Dear IPEM friends,

We are more enthusiastic than ever about Private Equity and a great IPEM edition. Since this summer, the Covid situation has evolved and is becoming more difficult to navigate for all of us. However, in these unprecedented times, we believe it is important to be very transparent and to stay as agile as possible! Therefore, we want to share with you some of the positions we are taking and some important updates:

• As of today (Oct. 7^th), IPEM 2021 will take place on Feb. 2/3/4 in Cannes as planned!
• We have secured back-up dates for July 6/7/8 2021– these dates have been booked and communicated to all our clients since March. Please save these dates just in case; we may have to postpone the event to ensure a successful physical event, as is IPEM tradition…
• IPEM will be a physical event in 2021 or our clients and partners will be refunded 100%. Let us spell it out: we would never transfer your booking from a high quality in-person event to another digital conference / webinar. We stick to our promise to keep the integrity of IPEM’s concept. We also want to offer you the best possible event – and would never downgrade something that we have worked so hard to build…. your trust. Our terms and conditions were updated accordingly in March 2020 to offer you flexible refund options. Feel free to reach out for more information about this.
• We are obviously monitoring the situation very closely – and are aware that it has not headed in the right direction lately.
  Some thoughts (as of Oct. 5^th):
  • If held today, IPEM could be organized without restriction and in the safest conditions. Professional events have been allowed in France since Sept. 1^st (up to 5,000 delegates; we are targeting 3,200 this year). Le Palais des Festivals and all our local suppliers did also a great job to adapt their level of service to this “new normal” and implemented new health / safety guidelines. You could not imagine a better and safer venue to reconnect – Cannes and le Palais are airy (thanks to the Mediterranean Sea!), spacy (18,000+ sqm) and… always beautiful!
  • We are more worried about travel restrictions than about anything else! IPEM is 90% European + 10% RoW. We need a safe and clearly regulated travel environment, especially for our numerous international delegates. This is currently not the case in France – quarantines and red-zones classifications are back in force this Autumn.
  • We believe (and hope!) that some progress will be made in the coming months, running up to February. There is good reason to believe that testing and case tracing will be more efficient, and that border controls will be better coordinated soon.
• The situation should be clearer (for better or worse) in November and we commit to communicating with our IPEM friends and community as early as we can. Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any question in the meantime!
• Finally, we are happy (and proud!) to share with you this week our IPEM 2021 pre-program, our list of confirmed speakers and of participating companies. To date, registrations are up +40% compared to last year. We already have 460 companies / 160 GPs / 190 LPs and 175 meeting booths confirmed! This is an amazing accomplishment.
• We want to thank all of you for being so supportive and to say how amazed we are every day by your energy, resilience, and grit. It is an honor to serve this industry!
• Please feel free to reach out to the team (contact@ipem-market.com) to share with us your feedback, views or ideas about this!

Stay tuned! All the best,

Antoine COLSON and the IPEM team
#welovePE #weloveIPEM