LPeC (Listed Private Capital) Part 1: featuring NB Private Equity Partners, CapMan, Gimv NV

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to the first pass of ELPEC's showcase event exploring the listed private capital opportunity. We've got three very interesting companies presenting today: London-listed NB Private Equity Partners, Helsinki-listed Capman, and Brussels-listed Gimv, proving immediately that listed private capital comes in many different varieties. At this point I'm going to do a quick plug for part two, which is next Monday the 12th, when we'll be joined by three more and different companies. If you haven't registered for part two yet, please do so. I'm chief executive of ELPEC, the international group for listed private capital companies, and I get to start things off with a brief general look at listed private capital. We have got a mixed audience today. Many of you may be new to listed private capital, so what I'm going to cover is some context: what listed private capital is and why it should matter to investors. Those of you who know all this already, please bear with me just for a few minutes. So what is it? Listed private capital involves closed-end funds that then invest in private assets. That's putting it simply. They put together carefully constructed and diversified collections of stakes in these attractive assets. The funds themselves then list on public stock exchanges, and this means you can buy and sell shares in them as you would in any other company. Listed private capital comes in different forms, which is actually what makes it interesting, as investors can choose according to their preferences. Put simply, and it isn't entirely simple, there are first of all funds that are the single manager, known as direct funds, and there are also those that invest with multiple managers, described as funds of funds. Direct funds invest directly in the underlying businesses, as their name would suggest, and funds of funds take stakes in a number of unlisted private equity funds, which in turn invest in the underlying companies. Just to make it a bit more complicated, there are also some hybrids, investing mainly in other unlisted funds but with a portion of direct investment too. The fund managers make these investments either when the funds are launched, which is primary investment, or by taking on investment commitments as businesses in the fund require new capital, known as secondary investment. Others have parcels of loans or specialize entirely in the credit field or in turnarounds. Funds can also have a sector or geographical specialization, and we'll hear a lot more about that today, or they invest at different stages. So venture capital funds, for example, invest in early-stage emerging businesses, while buyout funds look at more mature businesses. So that's what listed private equity is. But why should it actually matter to investors? Well, for a start, in the 10 years to the end of 2019, listed private equity outperformed global public markets by more than a third, and that's allowing for dividend income and for fees. So it matters because of performance, but also because public markets are providing less and less investor choice. The number of companies listed on public markets has roughly halved since the peak in the late 90s, and today private capital is funding companies that have never seen a stock exchange and in many cases never will. Fewer companies and assets are coming to public markets at any point at all, or if they are, most of their growth is happening well before they get there. Public markets are often simply unsuitable for many sectors. Private capital is better for their needs. It's more flexible, it has a long-term outlook, it can provide them with a reliable planned sequence of funding for longer-term growth strategies, so they can build value and create more sustainable businesses, contributing to a more sustainable society. And it's particularly relevant in our Covid, post-Covid world: private capital has been providing a vital lifeline, funding assets with capital that might be hard to find elsewhere. The upshot of all of this is that there are now entire specialist sub-sectors, technology enablement such as edutech or other smart industries or health and care, that are simply not widely available on many public markets. In fact, many national stock markets arguably now have sector skews that no longer provide investors adequate diversification. In summary, listed private capital offers access to performance, exciting investment strategies, to companies, assets, and often whole sectors that are simply not available on public markets. Investors get diversification, and particularly in the case of companies those in a relatively high phase of growth. And listed private capital means that investors of all sizes get to invest, not just big institutions, pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and so on. Listing funds on public markets democratizes access, and it means smaller investors aren't excluded from these interesting opportunities. So now to talk about what this means in practice, we have three of the leaders in the sector. First up is NB Private Equity Partners, Paul Baggett.

Paul, great, thank you very much Deborah. I appreciate the introduction. So I'm Paul Baggett, Managing Director with Neuberger Berman. And if we turn to the first slide, I'll start by introducing the manager of NBPE, which is Neuberger Berman. Neuberger Berman is a global privately owned investment manager which manages about $380 billion of assets across equities, fixed income, and private markets. And as you can see, we have $70 billion under management in private markets. We've been investing for 30 years in private equity. We have about 150 investment professionals across 10 offices. Over the last three years on average, we committed about $13 billion to the private equity asset class. So all of this means we're very well known within what we do within private equity, which will become very important as I explain the strategy that we have within the fund. Second point I wanted to make is, as part of a larger investment manager, we do get to benefit from the resources and the scale that the platform provides to us. And one of those is ESG. You see on the right, Neuberger Berman itself has centralized ESG resources and personnel, and within the private equity group we also have specialized personnel focused on ESG. And as you can see, this resulted in us receiving an A-plus top score from the PRI assessment for ESG, both for private equity and for the firm as a whole. Secondly, not shown on the page, but NBPE itself has a responsible and sustainable investment policy which was issued by the board in 2020. So you have the manager very focused on ESG and integrated into our due diligence and investment processes, but you also have the fund itself on the board making that statement of how important ESG is to us. So moving on to NBPE on the next slide, the company itself, as Deborah says, is listed on the London Stock Exchange and we've been listed since 2007. We have about $1.2 billion of net asset value invested in private equity. And you can see that our strategy is direct investments in high-quality companies. We're focused on co-investments, which I'll explain in just a second. We have a very selective and responsible investment approach. And at the bottom, you can see a very strong track record of returns. We're showing the last five years here, looking at portfolio IRRs, which was 18% over that time period, but I'll get into more details on that. One other point to make, this should really be a fifth bullet here, as we also pay a dividend twice a year. That dividend is set to be 3% of our NAV, which because we do trade on a discount at the moment obviously translates into a higher yield than 3% based on the share price.

On the next page, we talk a little bit more about co-investments. So let me start by explaining what a co-investment is. Deborah explained there are direct funds and there are funds of funds. Our approach actually in a way is somewhere in between the two, although we are a direct investor. A co-investment is an investment made alongside a lead private equity fund directly into the equity of individual companies. Those opportunities come about because there are occasions where a private equity fund wants to make an investment into a company but it can't write all of the equity from its own fund. For example, in a mid-market investment, there might be $200 million of equity needed to complete a transaction, and if the fund can only do $100 from its fund, then it will need to find an additional $100 from somewhere. It has the choice of either going out and bringing in another private equity fund and sharing control in that deal, or going out and looking for other partners for that extra $100 million who will invest alongside them but will allow them to ultimately control the company. And that's what a co-investment is. There are a number of advantages that we believe come from that. First of all, selectivity. We can pick the investments ourselves. We typically see somewhere between 300 to 400 opportunities for co-investments offered to Neuberger Berman in an average year, and we typically select on the platform somewhere between 10 to 15% of those investments, so we can be very selective and look for particular themes and obviously high-quality companies to invest in. We can also control our own pace of investing. Because we're a direct fund, we can start and stop investing whenever we choose. That's obviously a little bit different to a fund of funds which would commit to an underlying private equity fund or a group of them, and those funds themselves will call capital when they need it. Once you've made that commitment, you don't control the timing of those capital outflows. With a direct strategy like co-investing, we do control the pacing, so we can invest when we want to, we can also choose to stop investing if there's a particular need to do that. There's also fee efficiency. The benefit of co-investing is that in return for the lead fund getting control of the company and running the company, co-investors typically pay no management fee or carried interest. That's certainly the case for us in the vast majority of the co-investments we have, which makes it a very fee-efficient strategy.

And then finally diversification. We come to the logos on the page. One of the ways we can diversify the portfolio is by general partner. These are the lead funds that we've invested alongside over the last three years. There are 31 different sponsors we've invested alongside in 43 investments. You'll recognize some of the logos like KKR, BC Partners, but there's also a lot of other logos you may not recognize because they're mid-market funds or because they're industry specialists. To take one that perhaps you will recognize within technology, you see Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake, Francisco Partners, all leading software and tech investors that we've co-invested alongside in one or more investments over the last three years. So we believe you get the benefit of diversification by general partner while also accessing these investments typically with no management fee or carried interest. Now to go on to the results on the next page, this is an overview of our direct equity portfolio. If we start on the right, we have $1.3 billion of direct equity investments in the portfolio. That represents about 89% of the portfolio as a whole, and we have 89 investments. Obviously the average is about 1% of the total portfolio within our direct equity investments, which we think is a good level of diversification. The biggest investment is almost 6% of the portfolio fair value, and the top 20 investments make up about 50% of the fair value. So we think we've got a good level of diversification such that we do have the protection that diversification is intended to provide, but equally if one investment does perform particularly well, they're big enough to really drive overall results for the fund. So we think that diversification is in a good place, which again is somewhere between what you might see in some direct funds and funds of funds. Then in the results on the left, at the top you can see the direct equity investments have produced very good performance over one, three, five, and ten years. Because that's almost 90% of the portfolio now, obviously that's driving the overall returns of the portfolio. We'll come to returns in a bit more detail in a couple of slides. One more thing on diversification on the next slide. We are, as you can see on the left, weighted to North America. We also have a meaningful exposure to Europe though. So we think North America is an attractive market, the deepest private equity market in the world, but we are global in nature and do consider investments from Europe and rest of world. In terms of industry on the right, we're well diversified by industry as you can see, with tech, media and telecom, industrials, consumer as the largest exposures. Importantly, within those industries we look for two key themes. One is companies which have long-term secular growth drivers. The other is companies or industries where we think there is less cyclicality expected in a particular business model or industry. Both of those are designed to allow us to produce hopefully stable returns while driving upside through other levers within the investment strategies of the company. Very quickly to give you two examples. If you take consumer, which is a sector that you probably don't think of as either non-cyclical or maybe not even with secular growth drivers, two example companies in our portfolio are PetSmart / Chewy. The Chewy part of that business is an online retailer of pet supplies in the US. Obviously online retail itself has had a long-term secular growth driver and we expect that to continue. That would be an example within consumer of a secular growth driver. Then there's a company called Action, which you may know, obviously 3i is the lead investor in that particular company, but it's a discount non-food retailer and it tends to be relatively less cyclical on a same-store sales basis while driving growth overall through rolling out new stores. Both of those are examples within the consumer sector. Finally, it's not a pie chart on the page, we're also well diversified by vintage. Typically we've seen good realizations, so most of the companies in the portfolio have been in the portfolio for less than five years, but we're well diversified across 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 in terms of investments. The average holding period within the portfolio at the moment is 3.4 years.

Moving on to liquidity. So far this year we've had 10 full or partial exits announced in addition to an IPO of one of the largest companies in the portfolio. You see the 10 logos on this page, and at the bottom are some statistics. These 10 full or partial realizations are expected, when completed, to produce a total multiple on the capital we invested into those companies of 3.5 times our money. That represents a $160 million estimated NAV gain versus where we held those companies as of the end of December in our financial statements, and that's an 88% uplift, which is above our historical average. Not necessarily something we would expect to continue, but it does show you that so far this year we've had a very good set of results from realizations. A little bit more on returns on the next slide. There are three bars on each of these charts which look at year-to-date, one year, three year, and five years. There's NAV total return shown in dollars and in sterling, and then the share price to the right is shown only in sterling. We are listed in both sterling and dollars on the LSE though. You can see that so far year-to-date we've got a 15% NAV total return in dollars. The share price return is about 18%. Over one year the numbers are higher, obviously that has a slightly lower starting point in May of 2020, but you can see over three years, five years, results have been very good across NAV total return and share price. So we're very proud of the returns that we have been creating. But one thing to point out in the bottom right is that we are trading still on a 24% discount. That is something which we are hoping, with the results that we've been producing, if we can continue to do this, our goal is to narrow that discount over time. Many private equity funds that are listed do trade on discounts, but of course that doesn't mean you have to be satisfied with that. We are working on a number of initiatives to try to narrow that over time, but at the moment it is a 24% discount to the net asset value. Finally, in summary, we believe we have a differentiated strategy. As I mentioned, we can be selective with picking the individual co-investments with an extra layer of due diligence from our 150 investment professionals. We can be dynamic with the pacing of our deployments of capital, and we believe we are a fee-efficient strategy with that single layer of fees on the vast majority of investments. Performance has been good year-to-date, one year, three year, five years, and a lot of realizations already announced this year. I will also note that because our portfolio has an average holding period of 3.4 years and we are still seeing a very strong private equity market, we are hopeful that we can continue to produce realizations, maybe not at the pace that we saw in the first six months, but hopefully we can keep doing that. Equally, we are still making new investments. We've made $50 million worth of new investments across five companies so far this year. We're seeing very strong deal flow, but we're also being relatively cautious about picking our spots carefully because the market is of course very competitive at the moment. So we're being cautious about the pace and the opportunities we pick, but we do expect to continue to deploy capital as the year goes on. With that, a very quick run through of NBPE. I'll hand over to Linda, and we'll be back for questions at the end. So thank you.

Thank you so much, Paul. And good afternoon from me from an uncharacteristically warm and sunny Helsinki. My name is Linda Tiarella and I'm Director of Investor Relations and Communications at Capman. I'm very happy to see that so many of you here are interested in hearing about Capman, which probably for most of you is a quite new acquaintance on the listed private capital scene. In this presentation, I hope to provide you with a short overview of our company and our business model and earnings logic, as well as present some key trends and developments in our portfolio. I surely hope that this will pick your interest and that you will be inclined to follow Capman's developments in the future. Capman was founded in 1989 as one of the first private equity companies in the Nordics. We have been active in this market for over 30 years and we have a presence in all the Nordic capitals except in Iceland. So we have offices in Helsinki, which is our headquarters, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, as well as in London and Luxembourg. At the moment, our portfolio consists of 110 companies and real estate assets as well. We cover the full spectrum of private capital, from private equity to real estate and infrastructure. We have approximately 250 limited partners as investors in our funds. These limited partners are what we refer to as our main customers. Most of them are Nordic institutional investors since this is our home market, so Nordic pension funds and insurance companies, but an increasing number of capital is actually coming from large international investors from the US, continental Europe, UK, and Asia. Our assets under management are almost 4 billion euros, which is an all-time high for Capman. Capman was listed on Nasdaq Helsinki in 2001 and our market cap is around 450 million euros. Investing in Capman is a liquid way of accessing a diversified portfolio of unlisted companies, real estate, and infrastructure in the Nordics. I'll now briefly present Capman's business model and earning streams, as it differs a bit from the listed direct fund model that Deborah described in the beginning of this seminar. Capman is a private assets manager which means that we manage mostly closed-end funds that invest in private assets according to various different strategies. These funds are organized as limited partnerships and they're not directly owned by Capman. Rather, we act as the fund manager and we receive management fees from the funds as well as carried interest. In addition, we have a service business that offers private equity related services to another set of customers. But what makes this model so special is really the fee component of both the management company business and the service business, since this fee component is highly predictable as the funds typically have 10-year terms. The initial fund size as well as the acquisition value of the underlying portfolio determine the magnitude of the future management fees over the lifetime of the fund. Then in addition, carried interest is determined based on the success of the fund and is paid to us as fund managers when the fund has repaid the invested capital back to its limited partners in addition to a hurdle rate. In addition to the management company business and the service business, we also invest from our own balance sheet. These investments are mostly done in our own funds alongside our limited partners, so in that sense we as a fund manager also have our own skin in the game by investing our own capital in the funds. This provides returns from realized investments and fair value changes for the investors in Capman stock.

So Capman is a multi-product house, which means that our portfolio is extremely diversified in terms of both sectors and types of assets. We have three distinctive investment areas: those are real estate, infrastructure, and private equity. Further, these investment areas are divided into several investment strategies. For example, our real estate business invests in both value-added real estate and income-focused real estate across the Nordic countries, and we have one of the largest real estate-focused investment teams in the Nordics. We also manage the largest hotels fund in the Nordic countries. The infrastructure investment area is our newest investment area, with one fund under management and two mandates. The team is based in Helsinki and Stockholm and they invest mostly in energy, transportation, and telecom infrastructure. On the private equity side, we cover the full spectrum except very early venture capital. On the private equity side, our growth team makes minority investments in Nordic rapid-growth companies with proven business models, so we don't take any technology risk for example. The buyout team takes majority stakes in Nordic companies. The special situations, which is our newest private equity strategy, invests in business turnarounds and restructurings. The Capman credit team provides private debt financing for Nordic buyouts. All in all, the private equity investments that we do do not have an industry focus but rather all teams seek interesting growth stories and niche market leaders across sectors. We see that this is a good way to diversify the portfolio and make sure that we have exposure to a lot of different interesting growth sectors. In total, the funds that we manage have a significant impact on the underlying Nordic economies. For example, the combined area of our real estate assets is more than one million square meters, and we house more than 3,000 tenants. The close to 40 portfolio companies in our funds under management have a combined turnover of two and a half billion euros and employ more than 15,000 employees. These figures of course change as we make additional investments and exits from the current portfolio. We've already made quite a few this year. This graph is just to show you an overview of how these assets under management in Capman's funds are distributed. The majority of our funds are in real estate, that's about two and a half billion euros. In private equity funds, we have approximately 1 billion euros under management. Infrastructure, which is the newest area, we have approximately 400 million euros under management, but we expect that figure to grow quite rapidly. So in total, we manage close to 4 billion euros. The development of Capman's assets under management is a very important indicator of our future earnings potential, since it's the assets under management that determine the magnitude of the management fees and also determine what the carried interest potential will be. Our assets under management have increased significantly over the past 20 years. If we look at what the situation was in turn of the last millennium, we had exclusively buyout funds under management, but we started expanding our operations quite quickly after we went public in 2001. We raised larger buyout funds and then we also launched the first real estate funds already in 2005. The financial crisis hit us quite hard, so we went through several years of stagnation, but since 2016, Capman's assets under management have been firmly back on the growth track, with new investment strategies and new funds launched every year. We also now have a strong pipeline of successor funds for our existing strategies and new initiatives to continue this trend. As you may recall, in addition to just managing funds, Capman also invests directly from our own balance sheet. We do this to firmly align our interests with those of our limited partner investors, but also to provide an additional earnings boost. The fair values of our private asset investments are currently at approximately 130 million euros. This allocation of these investments has developed in a more diversified direction in the past 10 years, as you can see from this graph pictured here. We used to be quite heavily invested in buyout, which is quite natural since that's where Capman's story started back at the end of the 80s. But today we have a much more even distribution of our own balance sheet, and the exposure of new investment strategies is seen also in our own balance sheet investments. The allocation of undrawn commitments, which is the bar on the right-hand side of the slide, is approximately 100 million euros. These undrawn commitments further demonstrate how this allocation of our balance sheets is likely to develop going forward. As you can see, we have undrawn commitments across the different strategies, with commitments to the most newly established funds showing an increased weight.

Last but not least, since this is something that's very important not just for Capman as a company but also for the development of the value creation of our portfolio, sustainability has always been an integral part of Capman's operations, just starting from our values, one of which is active ownership. We have in the last few years developed a rigorous ESG framework for all of our funds, where we look at relevant new and sustainable development goals and follow select KPIs to measure how we meet these goals. The SDGs that we work with are gender equality and decision making, measured by the gender distribution of management groups and boards of our portfolio companies. The second goal is decent work and economic growth, which we measure by the growth in jobs in our portfolio companies. The third is climate action, measured in absolute emissions and emissions efficiency. The last sustainable development goal that we follow actively is one related to strong governance, measured by the implementation of anti-bribery and corruption protocols in all of our portfolio companies and assets, as well as the establishment of reporting frameworks. In addition to these four SDGs that are crucial for all of Capman's funds and the group as a whole, each individual investment may have additional KPIs that they look to and measure. Here on this slide are some results from our most recent ESG overview. There's been a slight increase in the share of women of our buyout portfolio company management groups. There's a quite strong growth of jobs in our growth fund, plus 17%. And a significant reduction in CO2 emissions in our largest portfolio company. That is one of our infrastructure assets, a ferry company called NORD. The reason I'm bringing this up is that this one single investment accounts for almost 45% of all CO2 emissions in the portfolio, so that's why it's quite significant that we have been able to reduce emissions by 23% in this asset just through last year. Capman is a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment, we've been since 2012, and have done quite well in the latest assessment. We achieved an A-plus score for all investment areas that we report for the PRI. That said, we are still only in the beginning of this journey. But by helping our portfolio companies set relevant goals and targets, we think we can achieve significant results also on an aggregate level and make a real difference. With that, I would just like to let you know that Capman publishes our half-year results on 5th of August, and that presentation will be webcast. You'll find additional details on our website closer to the event. I would like to thank you for your attention and I really hope that you have gained a bit more insight into Capman and what private equity in the Nordics looks like. Look forward to answering any questions that you may have after all the presentations have been concluded. Now I'm happy to hand over to Kristof who will be the next presenter. Thank you.

Many thanks Kristoff. And we've got a question for Paul. You've seen strong NAV growth last year and year to date. Can you say a little bit more about what has been driving performance, particularly in the context of COVID and post-COVID?

Thank you for that question. So realizations, you'll see, so far this year have been a key driver of those returns, and that was in the slide that we showed. I'm looking at our 2021 results so far, and those realizations have been across 10 companies plus an IPO, and all different kinds of realizations, some full, some partial, some to private equity, some strategics. So I would say this year that the driver has been really having those 10 companies, you know, an attractive portfolio of investments which are the type of investments that both strategics and private equity are looking for. So that has been the biggest part. The second piece of course is private equity valuations are ultimately usually based on public comparables with a discount applied to them, and so there's not a one-to-one correlation of this, but as public markets go up, providing of course that your underlying portfolio is performing well, then typically you will also see private equity valuations increase over time, and that has been the case also within the portfolio. And I think it's definitely critical to point out that underlying those increases in valuation, in MVP's portfolio you've seen both revenue and EBITDA growth of about six percent of the last time we actually published this was as of year end, but during 2020, the average even revenue growth of our portfolio was about six percent for each, and so it's really a combination of all those things: valuations, performance of the companies, and the companies are doing well, and then the exits we've had have driven that growth.

Great, thank you very much. And just one more question while you're there. With the share price where it is at the moment, what is the dividend yield?

So we set the dividend, the board sets the dividend as three percent of NAV. Now, when we did that last, we paid the February, the last dividend in February. NAV has increased since then, so I think the yield is just a little over three percent on share price at the moment because NAV has increased. But of course, we'll see that the next dividend is paid in August. The board has not yet made a statement about it, but the policy is at least three percent of NAV, and of course with the 24% discount, that would mean the share price yield is higher than three percent, and you know, somewhat meaningful with that 24% discount.

Great, thank you. And for Linda, can you provide more information on the real estate investments, which sectors you're invested in such as commercial offices etc., and how have these been affected by COVID?

Sure, absolutely. So we invest across actually all the different sectors. So on the value-add side, we invest in offices, in retail spaces, and here mostly sort of high street retail, so not really shopping centers or that sort of properties. And then on the income side, we invest in hotels and in residential real estate. So we do see the whole spectrum of real estate investments, and we especially focus on growth centers in the Nordic regions, so that's mainly the capital regions but then also selectively other cities where we see strong demographics backing up the demand for these real estate sectors. And COVID has had an impact on our real estate portfolio, and in some instances, the real estate investments have been quite a defensive play in this market. So quite obviously, the hotel real estate has been affected, and it was quite early on, but they are, as owners of the actual real estate assets and not the hotel operations, we've been able to work together with the hotel operators with which we have really long leases, and just to work out ways for them to be able to continue with their operations and get back on track as we've all foreseen that even though this situation is difficult now, it will not last forever, and we have good assets and really good tenants and a very long-term view in terms of these assets. But at the same time, we see still quite strong demand especially on the residential side, so there's been a demand surge there. And then at the same time, on the office side, even though there's been a lot of discussions about how we will continue working in a post-COVID world and whether the home office will take over the actual physical office, there's still quite a lot of demand for high quality attractive spaces, and there's actually a push to in a sense also upgrade office facilities. So we do see quite interesting demand in the types of assets that our value-add real estate funds invest in.

Great, thank you very much. And we've got a question for Kristoff. Read the six levers and exits to value added. Can you say how important each has been over say five years, and do you see it changing going forward?

Thank you. And this is a question for all of you, so perhaps we start with Paul. Why is there a discount to NAV, and are listed PE funds better in performance than normal PE closed funds?

So the discounts in that question is a great one. And I think if you look across the market, as I mentioned, the vast majority have some level of discount, and within that obviously there's a range as well. And I think there's lots of things I could speculate as to being the reason in terms of people's understanding of portfolios and relative weighting of the factors that go into valuation. But the one thing I'll say is if you look at private equity markets, then within the actual private part of those markets, secondary investments in private equity funds typically occur at relatively small discounts between limited partners, and sometimes even actually at NAV and occasionally even above that. And so if you look at the institutional investors participating in secondaries, there typically is a very small discount. But in the public listed markets that we're talking about today, and those discounts range up to 20, 30% and sometimes even a little bit more. And I think it's really just people looking at the portfolios and whether the right information is there and the understanding of the portfolios, and of course ultimately to buy, the difference between the buyers and the sellers in terms of numbers and whether there is enough demand for the assets. So really I think my answer is that looking at the list of private equity funds, in most cases they have very high quality assets within them, and institutional investors typically transact at higher prices for private equity assets. The listed markets tend to be different though. And I'll see if Linda or Christoph have any other points to add to that.

Christophe, would you like to go next?

Thank you. And are listed PE funds better in performance than normal PE closed funds?

Thank you, Kristoff. And Linda, what's your view on the discount to NAV and whether listed PE funds are better in performance than normal PE closed funds?

So our business model or earnings model is quite different from a lot of the other private capital funds. So as a private capital fund manager, we have a small balance sheet of over 130 million that we invest directly into our funds, and then if you compare that to your market cap of 450 million, we trade at a huge premium, but that just reflects that the majority of the earnings potential comes from the actual management fees and uncarried interest potential from managing those funds. So I think there's quite a lot of good points brought up by both Christoph and Paul here regarding what the reason for the discount is. I mean, there might be that there is also a slight portfolio discount applied for these types of assets in general. But then at the same time, I think the one way to counter it is to offer a predictable dividend, and that's also something that we at Catena want to do. So that's an important part of the reasons why invest in Catena, or what we want to offer investors. So to be able to offer a predictable and growing dividend, which we've done now for seven years in a row. And then when it comes to whether the performance for listed private equities is better compared to non-listed, as Christoph said, I also like the data to be able to confidently state whether that's the case. But I think there might be something said about the other disclosure that is required for listed funds and that additional information that's available publicly, and that transparency might then add to, in a sense, somehow translate to better performance. But I mean, for us as a multi-product house, we see a range of performance also for our own funds, so we have top quartile performers and then we occasionally also have teams that don't perform that well, and then as a consequence, there are no subsequent fundraisers for those teams. So I think there's plenty of different types of performance for all models.

Well, one thing I maybe just add is obviously with limited partner funds in private equity, they're typically 10-year lives where you're locked up for 10 years as an institutional investor, whereas all of us have listed funds which are evergreen in nature, so we reinvest the proceeds. So the model and the comparison to an LP fund is much harder in that sense because they're a given private equity fund will raise a series of 10-year funds, whereas all of us have evergreen vehicles where we reinvest proceeds, obviously in all of our cases also pay some of those proceeds out as dividends. But there's a difference there. And the other point I would just add for MBPs is, although there is a discount, obviously the share price return has been very good over different periods because the discount unfortunately has been there for a long time. So I would say looking at the share price returns is also important when thinking about discounts.

Thank you. And listed private capital generally has a long-term time horizon. So for each of you, what makes you excited for the future? Perhaps start with Christoph.

Thank you. And Linda, what makes you excited for the future?

Well, I think the especially the way that the private equity model can be applied to a lot of different sectors. So we've seen that sort of come into play in real estate, and I think infrastructure is sort of the next place where this will happen. So I think that's going to be a very interesting space going forward when there's quite a lot of investments that need to be being made on a government level and where private capital can be of help. So I think that's a very interesting space to be in at the moment. And then also, as Christoph said, I think the areas into impact investing and sustainable investments as such will become really mainstream, especially when there are improved ways of measuring the actual impact of these investments. And it's not going to be a question of whether one has to choose between good returns and making impactful investments, but to actually be able to see that these two things go hand in hand. So I think that's going to be another very interesting area.

Thank you. And Paul, at MB Private Equity, what do you see as exciting about the future, particularly with a longer term time horizon?

Yeah, I mean, first of all, we've got a portfolio that's 116% invested, so we're in a favorable position of having companies that are performing well. We've held for on average almost three and a half years, which puts us in a good position, and having those companies doing well and the potential for future exits. But really with regard to broader private equity, obviously as we get realizations, we ultimately need to reinvest, and through the co-investments we look at, we see as I mentioned three to four hundred investments a year alongside high quality private equity funds, and so we're getting a really good view into what's going on in the market. And although prices have increased in recent years just as they have in most asset classes, I think we're really continuing to see differentiated investment plans, value-add coming from private equity sponsors that can continue to create good returns in the private equity asset class in general. And so I'd say, you know, a lot's written about the amount of money and the level of competition in private equity, and I think that's very true. But I'd say what excites me is that as more money is coming in, as funds are having to pay more on entry, we're seeing a constantly increasing level of involvement and action plans, and it's through a number of the things Kristoff mentioned like M&A, really making companies better, diversifying companies, growing companies, and I think we're seeing really good plans for that in many of the investments we're looking at. So we think there's still a really exciting opportunity for the medium and long term in private equity.

Many thanks, Paul, and Linda, and Kristoff for great presentations.