So why would an investor consider to invest in European private equity today. There is many reasons to do so. First of all times of challenges always post substantial opportunities and private equity has proven to be a very good investor in individual opportunities rather than macro economic benefits. Europe poses a very safe and secure regulatory and legal framework very opposite to some of the fastgrowing emerging market frameworks. Private equity point of view our asset class has consistently outperformed the stock market. If we take over a period of 20 years the IRRs in the private equity industry in Europe have been double the performance of that of the footsie 100 in terms of returns. Looking at the past history always at the bottom of the cycle and in particular of the cycle. This is when firms are starved for cash and there's what typically academics we call financial constraints as hard to borrow it's hard to come up with money and this is where private equity can really play an important role and because companies do not have other opportunities the investment can be made a particular advantageous terms. Our view is that Europe provides the stability of a developed economy and yet access to the growth of many of the developing economies.
One other thing that we like about Europe particularly is that it's a lessdeveloped private equity market than the United States is. There is more pacity there is a harder field in which to conduct transactions and we think that for the managers who are the most capable this does create opportunities to create real value within the their portfolios. You all have talked about growth. I think if we think about Europe not as a mature market only which has you know the largest consumption area of the world but also as an area which touches fifty percent of the world's trade flows it is clear that they are a new company innovations and developments which need financing and which actually have global potential. You have mentioned that in other territories you couldn't buy that growth and maybe as affordable prices as you can find it in Europe. I have shown in a study that the macroeconomics crises have much more of an impact on developing country than in developed country like the European ones and what I actually find this is not so much the macroeconomic condition at the moment in which the investment is made but rather the level of development of the country at that time in terms of level of interest infrastructure the development of the financial services d a competitiveness of the market. So these are all aspect in which Europe scores very well relative to other emerging markets and that seems to affect much more the success of an investment and the macro economic cycle.
Why is your bin of ative the best case in point is probably some examples that we have seen last year where we see three close to 10 billion euro exits from venture backed companies in Europe. All of these companies commercialized on very strong European innovations in the area of digital media software and IT and internationalized very successfully. Part of that success is built on our still very strong education systems in Europe on our research capabilities on the vast amount of money both corporations and governments in Europe invest in our research and development activities and the strong networks that we have built in recent years to take commercial advantages and spinoff those research activities into successful business undertakings.
Terms of innovation one of the most innovative features in Europe is the fact that the family companies in Europe have embraced private equity to globalize. You look at the singers as an example bertelsmann which is the largest media company in Europe teamed up with us in 2009 to build a digital music rights company and so we provided entrepreneur capital we provided management practices and we provided the expertise in acquiring the necessary companies and to integrate them and have now built the largest independent music rights company in the world. Europe in addition to actually funding sponsoring and developing innovation. I think it's also important to point out that the quality innovation the quality the development developed and acquired on the European market is such that it attracts many businesses abroad and internationally and this is again why we see so many of particularly in the engineering space but also in the fashion the brand industries such an attraction for foreign companies to invest in European businesses or actually have them come and develop on their own markets.
So investing in European funds doesn't necessarily equate to investing strictly in the euro. One has to remember that Europe was made up not just of eurozone countries. You've got the danish krone of the swedish krona of the norwegian krona the pound the swiss franc various Central and Eastern European currencies as well and so automatically by investing in a European fund you haven't just placed your bet on the Euro. When you invest in a European company you generally exposed to a high proportion of noneuropean revenues. To give an example again through our portfolio which covers several thousand European companies only fifty percent of the revenues or euro based about twentyfive percent is the US dollar the balance could be any other country in the world. So our view is that investing in the euro if you're trying to hedge against that exposure is a very difficult thing to do over the long wave of a private equity investment cycle but by investing into diversified pockets of currencies as well as revenue streams you achieve a virtual form of hedging which we can serve you as an investor.
In summary this is a great time to address in Europe for three reasons. First it's a large area 500 million people plus fundamentally prosperous innovative economies that are putting themselves through very important fitness programs that will result five to ten years down the road in even more prosperous economies. Only you can invest today cheaply if you look at the average and some of the others because you talked about this investment prices that you see in Europe versus the US or other geographies. We are seeing discounts of twenty to forty percent that's very attractive and we believe it's temporary. We look at this in 10 years we won't have that opportunity. And thirdly and very interestingly for the investment community Europe needs capital. There's fundamental deleveraging banks can finance the growth anymore and private equity venture capital and other sources of capital can fill that gap and importantly they can bring more than capital to the table. They can provide entrepreneurial capital which is what European companies can benefit from because they need acceleration they need internationalization and they need a linkage to a global practice that many of us have. From a venture capital perspective Europe is a very exciting place to be at the moment. We have a evolving entrepreneurial universe we have very experienced venture capitalists in the meantime that have learned their lessons in the last two cycles and we have a buyers market for investments which all together creates wonderful opportunities to invest. This is an attractive market it's a growing market it's an innovative market it's a market where people are exporting and finding growth on a global basis. Therefore we remain very very convinced and adamant that the European market is an attractive market and a market in which we will continue to invest and see very strong returns in the years to come.
