History

History — A Founder-Led Compounder Tested by the Cycle

Partners Group's story over the last five years is, on the surface, monotonous in the best way: assets under management climbed from USD 109 billion (2020) to a record USD 185 billion (2025), the dividend rose every single year, and the firm hit its ~60% operating-margin target in every reporting period. But underneath that smooth line sits a violent private-markets cycle — a 2021 boom, a 2022–2023 fundraising-and-performance-fee bust, and a 2024–2025 record recovery — that the management team navigated without breaking a promise it had put in writing. The narrative did drift: the firm leaned ever harder into evergreen/private-wealth vehicles, royalties, and distribution partnerships, and quietly swapped its headline margin metric from EBIT to EBITDA. And in June 2026 the very pillar it pivoted toward — semi-liquid evergreen funds — hit its first liquidity wall. Credibility here is high and improving on delivery, but a fresh, unresolved test is now live.

The arc on one screen

Source: AuM series 2018–2023 from FY2023 Annual Report key figures [3]; 2024–2025 from FY2025 Annual Report [1].

AuM never fell — not even through 2022 (USD 135.4 billion) and 2023, when industry fundraising froze [11]. That is the headline most analysts stop at. The real story is one level down, in the revenue mix, where the cycle is brutally visible.

Source: FY2021 [10], FY2023 [14], FY2024 [17] and FY2025 [2] Annual Reports. 2022 management/perf-fee split from the FY2024 results presentation; 2024 revenue derived from reported +10% growth.

Performance fees swung from CHF 1,197 million (46% of revenue) in the 2021 boom to CHF 269 million (≈14%) in 2022 — a CHF ~930 million collapse [10]. The management-fee base, by contrast, barely flinched, holding around CHF 1.6 billion throughout [14]. That is the whole investment case in one chart: a recurring, sticky fee annuity with a volatile, exit-driven kicker on top. The cycle hit the kicker, not the annuity.

Who runs it — and what they inherited

This is not a turnaround and not a new-management story. Partners Group was founded in 1996 by Alfred Gantner, Marcel Erni and Urs Wietlisbach; Gantner served as CEO from 1996 to 2005 [6]. All three founders still sit on the board as executive members, each holding roughly 1.34 million shares — deep, durable skin in the game. Steffen Meister, with the firm since 2000, was CEO from 2005–2013, then Delegate of the Board (2013–2018), and is today Executive Chairman, the role from which strategy is actually set [7].

David Layton — who joined in 2005 and ran the private-equity business before rising — assumed the sole-CEO role effective 1 July 2021, ending a co-CEO arrangement [5] [8]. The timing matters: Layton took sole command at the absolute top of the cycle — the record 2021 — and his entire tenure as sole CEO has been spent managing the descent and the rebuild, not riding a boom.

The cycle that tested the story

The clearest way to feel the arc is the firm's own investment-volume disclosure: a record USD 32 billion deployed in 2021, cut to USD 13 billion in 2023, recovering to USD 27 billion in 2025.

Source: FY2021 [9], FY2023 [12], FY2024 [15] and FY2025 [1] Annual Reports.

2021 — the peak. "An exceptional year": record USD 32 billion invested, record USD 29 billion realized, USD 25 billion raised, AuM up 17% to USD 127 billion, revenue up 86% to CHF 2,629 million and an EBIT margin of 62.8% [9] [10]. Crucially, management did not extrapolate the boom: even as performance fees hit 46% of revenue, they flagged that figure as a 40–45% one-off and explicitly reaffirmed the long-run 20–30% guide.

2023 — the trough, handled honestly. Investment volume fell to USD 13 billion and realizations to USD 12 billion. Rather than dress it up, the letter stated plainly that the firm "elected to postpone most exits originally planned for H2" because the transaction market "remained more fragile than anticipated" [13]. That is the language of management telling the truth about a miss, not spinning it. Performance fees fell to 19% of revenue (CHF 369 million) — below the 20–30% range — and they said so [13]. The margin still held at 61.3% [14], and the dividend still rose, to CHF 39.00 [12].

"We elected to postpone most exits originally planned for H2 given that the environment for transactions remained more fragile than anticipated earlier in the year."

Why it matters: in the worst year of the cycle, management named the shortfall and its cause rather than burying it — the single strongest credibility signal in the record. [13]

2024–2025 — the rebuild delivered. Investment activity rose 66% in 2024 [16], and 2025 produced a record USD 26 billion of new money (+22%), pushing AuM to USD 185 billion and performance fees back to 32% of revenue [1] [2]. The boom-bust-rebuild round-trip was completed without a single broken financial promise.

What they kept promising — and whether they delivered

Partners Group makes three durable, checkable promises every year: a fundraising range, a ~60% margin on new business, and a 20–30% performance-fee share of revenue across the cycle. Here is the scorecard.

Source: 2023 guidance — H1 2023 Interim Report [19]; 2024 — H1 2024 Interim Report [20]; 2025 — H1 2025 Interim Report [22]; 2026 — FY2025 Annual Report [24]. Actuals from the respective full-year Annual Reports.

Fundraising: three-for-three. Every post-2022 fundraising range was met — USD 18 billion against 17–22, USD 22 billion against 20–25, USD 30 billion against 26–31 (the last including a USD 4 billion underwritten contribution from the Empira acquisition) [19] [20] [22]. These were deliberately conservative ranges set after the 2022 reset — they did not over-promise into the downturn.

Margin: the most-kept promise in the file. The "~60% operating margin on new business" target has appeared in interim after interim, and the firm has cleared it every period — 61.2% (H1 2023), 62% (H1 2024), 62.7% (H1 2025), 61–64% full-year [18] [23]. Even the executive performance-fee pool is explicitly structured "to stay within its operating income target of ~60%" [25].

Performance fees: respected across the cycle. The 20–30% guide was breached on the upside in the 2021 boom (46%) and the downside in 2022–2023 (≈14% and 19%), but management never abandoned it — and the cycle average has landed back inside the range (24% in 2024, 32% in 2025) [10] [21]. Notably, in H1 2024 they guided the share would be "around 20%" — the low end — and delivered 24%; an under-promise, not an over-promise [21].

"In the mid- to long-term, we retain our guidance that performance fees will account for 20-30% of total revenues."

Why it matters: stated at the very peak (2021, performance fees at 46%), this refusal to re-base the guide upward is exactly the discipline that lets a reader trust the number through the cycle. [10]

The dividend is the quiet proof. Ten consecutive annual increases — CHF 15.00 (2016) to CHF 46.00 (2025), a +10% raise at a 95% payout — straight through the worst fundraising downturn the industry has seen in a decade.

Source: FY2025 Annual Report dividend history table [4].

Narrative drift — what they started, and stopped, saying

Same firm, same founders — but the emphasis migrated sharply. Reading the Chairman-and-CEO letters in sequence, three themes are louder every year (evergreen/private wealth, the new royalties asset class, and distribution partnerships), while the old swagger about performance-fee firepower went quiet during the bust.

Source: derived from the emphasis given each theme in the FY2021 [10], FY2023 [14], FY2024 [16] and FY2025 [1] Chairman and CEO letters.

• Evergreen / private wealth went from a supporting line to the lead engine — bespoke solutions (mandates plus evergreen) rose to 71% of AuM in 2024 and 72% of inflows in 2025 [17] [1].
• Royalties, announced as a fifth asset class for 2024 [14], went from a footnote to a recurring growth headline.
• Distribution partnerships barely registered before 2024, then exploded in 2025 — BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, PGIM and Generali joint ventures, framed as becoming "the private markets partner of choice" for big distributors [1].

The one presentational tell

Through 2023 and into H1 2024, the firm's headline profitability metric was the EBIT margin (61.3% in 2023) [14]. From the FY2024 report onward, the headline switched to the EBITDA margin (63.6%) [17]. EBITDA is a defensible metric and the underlying ~60% target was never changed — but adding back depreciation and amortization optically lifts the margin by roughly two points and lets the firm say the margin "remained stable at 63%." It is the one place where the presentation flatters; worth noting, not alarming.

The story now — and the live test

The current chapter is the most ambitious the firm has ever set. At its first Capital Markets Day since the 2006 IPO (March 2025), management committed to grow AuM to more than USD 450 billion over the next cycle — its "2033 ambition," implying a roughly USD 185 billion → USD 450 billion climb [2]. The engine for that ambition is precisely the evergreen/private-wealth and distribution-partnership build-out the letters have been amplifying. The 2026 outlook reaffirms USD 26–32 billion of gross new demand [24].

Then the engine sputtered. In June 2026, Partners Group gated its USD 8.6 billion Global Value SICAV evergreen fund, capping redemptions at 5% of NAV per quarter after withdrawal requests neared 10% — and warned that further evergreen funds could face caps. The shares fell as much as 17%, the worst single-day move since the 2006 listing, dragging Blackstone, KKR and Ares down with them [26].

This sits directly against the firm's own framing of itself as "a highly differentiated, all-weather investment firm" in the FY2025 letter [1].

"…a highly differentiated, all-weather investment firm."

Why it matters: the gating of an evergreen fund months later is the first real stress-test of the "all-weather" claim — and the cleanest example of a marketing phrase the reader should now discount until proven. [1]

What to believe, and what to discount

Source: assessed from the promise-versus-delivery record cited throughout this page.

Believe: the financial discipline. The dividend has risen for ten straight years through a brutal cycle [4]; the ~60% margin target has been met every period [18]; post-reset fundraising guidance is three-for-three [22]; and management told the truth about its 2023 miss rather than spinning it [13]. Founders remain heavily co-invested. The recurring management-fee annuity is real and resilient.

Discount: the "all-weather" branding and the size of the USD 450 billion / 2033 ambition, which is long-dated, unproven and now leaning on the one product line that just demonstrated fragility. Treat the EBITDA-margin headline as the flattering framing it is.

Credibility verdict: 8/10 — high and improving on delivery, capped by a live test. A founder-anchored compounder that does what it says on the numbers it controls, and accounts honestly when the cycle goes against it. It is not a 9 because the strategic narrative has drifted toward evergreen/private-wealth growth whose central risk — redemption liquidity — management downplayed until it materialized in June 2026. Whether this team can keep its all-weather promise through a redemption squeeze is the open question the next two reporting periods will answer. The story today is broader than it was in 2021, not simpler; the financial credibility is more proven, but the strategic credibility now carries a fresh, unhedged liability.