Ardian, the world's biggest secondaries buyer according to the SI 50 ranking, is moving ahead with a sizeable LP-led portfolio amid wider uncertainty spurred on by the latest tariff announcements.

The Paris-headquartered firm is looking to offload a portfolio of interests three sources told Secondaries Investor. The deal is understood to be $1 billion in size with binding bids due this week. The proccess remains ongoing. It is unclear which Ardian funds are part of the process.

Given LPs' desires to continue to commit private markets assets classes, some sellers are continuing to move forward with their processes regardless of uncertainty, a source told this week. "Whether it's a cashflow model or an allocation issue, they've got some problem that they're trying to solve," they said. If sellers had launched or were almost ready to launch, they're opting to see where pricing lands and will make a call on whether or not to progress with a sale at that stage, the source added.

Aware Super's head of private equity Jenny Newmarch said "It's hard to get a read of whether that window is drying up or not. We've not really tested the market yet, but we will do in the next few months," she also said "On Tuesday night (last week), we probably felt the market had a 90 percent chance of drying up or the bid-ask spread becoming too high. By Thursday, we probably thought.. it's changed to 70 percent."

Ardian managing director Wilfred Small said "Depending on the unfolding situation with tariffs, the reasons behind this just might be different, and more driven by the denominator effect and a slowdown in distributions, versus opportunistic portfolio management. Secondaries have an important role to play in any market," Small explained.

Other LP-led processes that are working through the market include Employees Provident Fund of Malaysia's roughly $1 billion sake, CPP Investments' process for a $1 billion-plus private equity portfolio and Nan Shan Life Insurance's process, which could result in an around $2 billlion deal.

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