ZURICH (Bloomberg) — Insurance companies are ripe for consolidation through private equity acquisitions, said Alfred Gantner, chairman of Partners Group, a Swiss manager of buyout and hedge funds."Insurance companies can become targets of private equity firms," Gantner said in an interview at the British-Swiss Chamber of Commerce in Zurich yesterday.

Insurers that do most of their business in one country would be attractive, he said. "There will be a catalyst, a temptation to help build continental leaders and we will probably be part of this consolidation process."

Zug, Switzerland-based Partners Group, co-founded in 1996 by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. money managers Gantner, Marcel Erni and Urs Wietlisbach, sold shares to the public last year. In March, it reported that full-year profit almost doubled to 154 million Swiss francs ($125 million). Assets under management rose 63 percent to 17.3 billion francs and revenue jumped 72 percent to 215 million francs.

"The perception of us as locusts or sharks is wrong," Gantner said of private equity firms. "Nobody should blame us for killing jobs. Private equity has a tendency to reduce jobs in the first 12 months, because they're cutting out inefficiencies, but in the long-term they create jobs."