Responsible investing is very important to us. We are a private equity fund investor, and so we raise capital from pension funds, insurance companies, and other sources, and we invest that into private equity. The most important thing for our investors is to have good, stable, reliable returns and outperform most of their other investments. But they also want to hear positive news. No pension fund, no insurance company wants to see any of the investments that they've been involved in in a negative way.
For us, what we try and do is we try and find the best performing managers and then we work with those managers to make sure they're fully aware of the latest news about responsible investing, about how to work with their companies in order to generate the best returns in the best possible way. I believe private equity is a very responsible investor. In fact, I would argue quite strongly that across the entire asset class, private equity is one of the most responsible kinds of investments. The reason for that is because it's one of the most active kinds of investments. It is not passive investing where you happen to buy shares in a company and watch what happens. Private equity is all about buying companies, changing them, and improving them in some way, which can be expanding into new geographies, expanding into new products, expanding into new regions.
We believe that responsible investing is very closely related to growth investing. One of the ways is the UNPRI. The UNPRI, as a United Nations Principle for Responsible Investing, now has some 700 private equity investors who have signed up. There's also the EVCA. The EVCA has created a handbook which is very detailed and very interesting and useful for private equity managers in the way that they develop their own responsible investing policies. One example is employment levels across our portfolio companies, where we did a very detailed study to look at the employment levels when a private equity firm gets involved in the company to when they sell the company. We saw that there was a drastic increase in employment across Europe for our private equity-owned companies. It was particularly pronounced in the small buyout segment, the small SME segment across the European landscape.
