The private equity industry has produced another eye-watering set of figures, topping off ten years of growth.
Assets under management (AUM) rose by 20% over the course of last year to reach $3.06 trillion at the end of December 2017.
Preqin, which calculated the figure, said it was the biggest rise seen since 2000 when Preqin began tracking assets in the private equity sector, and the industry is also more than twice the size that it was a decade ago.
However, certain numbers pointed downwards, including the amount of capital that fund managers distributed to investors during 2017. Investors received $466 billon – down from the $516 billion they received in 2016.
Christopher Elvin, head of private equity products at Preqin, said: “The industry has managed to post record growth even as it returns significant levels of capital back to investors. 2017 did not quite match the record levels of distributions seen in 2016, but nonetheless approached half a trillion dollars for the year.”
He added: “Although the net flow of capital was low overall compared to recent years, this is because fund managers called up a record amount from investors – an encouraging sign given that there are concerns in some quarters about the level of available capital that managers have collected from investors but not yet deployed.”
This non-deployed money, known in the industry as “dry powder”, reached just over $1 trillion at the end of the year, a year-on-year increase of 24%.
©2018 funds europe
