CVC Sustainable Investments

Sydney, June 25, 2007 (ABN Newswire) - CVC Sustainable Investments is unique amongst Australia's ethical investment funds. The fund's environmental focus means that all investments must produce positive environmental benefits.

The fund is part of the CVC Group, whose core investment team has a 20 year performance record of delivering strong returns across a range of investment sectors.

As the need to adopt cleaner technologies gathers momentum, high-growth investment opportunities in the environmental sector are expanding. According to Portfolio Manager Christian Jensen, CVCSI is well positioned to take advantage of this growth and deliver environmental outcomes without compromising investor returns.

Christian Jensen, Portfolio Manager, CVCSI:

CVC Sustainable Investments is a private equity fund which is dedicated to environmental or what's becoming known as clean technology investing. We specialise in providing expansion capital to a mix of listed and unlisted companies that are developing products or infrastructure which reduce carbon emissions or pollution, manage resources in a more sustainable way or reduce the existing effects of environmental damage.

Each investment that we review for potential investment in the portfolio has to actually provide positive environmental benefits. So we look at each company's ability to deliver those environmental benefits.

We look at things like their ability to reduce harmful emissions and pollution, for their ability to use resources more efficiently, to reduce harmful by-products, reduce wastage. If the company that we're looking at can't actually produce positive environmental benefits then it's not suitable for the portfolio.

I think the key issue in investing in environmentally sustainable companies in Australia is not that the investors are becoming more environmentally aware, but actually the consumers are becoming more environmentally aware.

What that does it is actually drives the demand for environmentally sustainable products and infrastructure, which improves the investment opportunities that we have available to us.

We're raising additional funds to take advantage of opportunities in the market. In February of this year we deployed all the capital that we were holding that we'd raised previously.

There's a number of good opportunities out there and we'd like to take advantage of them.

What we're doing is providing expansion capital to companies. So we provide companies who are growing with the money to launch new products, enter new markets or even make synergistic acquisitions within their industry.

And what we find is that when you're making expansion capital type investments, those investments take time to mature. So the money that we put in today won't actually deliver a return until say three or five years down the track.

So what we're doing is very much patient investing and it's really important that our investors understand that they're investing for the long term.

One of the characteristics of the way that we invest at CVC is that we have a very hands-on approach. We get involved with companies at an early stage when we invest in them and we work alongside the management team to help them deliver the growth plan.

We find that if we can actively assist the companies in delivering that growth plan then the chance of generating a good return is higher.

CVC Reef is the other fund that CVC manages in the environmental space. Although there's no direct connection between CVC Sustainable Investments and CVC Reef, what we've found is that CVC Reef tends to go in at an earlier stage than CVC Sustainable Investments in terms of the investments that it's making.

So what we've found is that CVC Reef has almost become like a feeder fund for us. They tend to invest maybe two to three years before we'll come on board and it actually takes away some of the early stage and technology risk.

It also gives us as a management team a chance to get to know the company and I guess more importantly, get to know the people that are behind the company.

We believe that there are enough investment opportunities in Australia for CVC Sustainable Investments to build up a very good portfolio. Having said that, we're particularly interested in Australian companies that have the ability to take their technology or their products or their infrastructure, ideas and actually launch them globally.

We're offering investors the ability to invest in assets that are not otherwise available to them. And we're offering them the ability to do that with a manager who is recognised as a leader in the space.

We've proven our ability to generate returns by investing in this sector and we've now got a structure which enables us to invest in the best of breed companies that are in this space.