtarn is now the fourth member of her family to serve as the country’s prime minister. As well as her father and her aunt, her uncle Somchai Wongsawat was briefly prime minister in 2008 throughout the Global Financial Crisis.
The Thai-Hakka Shinawatra family is estimated by Forbes to be worth around $2.1 billion. It has its roots in Seng Saekhu, a trader who moved to Thailand in the 1860s.
HIPstr closes debut fund at $100 million
HIPstr, the early-stage venture arm of Mark Bezos and David Moross’ HighPost Capital, has announced the successful close of its debut fund, HIPstr Fund I with $100 million in capital commitments.
In a statement, the firm said that its investor base is comprised of some of the world’s leading institutions, endowments, family offices, and high net worth individuals.
Private equity executive David Moross and marketing leader Mark Bezos – the brother of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – launched HIPstr to focus on early-stage businesses that did not fit the investment criteria of HighPost’s more traditional buyout strategy. HIPstr’s investment team is led by chairman and chief executive Moross and includes senior managing directors Sol Goldwyn and Steven Himmel.
Moross, Bezos, Goldwyn, and Himmel serve on HIPstr’s investment committee.
To date, HIPstr has led or made Series A investments in companies that include: luxury agency Closer, Kylie Jenner's vodka soda firm Sprinter, tequila brand Wild Common, residential-fencing platform EverFence, and sport shoe retailer RAD. It also led the funding for cremation services startup After.com last month.
“We launched HIPstr to capitalise on an attractive market opportunity driven by a reset in early-stage company valuations alongside a structural shift in how entrepreneurs scale companies,” said Moross.
“With six companies already in the portfolio, we look forward to continuing to identify highly compelling opportunities for our investors and working with entrepreneurs to help them build and scale their high-growth and capital-efficient brands,” he continued.
Adani returns to markets with share sale
Gautam Adani has shaken off a challenging 2023 and returned to the markets with a blockbusting share sale to raise Rs83.7 billion ($1 billion).
Adani is chairman of the $32 billion Adani Group conglomerate which has diverse interests such as ports, airports, power generation and transmission, coal mining and green energy.
A report in January last year by US short-seller Hindenburg Research caused a more than $150 billion selloff in the conglomerate's stocks despite the company's denials of any wrongdoing. It took several months, but the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) effectively exonerated the group later in the year which stabilised its outlook.
Adani Energy Solutions (AESL), formerly known as Adani Transmission, raised the funds through a fully upsized qualified institutional placement. It is the largest deal ever in India’s power sector. The deal was marketed and priced at Rs976 per share which is a 13% discount to the closed price before the deal priced.
The company says that the deal saw overwhelming demand, receiving bids of approximately six times the base deal size from a diverse group of investors, including utility-focused US investors entering India for the first time, sovereign wealth funds, major Indian mutual funds, and insurance companies.
“India's robust investment cycle and rising power demand are positive indicators for the power sector. The strong interest from institutional investors reflects their commitment to and belief in India’s energy transition, in which AESL plays a pivotal role,” said AESL chief executive officer Kandarp Patel.
As we reported in June, Gautam Adani reclaimed his spot as Asia’s richest man, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of $111 billion.
