Goldman Sachs Wins Stake in $1 Billion China Investment Deal

Goldman Sachs Group’s buy-side role in China Investment Corp.’s roughly $1 billion private-equity stake sale shows how secondaries have moved from niche liquidity work to a strategic growth lane for the firm. Goldman’s asset-management arm teamed with Ardian after CIC looked to trim its exposure to private markets, and the pricing split told the story: Ardian bought at double-digit discounts, while Goldman paid single-digit discounts, signaling how selective top buyers can be when inventory is scarce and the market is still cautious.

For Goldman’s alternatives staff, the deal is more than a one-off win. The firm says its secondaries platform has 25-plus years of experience, more than 750 closed secondary transactions, more than $80 billion effectively invested as of April 2025, and relationships with more than 1,200 private-market managers globally. That scale matters when a sovereign fund wants liquidity on complex positions, and it matters inside Goldman too, where secondaries can generate fees, deployment opportunities and internal credibility at a time when asset management is supposed to do more than sit on the sidelines.

CIC’s sale was already taking shape last year, when it was offering about $1 billion of private-equity fund stakes in the secondary market with Evercore advising. The stakes were held across funds run by eight U.S. managers, including Blackstone and Carlyle, and they were originally invested in 2016 and 2017, near the end of their cycle. Private Debt Investor said the portfolio was mostly stakes in large North American buyout funds and could be the first in a series of fund-stakes offerings, which helps explain why Goldman wanted in. This is the kind of LP-led, relationship-heavy business where scale and judgment matter more than headlines.

The broader market backdrop has made that strategy more attractive. Evercore said secondary-market transaction volume topped $100 billion in the first half of 2025, the highest half-year on record, after volume reached a record $160 billion in 2024. In a market still working through frozen allocations, rising denominator pressure and slower exits from illiquid assets, secondaries have become one of the few reliable ways to create liquidity without forcing fire sales. That is good for sellers like CIC, which said 2024 was pivotal as it advanced its 2023-2025 strategic plan and continued to optimize asset allocation and investment strategy, and it is good for buyers with capital and patience.

CIC’s 2024 annual report put its net assets at $1.37 trillion at year-end and said nearly 48.5% of assets were in alternatives, with almost 62.5% of the global portfolio externally managed. That mix helps explain why the fund is willing to keep pruning and rebalancing. For Goldman, the message is simpler: secondaries are no longer just a transaction stream. They are a platform business, a source of durable capital-light growth, and a meaningful part of the firm’s push to expand private-markets and alternatives assets to $750 billion by 2030.