Doughty Hanson & Co


Doughty Hanson & Co is a British private equity fund manager focused on leveraged buyout and recapitalization transactions primarily of upper middle-market companies in Europe. The firm also invests opportunistically in European real estate and provides early-stage venture capital to technology companies.
Doughty Hanson is headquartered in London and has offices in Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris and Stockholm.
The firm which was founded in 1985 by Nigel Doughty, Chris Wallis and Richard Hanson is one of the oldest European buyout private equity firms. Since its inception, the firm has invested over €23 billion across more than 100 investments.
On 4 February 2012, Doughty was found dead in the gymnasium of his Lincolnshire home.
Then, on 10 August 2015, the firm announced the shut down of most of its European offices after abandoning its next round of funding. The offices included closed in 2015 included Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid and Stockholm. In May 2017, the firm re-branded itself to DH Private Equity Partners.

History

Doughty Hanson traces its history back to 1985 when Nigel Doughty and Richard Hanson started working together on European buyout investments within Standard Chartered Bank as founding members of its management buyout unit. In 1990 they established CWB Partners, a private equity joint venture between Standard Chartered and Westdeutsche Landesbank.
Doughty Hanson was established as an independent firm in 1995. In 1999, the group expanded its activities with the formation of a real estate investment team and the following year it established a team to focus on early-stage technology venture capital investing.

Investment strategy

Doughty Hanson's three product areas operate as separate fund families:
In June 2007 Doughty Hanson became one of the first private equity signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, which provide a framework for incorporating environmental, social and governance issues into investment decision-making and ownership practices. A year later the firm became the first private equity manager in Europe to hire a dedicated Head of Sustainability to focus on the implementation, management and monitoring of ESG issues across the Doughty Hanson portfolio.

Investment funds

Since inception, Doughty Hanson has raised over €8 billion across its five private equity funds.
The following is a summary of the investment funds raised to date by Doughty Hanson:
FundVintage
Year		Committed
Capital
Private Equity Fund I1990£167
Private Equity Fund II1995DM 1,000
Private Equity Fund III1998$2,700
Real Estate Fund I2000$616
Technology Ventures Fund I2000$237
Private Equity Fund IV2004€1,500
Real Estate Fund II2005€530
Private Equity Fund V2007€3,000

In 2007, Doughty completed fundraising for its fifth private equity fund with €3.0 billion of investor commitments. This came just two years after the firm had wrapped up a difficult fundraising for Doughty Hanson IV, in 2004 which had only generated €1.6 billion of investor commitments compared with the firm's original €3.0 billion target. Doughty Hanson III, raised in 1997 had been a €2.7 billion investment fund.

Portfolio companies

The following investments are representative of Doughty Hanson's portfolio of private companies:
Other notable investments include: TMF Group, TV3, Tumi Inc., Dunlop Standard Aerospace Group, Caudwell Group, and LM Wind Power.

Notable alumni