South Africa’s market is better placed than most to benefit. The institutional sophistication is building, argues the writer.
Dylan Cunard
South Africa is sitting on a growing backlog of mature private equity assets that managers cannot exit and investors cannot access. The global solution already exists but we are not using it yet. Exits depend on a cooperative stock exchange, willing trade buyers, and investors patient enough to wait out a fund’s full life. In South Africa, none of those conditions are reliably available. The result is a growing backlog of mature assets, mounting pressure on fund managers and investors who cannot access the returns owed. The secondary market is changing that, and the numbers behind it are extraordinary.
Global secondary transaction volumes reportedly hit a record $162 billion in 2024 and exceeded $200bn in 2025. By mid-2025, volumes were already up 51% year-on-year. Ardian's Secondary Fund IX, the world’s largest-ever fund established to invest exclusively in private equity secondaries, closed on $30 billion last year alone, showing that this is no longer a niche corner of private markets but one of the fastest-growing areas in global finance.
The secondary market takes two main forms, either investor led or fund manager led transactions. In an investor-led transaction, an investor - such as a pension fund, that is rebalancing its portfolio - sells its fund interest to a third-party buyer before the fund reaches the end of its life. The buyer acquires a mature, de-risked asset. The seller gets liquidity.
