Shyam Maheshwari SSG voices Private credit market in India is evolving and scaling up in size

SSG Capital co-founder Shyam Maheshwari

Shyam Maheshwari SSG is a Founder and Partner at ARES SSG. He is also an Associate Member at The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and on the board of various companies. He has 17 years of experience in the deal sourcing, analysis and investing industry. According to Shyam Maheshwari SSG, flexibility is at the core of expanding private credit market in India.

Shyam Maheshwari is a Founder and Partner at ARES SSG. He is also an Associate Member at The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and on the board of various companies. Previously, Mr. Maheshwari served as a Senior Member of the Lehman Brothers Asia Special Situations Group primarily responsible for making principal investments in India, where he oversaw the efforts to build the India business and initiated pan-Asian ventures in mining and power assets with a focus on Indonesia. He has 17 years of experience in the deal sourcing, analysis and investing industry.

Global fund managers have raised nearly $300 bn of private credit capital in the past two years. The private credit market in India is evolving and needs to primarily focus on flexibility of capital structure to succeed, says the panellists at Mint’s India Investment Summit. Shyam Maheshwari SSG, one of the panellists at the summit feels that, flexibility is at the core of expanding private credit market in India.

Global funds are now interested in India, and have raised a significant amount of capital over the last couple of years, he says. The demand for Indian paper is high, and private credit is scaling up in size. Global fund managers have raised together close to $300 billion of private credit capital over the last two years. In the views of investor Shyam Maheshwari, for the resolution of India’s bad debt problem, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy (IBC) Code needs to work better.

“The start of IBC is to protect the company. The longer you take, the worse it gets. The timing is critical and timing delays are due to infrastructure, process or other impediments. We have been on both sides. We have had difficulties in putting companies into IBC. We have also bought a firm under IBC as an investor, which in itself was a long process. It was a failed bid from the previous process. Bidders walked away without any repercussions. Automatically the asset becomes tainted and deteriorated. That creates a difficult environment for both the creditor and buyer on why he is changing the bid. This is an important point that people miss. When a bidder is bidding for a company, there has to be a finite time frame," said Shyam Maheshwari SSG, partner of Ares SSG Group.

Bankers said IBC is not the only solution for the resolution of distressed cases. The slow pace of resolution under IBC has forced banks and investors to look at options outside the IBC, including one-time settlement, Shyam Maheshwari concluded.