Industry Performance

The Performance Measurement Survey looks at funds which invest in businesses at all stages of the growth lifecycle – from venture capital funds specialising in start-ups to large buyout funds investing in global corporations. The survey captures the performance of UK managed funds, including independent funds, venture capital investments and management buyouts, representing most of the UK private equity and venture capital industry, making the dataset and analysis rich and robust.

Our full Performance Measurement Survey Report takes an in depth look at the data, presenting performance by vintage year, fund type and fund focus. We also publish a short highlights paper and accompanying data tables in excel for those who love the detail.

We are pleased to be able to contribute to the wealth of data evidencing the positive performance of UK private capital through this long running study.

The third edition of the PME report from the BVCA applies two Public Market Equivalent (PME) methodologies to present a comparison of the relative performance of private capital funds managed by BVCA members against the public equity market, as represented by the FTSE All-Share Total Return index and by the MSCI Europe Total Return index.

• Collectively, private equity and venture capital funds managed by its members have outperformed the stock market as represented by the FTSE All-Share and the MSCI Europe, the most comparable indices for the range of small, medium and large investments held by UK private equity and venture capital funds, each vintage year since 2001.
• Since 2001, investors into private equity and venture capital funds have collectively earned a pooled return of 14.7% per annum. These annual returns are equivalent to investors nearly doubling their money, getting a 1.84x pooled return on capital invested, including the value of unrealised investments as at 31 December 2022.
• A Public Market Equivalent (PME) analysis compares these private capital returns to equivalent investments in a public index. BVCA analysis using two different PME measures shows that the returns generated for investors by funds managed by BVCA members have been better than those of equivalent investments in the FTSE All-Share index and MSCI Europe index every year since 2001.

View the full report