Partners Group (PGHN.S) FAQs on the Evergreen Business Part II

Research evidence excerpt

Partners Group (PGHN.S) FAQs on the Evergreen Business Part II

Goldman Sachs Partners Group (PGHN.S)

progression across the evergreen platform, while broader investor questions increasingly

surround unpicking the core drivers of the weakness in the evergreen platform between

cyclical vs structural problems and the impact of weaker performance levels.

What are we seeing in terms of underlying performance across the evergreen

vehicles?

Over recent years, and coinciding with the launch of products from competitors in the

US, we have seen an erosion in performance across PGHN’s flagship evergreen products

relative to their long-run averages. As detailed later in this report, we attribute a

significant component of this performance deterioration to the funds’ concentration to

the 2021 and 2022 vintage years. Given the open-ended nature of evergreen products,

every investor has a different investment return experience. This experience is a function

of (i) the product they select, (ii) their entry NAV, and (iii) their hold period.

Consequently, performance benchmarking across the product universe is an

inevitability, even between funds of different stages of maturity, albeit less

decision-useful over shorter periods of time. In this context, we have seen weaker

relative performance across both private equity and multi-asset-focused evergreen

funds for PGHN when compared to the suite of new product launches from peer firms.

Funds in this category comprise the largest portion of Partners Group’s evergreen

business by asset class (c.85% of AuM). The three largest funds (c.41% of AuM) have

underperformed respective peer funds over the past two years (see Exhibit 1 and Exhibit

2), with performance continuing to lag in 2026 to-date, with a c.-2% return over