It's always good to start with, you know, what we stand for. And the key words here is being a partner, entrepreneurs, family, this notion of patient capital and this notion of the value add we can bring to help them grow. This is stuff we've exchanged before on and that you know quite well. If I go to what Sofina is and the investment case around Sofina, it's a combination of virtues. For a long time, being able to take the time, being able to be patient, being able to build partnerships across all the ecosystems and dynamism, which is focused on growth.
They should focus on value creation. This translates into a diversified strategy and with diversification, what I mean is going after the greatest virtue of diversification, and that is risk reduction. So four sectors. They're very broad, and what we're looking at is indeed thematics inside these sectors which have wind in the sails, but the sectors of focus allow us to build expertise, to build knowledge. We have complementary investment styles, and the idea there is to cover all the stages of a business life cycle, from idea to an idea in a garage, becoming a legendary business and every step in between.
We have three regions that cover the lion's share of world GDP around the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and providing there, again, a level of diversification. We believe that geographical exposure is the one unmitigable risk that we have in the portfolio, and therefore, we cover the three regions. And, another element of the strategy is a growing focus on [crosstalk].
This meeting is being recorded.
Considerations with the ambition to move from being a risk mitigator into an [crosstalk].
This meeting is no longer being recorded.
Be a driving force in the business going forward, and it actually is going to be. It is.
Is that we see in the world with you. Yeah, so, so you don't want to be doing stupid stuff, but at the same time, a firm conviction that there's going to be a lot of value to be created when businesses innovate and find profitable ways to address these issues. So the combination of doing well and doing good. And this is covered with our different investment styles, with the private funds pillar, looking essentially at the earlier stage and through, again, partnership, building relationships across time and covering from idea to growth stage, and then our direct investment style covering the later stages from Sofina Growth to all the way to our long-term minority investment. Again, that hasn't changed.
And what I see happening in the market, what I see the evolution is indeed vis-à-vis this, the market changes every day, but the fundamentals, for me, don't change. And the fundamental ways in which Sofina can play upon evolutions in the world to continue making and creating value, my conviction is that we're still very, very well positioned. Even if, as any business, we will have to adapt to the changing circumstances. If then, you know, the broad view, if I then focus on the highlights of the first half year, conviction that our foundations and our ability to invest across the cycle are helping us well.
In terms of performance, what we see is the underlying businesses, and we have a good view there on the direct portfolio, which is a little more than half of the business, are creating growth and therefore value. There is a slide with giving some more quantitative data around that. What we also see is that there is a growing field and a growing opportunity set of creating synergies across the group. A lot of that plays around ESG, actually.
The fact that we're very focused on that is allowing us to help our businesses, the businesses in our portfolio, which are confronted, whether it's from what the stakeholders say or for instance, from arrival of new regulations, to make sense of it all and making sense, embedding it in their own strategy. What it translates into is that the NAV globally has stabilized versus the end of last year. We're down a small percent, which you know is it is what it is, but compared to the double digits.
Yeah, exactly.
There are ongoing market adjustments in the sense that what we see is if you look at different sectors, if you look at different regions, if you look at different businesses in that place and how, where they are in the cycle, the sentiment there can be quite different. So you have things where we think the message of the impact of high interest rates on the valuation hasn't sort of trickled down yet. And then you have cases where it's very, very difficult to get funding, therefore, big impact on valuation. If you make the sum of all of that, plus the evolution of the public market, that's where you arrive to a level of stability.
So this is still ongoing, and that's where if I look at investment, our activity is much lower than what it has been in the past, both on the exit and on the new investment side. It is what it is. We again, we're playing the long game, so we're not particularly worried about putting capital to work at a high pace across time. We don't have the pressure that maybe some private equity players have of, you know, they're counting their fees, and their fees are saying, "Well, you should do something with it because we're paying, you know, we're paying you to actually invest."
We, o ur mission is to invest our capital in the best possible way at every moment in the cycle. It translates into a low level of activity, but it's not Sofina- specific, because if I look at what's happening on the private fund side, we also see that vis-à-vis earlier years, there's much less fundraise activity, there is much less capital calls and capital distributions are much lower. It does mean, however, and that's the advantage of having a flexible model, that we spend more time with our portfolio companies, and the fact that financial investors in many conditions a little bit on the sideline, it actually creates an opening for companies to move into consolidation of their sector.
So we see that in a number of sectors, we have companies starting to, s ome sectors which were very dispersed are starting to consolidate. An example would be, for instance, SellerX, which is in the [crosstalk].
This meeting is being recorded.
With one of their competitors in the space. We refinanced the balance sheet and created one of the, or maybe the leader in industry. That is going on, and we were very active in making that transaction happen. All the while keeping disciplined and selective. Again, we don't feel pressure. You know, we look to create performance across the cycle for the long term, which means in terms of new investment, it has been much lower than what it was in the past, and so be it.
If I look then in terms of numbers, what it translates into, you see NAV going from EUR 9.3 million to EUR 9.2 million, and then you have the value and the asset value per share. And the cash position going a little bit down. We're still in the net cash position, but it's EUR 200 million rather than EUR 300 million, but with comfortable liquidity on the portfolio, EUR 800 million on the balance sheet, plus our available credit lines, we've increased that by EUR 200 million to go to EUR 1.1 billion. These are undrawn at the moment of closing, and our residual commitments on the PE program are at EUR 1.3 billion.
That's the view of managing the liquidity risk in the business by having cash on the balance sheet, available credit lines, comfortably, in a comfortable position vis-à-vis our commitments. It is unlikely that all distributions and exit possibilities would stop and all capital calls would be executed in inventories . It's unlikely, it's impossible, but it does mean that to be able to operate, we need that financial flexibility, and that's exactly what the figures are showing, that we're keeping that one going. If I look at the next slide, evolution of NAV. And again, that was the comment of that we made last year, an acceleration of NAV around the years 2020, 2021.
Some of it was having been given back, when in the correction last year. But all in all, a reasonably smooth curve in line with the long-term growth, that we try to, you know, that we stand for, and that is our objective. However, looking at the share price is a different story, with a great volatility and an acceleration of the volatility of the, of the discount slash, slash premium, something we unfortunately, do not control. So at semester's end, discount stood at 31%. Further to our newsletter, there's been a little rally in the, or small rally in the stock. Only, you know, around 210, it's still good 10-ish%. So discount now, if you should make the calculation, is at 25%.
Our performance, what we see is, versus our benchmark index, there has been some recovery in the market, driven essentially by the FAANGs. So the 11% is I think for more than 50%. Don't quote me on the numbers, but it's order of magnitude by Facebook and Amazon. So their recovery, whereas our NAV is still down year-on-year, - 5%. So there was also a big correction actually in the second half of last year. If we look at our longer periods, actually, we are more in line with our benchmark. Direct portfolio value creation, 3%.
So much lower if you compare that to last year, lower levels of divestments and investments, and a small, well, market impact. Forex was helpful last year, less helpful this year. It's part of it. And next, that's the slide. So Slide 9, the one which I think is interesting and we're trying to track to share with you also on portfolio level, how things are going. The evolution of listed, that's the market impact on unlisted companies. There's not much to say about that, but if we look at the unlisted, we try to separate the evolution of valuation according to a number of dimensions. One of them is the multiples impact.
So companies are valued at multiples of EBITDA, multiples of sales, multiples of ARR, depending on the valuation method. And we look at then we take comparables when we do the valuation, and we see how the comparables public market comparables evolved. And that gives the multiples impact. What we see is that the multiples impact, which was extremely negative last year, which was the big driver of the value correction in NAV, is actually turning positive. Then we look at the performance impact. So we look at how the businesses are doing, we look at the growth, depending, again, on the metric that we use, the growth of sale, growth of EBITDA, and so on, and we see how that has happened. So this is, t his captures the value impact of the company's underlying growth.
What we see is that one is positive. I remind you, it was also positive last year, but to an extent not sufficient to counterbalance the very, very negative multiple impact. Then we have other impacts, which is, for instance, if the company's debt position has changed, so we need to obviously correct the equity value for that. It's also in the valuation methods, vis-à-vis the comparable, sometimes we take a discount or a premium depending on the growth factors, et cetera. That one can change. So it's neither a market impact nor an underlying performance impact, but it's more a how do we judge the company, and that one is negative. And then bringing both together.
I spent a little bit of time for this slide, but it's something we want to keep tracking, to be able to have this, well, this vision on the underlying portfolio, how it is creating growth and value. If I look at sector distribution, after that, we see that sector balance hasn't changed a whole lot, keeping reasonably balanced between our two big sectors, which is consumer retail and digital, and then with smaller exposures to healthcare and education. There is an investment activity story behind that, selling and buying, and also valuation story. We don't have target allocations for the different sectors. It depends. We always chase the best opportunity. And then the balance between listed and unlisted is stable vis-à-vis previous period.
On the private funds, as you can see, much lower level, of course, and distribution. Our net investment on the period, but vis-à-vis the whole program, what we're looking at is EUR 30 million on EUR 4 billion. So this notion that the programs give or take, and with some volatility across the period, but is actually self-financed, it's justified here with a value adjustment negative. My intuition there is that because of the reporting timeframe of the funds, there is somewhat of a lag. We are as a quoted company, we have to be much quicker on the ball to translate into the published NAV all the evolutions we see in the market.
On the private funds business, there is more of a lag on how deep they go in the numbers of all their companies and so on. And this is probably a reflection on that. But again, a small variation. And then Forex, a lot of our private funds is in dollars, and so euro strengthening. Breakdown of the portfolio strategies hasn't changed, and geographies also not. The U.S. takes the lion's share. It's normal, it's the deepest market, deepest and most liquid market in the world for private investment, and therefore it's in the U.S. Next slide. Then the top 10. In terms of direct investments, ByteDance is still in position number one.
Groupe Petit Forestier is number 2. So few evolutions except, and preempting questions here, Byju's being driving drops from the top 10, because of our valuation exercise, taking into account the news flow, taking into account the sort of the ongoing governance issues. Governance in the sense of the ability of the company's institutional plumbing, as it were, and ability to react to business challenges is something that we've, you know, been vocal about it. It's not where it should be, and we are engaging the company together with other shareholders to try to raise.
Councillor Johnston is now joining.
Then in private funds, you know, Sequoia remains the largest partnership. We have as one of the oldest ones in the book, and we've had the good fortune. In all its ventures in the U.S., China, and India, and the rest, known names in the business and people we've been working with for a long time. Key events, so new investment, few and small investment in Too Good To Go, together with GLEIF, a small investment, and that's really getting our foot in the door with Mistral.
So Mistral is a European-led large language model, open sourced, trying to harness the power of open source to be able to create a more transparent and probably qualitatively better large language model. It's a very early venture, so, you know, a small investment, high risk, high return, but one way to, to, you know, to keep learning about the space. And then reinforcements in a number of our portfolio companies, including Biobest, which is one of the examples of companies consolidating their space. And then some exits, some liquidity generation from our investment in Petit Forestier. Petit Forestier, an investment we did in 2007. And so we had the opportunity to do a little bit of liquidity there.
Then a full exit that has been announced, but it was closed in the meantime with Biotech Dental. A partial exit of our investment in Aohua. Aohua is an endoscopy business based in China, which was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2021. Actually, we had a very long lockup, and we've been starting to sell down that position since. The company's doing quite well since then. And so it was a small but possible investment, and we had the occasion to do a little bit of secondary on Lenskart, which is an optician's business in India, doing very, very well. A little bit of liquidity. On the private funds, the comparable list last year was a slide so busy you could hardly see the white.
If you remember, this is an example that yes, activity is lower on the market. Very old partnerships in the TA Associates raising a fund. TA is one of the oldest names in private equity, and in our books, we've been involved with them since the seventies. They raised a fund. It was a very successful raise. So there is a flight to quality also going on in private equity, and then following other businesses of our other partners.
And at the same time, creating room for new managers, where we're looking for people who are very hard to access and where it was difficult in the past, and in these conditions, maybe it's easier, and I think Khosla is one of those examples. But also diversifying sort of the focus of the business and Volition Capital is maybe a good example of that. Volition is a manager based in Boston, with the focus on what they call bootstrap companies. So usually software businesses, but these are companies which have reached a, you know, a significant level of sales without ever using asset money. So that's why they call it bootstrap.
And where Volition would typically be the first institutional investor, and really then to help them consolidate their space, and accelerate the growth. Again, hard to access manager because the opportunities in that space are few between, but they have a very good name, and we have the opportunity to be investors with that examples. And a little bit the principles, the numbers, the stories at your disposal for questions?