Latest news with #Warburg
Japan Times
02-04-2025
- Business
- Japan Times
Warburg purchases Tokyo rental houses, plans Japan office
Warburg Pincus plans to open a Tokyo office later this year as it seeks more real estate and private equity deals in Japan, adding to the expansion of foreign investors in the market. The New York-based private equity firm, which has already been active in Japan dealmaking, said on Wednesday that it acquired a portfolio of 1,195 shared rental houses in the greater Tokyo area from Lone Star Funds. It didn't disclose the price. "Even with the declining population overall in Japan, we feel very strongly and are confident in the growth of metropolitan Tokyo,' Takashi Murata, Warburg Pincus's co-head of Asia real estate and head of Japan, said in an interview. "It also plays into the theme of inflow of foreigners into Japan.' Separately, Warburg also acquired an 18-story office building in Tokyo called Shinagawa Seaside West Tower, part of which it intends to reconstruct into lab space for a life sciences joint venture with Eastgate Group, Murata said. The moves underscore a trend of increased foreign investor activity in Japan, drawn by the weak yen, cheap financing and the return of inflation to Asia's second-largest economy. Already this year, Brookfield Asset Management has said it intends to ramp up Japan investments, and Hillhouse Investment Management took a local real estate developer private. "We're continuing to build our pipeline,' Murata said. "We're developing more relationships, we are very busy. And the team will get bigger.' The shared rental housing portfolio is operated under the brand name Tokyo Beta and has more than 16,000 rooms with an occupancy rate of around 90%, Murata said. The deal is the first major Japan acquisition under Murata, who joined Warburg last year after a 25-year career at Goldman Sachs Group. Share houses in Japan are lodgings with common kitchens and bathrooms, where tenants can rent a room for a short or flexible duration. The properties are popular with students, young professionals and newcomers to the country. Lone Star acquired the debt tied to the properties in 2022 from Suruga Bank after the regional lender was embroiled in a scandal involving loans for investments in the residences based on falsified documents. Murata said that the past issues don't affect current operations of the share houses. The properties will continue to be managed by Tosei Group, according to Warburg. Murata said he expects Warburg's real estate investments to remain centered on its broad theme of the "new economy.' The firm's Asia real estate deals have focused on rental housing, self-storage, retirement homes, logistics, labs for life science research and data centers. Japan is attractive because there are gaps between needs and investments in certain types of property, Murata said. "Japan's real estate market has a healthy pool of local core capital and also a very healthy debt market backed by strong megabanks,' he said. Warburg also intends to seek out chances to invest in late-stage startups and growth companies in Japan — and can take minority stakes in them, Murata said. "With our long history and capital formation, we are very flexible in playing through the different needs of companies.' Despite global economic risks from President Donald Trump's trade policies, as well as a path of rising interest rates in Japan, Murata sees those challenges as providing opportunities by putting pressure on Japanese corporations. "I like the noise and the uncertainty,' he said. "That also creates more opportunity for long-term investments.' Warburg first entered the Asia market in 1994 and has invested nearly $32 billion into more than 260 companies across the region.
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Warburg Pincus Partners With Hassana to Chase Saudi Arabia Deals
(Bloomberg) -- Warburg Pincus LLC and Saudi Arabia's $320 billion pension fund manager will jointly explore deals in the kingdom as the global private equity firm looks to boost its presence in the Middle East. Republican Mayor Braces for Tariffs: 'We Didn't Budget for This' How Upzoning in Cambridge Broke the YIMBY Mold NYC's Finances Are Sinking With Gauge Falling to 11-Year Low Remembering the Landscape Architect Who Embraced the City Trump Administration Plans to Eliminate Dozens of Housing Offices New York-headquartered Warburg and Hassana Investment Co. signed an agreement to explore investment opportunities that contribute to the long-term growth of Saudi Arabia, according to a statement. The two firms have had a decade-long partnership in international markets. Bloomberg News had reported in January that Warburg was planning to boost its presence in the Middle East. Get the Mideast Money newsletter, a weekly look at the intersection of wealth and power in the region. The $86 billion firm's peers like Ardian SAS, General Atlantic and CVC Capital Partners have either opened offices for deal-making in the region or boosted headcount. Warburg currently has exposure to the Middle Eastern market through Gradiant, a clean-tech water projects solutions provider and developer. Its previous investments in the region include BPO solutions provider Mercator, which it combined it with Accelya and exited in 2019, and payments firm Network International. Hassana has become an increasingly active global investor after a merger of two Saudi pension funds in 2021 helped catapult it into the ranks of the world's largest. Last year, it signed agreements with EIG Global Energy Partners LLC and Brookfield Corp. to explore backing new Middle East investment funds that the two firms are launching. It also said it would invest $1.5 billion in TPG Inc.'s climate funds. The world's largest investors in recent years have been flocking to Saudi Arabia to form partnerships with the likes of Hassana and the nearly $1 trillion Public Investment Fund as the kingdom looks to boost returns on its vast savings and attract more firms to invest in the Middle East. --With assistance from Matthew Martin. The Mysterious Billionaire Behind the World's Most Popular Vapes Rich People Are Firing a Cash Cannon at the US Economy—But at What Cost? Greenland Voters Weigh Their Election's Most Important Issue: Trump Snack Makers Are Removing Fake Colors From Processed Foods Trump's SALT Tax Promise Hinges on an Obscure Loophole ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Sign in to access your portfolio
The Guardian
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From secret societies to Selfridges: the eccentric geniuses responsible for the macabre world of tarot
There are few more appropriate venues in which to stage an exhibition about tarot than the newly refurbished galleries of the Warburg Institute. Based in Bloomsbury, London, since 1933 but founded in Hamburg at the turn of the 20th century by historian Aby Warburg – himself a pioneering modern scholar of tarot cards – its aim was the study of global cultural history and the role played by images, with particular emphasis on the relationship between the Renaissance and ancient civilisations. 'Tarot is a legacy of Italian Renaissance visual culture that spreads through time and space,' explains Bill Sherman, Warburg director, and co-curator of the exhibition Tarot: Origins & Afterlives. 'But how does something created in a mid-15th-century northern Italian courtly context, not at that point associated with divination or the occult, become such a pervasive global phenomenon?' It certainly wasn't obvious from the beginning when someone in a Milanese court added 22 new picture cards – drawing on Roman gods or classical virtues such as temperance or love which could act as an allegory for life – to a standard deck in order to enhance the complexity and fun of the game. 'It wouldn't be until the late-18th century,' says co-curator Jonathan Allen, 'that a French pastor and scholar of the occult, Antoine Court de Gébelin, came to the conclusion that what he was looking at wasn't an ordinary set of cards, but actually a concealed Egyptian religious text called the Book of Thoth.' A Parisian print seller and former seed merchant called John-Baptiste Alliette soon appropriated the theory, founded a society dedicated to its study and established himself as interpreter of the Book of Thoth before producing a new tarot deck explicitly used for fortune-telling under the reversed pen-name Etteilla. His deck, largely used by secret aristocratic magical societies, set the visual and spiritual tone in thinking and practice for the next few centuries until the early 20th century and the British occult revival. It was the various expulsions and fragmentations of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a secret society exploring magic and occult mysticism which included WB Yeats and Aleister Crowley as members – that then created the dominant decks of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Warburg exhibition includes the handpainted 1906 deck by artist and Golden Dawn member Austin Osman Spare, 'a lost relic' of British occultism that had been languishing unrecognised in the Magic Circle's museum. Also on display is the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909) designed by artist Pamela Colman Smith, which contains some of the most stylistically recognisable tarot images, as well as Lady Frieda Harris's deck created with Aleister Crowley in the 1930s and 40s. Her adoption of modernist artistic innovations places her work closer to the contemporary artists of the time as opposed to the neo-medieval romantic tarot iconography of tradition. The tradition of female artists shaping the visual grammar of tarot continues to this day. The exhibition will feature new responses to tarot including those by Suzanne Treister, 'who has taken these esoteric symbols', says Sherman, 'and used them to help us unlock today's hidden structures that can include covert, and sometimes conspiracy-friendly, areas such as systems of surveillance and control'. At a time when you can buy Dune and Hunger Games decks and get a reading in Selfridges, it is clear that tarot is alive and well. 'But rather than being wedded to its occult history,' says Allen, 'it seems to be returning to its humanist origins as a kind of serious game that allows individuals to mediate the complexity of the world around them.' He suggests part of the appeal is that it is participatory and social – although of course there are now also tarot bots. 'Tarot's more than 500-year history is disparate and full of discrete and often strange projects. But when you set them alongside each other as we've been able to do here, all sorts of connections and echoes emerge that not only help us make sense of the past, but assist in informing our perception of the present.' Tarot: Origins & Afterlives is at The Warburg Institute, London, 31 January to 30 April. The Tarot, in the form of leaves of the book of Thoth, Egypt, JB Alliette (c. 1780) Alliette/Etteilla, often described as the first person to make a living from tarot, had written several books on fortune telling with playing cards before coming across the Book of Thoth. We know this tableau contains his cards from the first deck explicitly used for fortune telling, but it does retain some mystery as it remains unclear why the images are cut to accommodate what appears to be folds. The Juggler, the High Priestess, the Emperor and Justice card from the Austin Osman Spare tarot deck (c. 1906) One of Spare's innovations was to employ images and text that bridged the boundaries between the cards. So when the deck is reconfigured, in addition to the permanent associations ascribed to specific cards, there are also new images created that can be read across the cards. Surrealist artists would later go on to explore similar ideas. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Pamela Colman Smith's The Hierophant card from Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909) Smith was a wide-ranging artist interested in synaesthesia and the relationship between music and art as well as being involved with the suffragettes. The deck, commissioned by Golden Dawn member Arthur E Waite, was advertised in the occult press and made available for the first time to a general public making it one of the most famous and popular designs. Frieda Harris's original painting of the Adjustment card for Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot, 1937-43 Harris and Crowley took several years to agree on the final version of their deck and it didn't emerge in a purchasable version until after both of their deaths. This original Harris painting was given to the Warburg Institute by Crowley's executor and is exhibited in the UK for the first time since her death in 1962. Ace of Swords card by Suzanne Treister, 2009-11 British artist Treister utilises tarot as a vehicle for probing her interests in technologies, beliefs and systems of influence and control, as well as a tool for unlocking these systems to offer some grounds for optimism by envisioning positive alternative futures. The exhibition will feature examples from an updated deck she has created to reflect conditions in 2025.
