NEWS

Partners Group Brings Aboard New Private Equity Leader

By David G. Barry

 

Partners Group is bringing in an outsider to head its private equity unit – a unit which accounts for half of the private markets firm’s assets.


Wolf-Henning Scheider will join Partners as a partner and head of its private equity department. He is currently CEO and chairman of ZF Group, which manufactures systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, and industrial technology. It generates more than €38 billion ($38.2 billion) in annual revenue and employs more than 150,000 people. His background also includes serving as CEO and chairman of MAHLE Group and serving as a member of Robert Bosch’s management board.


Scheider succeeds David Layton, who is Partners Group’s CEO. Layton, who has been with Partners since 2005, retained leadership of the private equity department after becoming co-CEO of the firm in 2018 and sole CEO in 2021.


Partners has $127 billion in assets under management, with $63 billion of them in private equity.
The firm said that Scheider will “give particular focus” to its control private equity portfolio, which is organized around four industry verticals: goods & products, health & life, services, and technology. Within this portfolio, the firm owned more than 100 companies in 23 countries and employed over 250,000 individuals as of March 31.


In a statement, Layton said with “more than three decades of senior management experience, [Scheider] is ideally positioned to deepen the operational expertise that underlies our transformational investing efforts. In this changeable macroeconomic environment, the ability to truly transform companies will be a crucial point of differentiation in private equity.”