Hello everyone, and welcome to the 2023 NB Private Equity Partners Capital Markets Day. I'm Peter von Lehe, Head of Investment Solutions and Strategy for NB Private Markets. The market environment today looks very different than it did just a few years ago. We are pleased to report, however, that the operating performance of NBPE's portfolio is showing real resilience, which you will learn more about today. We have an interesting agenda planned, with the goal of giving you, the shareholders and prospective shareholders of NBPE, insights into our strategy, performance, current portfolio, and prospects for the future. We'll start with a few words from our chairman, William Maltby. After that, my partner, David Stonberg, Deputy Head of NB Private Markets, will give you an overview of our private equity platform and our co-investment business in particular.
Jennifer Signori, Head of Private Markets, ESG, and Impact, will discuss how we incorporate ESG into our investment approach. I will discuss market trends we are seeing today and how we expect those trends will affect private equity performance. Paul Daggett will provide an update on NBPE's performance, portfolio, liquidity, and value drivers. We'll also hear presentations from two private equity managers who are the lead investors in some of NBPE's important portfolio companies, NB Renaissance and AEA. We will conclude with closing remarks from our chairman before opening up to questions from all of you. I'd now like to introduce the chairman of NBPE, Mr. William Maltby.
Thank you, Peter, and welcome everyone. Despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop, our private performing portfolio is performing really well. It's up 3.8% year to date, and this has led to a NAV total return of 4.3% over the last 12 months and 1.8% year to date. Our share price total return is 10.5% over the last 12 months, and 3.6% year to date. Our primary means of returning capital to shareholders remains the dividend, and we held the dividend at $0.94 per share. In addition, we also bought back five million shares at a weighted average discount of 31.8%. Most encouragingly, the performance of our underlying portfolio companies remains really strong, with revenue and EBITDA growth over the last 12 months of about 15%.
We've also announced about $127 million of realizations in the first nine months, and this compares to $143 million over the whole of last year. The exits of these companies were achieved at an average exit multiple of 2.2x. I will now hand over to David Stonberg, of our manager, who will go through the NB platform.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. I'm David Stonberg, Deputy Head of Neuberger Berman Alternatives Advisors, and Co-Head of our Co-Investment business. I will be joined today by Jennifer Signori, Head of Private Markets, ESG, and Impact, to provide an update on the Neuberger Berman private markets platform. Over the last year, we continued to grow and build our private market capabilities. We are one of the world's largest and most active private markets investors. We now manage total commitments of over $120 billion across primary, co-investment, secondary, direct credit, and specialty strategies. And in 2022, we executed on over $14 billion in private markets investments. For us, investing is a team sport, and all of our private market teams seek to assist each other in augmenting deal flow and evaluating and executing on new investments.
The breadth and depth of our private markets business and relationships provides us with a robust pipeline of high-quality deal flow, a treasure trove of information and data, broad resources, and strong execution capabilities. We believe this gives us distinct advantages in sourcing, evaluating, and executing on the highly attractive private markets investments for all of you. We are proud that we have been recognized in the industry, winning awards for our investment results, service, and innovation. Of course, to accomplish all of this, you need a large, experienced, and disciplined team. We have continued to grow and invest in our team, adding over 45 people to the team over the last 12 months. Currently, we have 300+ dedicated private markets professionals across Europe, North America, and Asia. Teams are led by senior members averaging 21 years of experience.
Our team is very stable, and turnover is close to zero. I'm proud of how rapidly this team has met the challenges brought by the current market conditions. In addition to the new hires, we also continue to strengthen the team through our focus on developing and retaining talent. We are proud of the leading co-investment platform we have built in Neuberger Berman and believe we are in an excellent position to continue to deliver for you on co-investments. We have significant industry scale and experience, having deployed over $18 billion in 387 co-investment transactions since our establishment as an independent firm. Even though overall M&A and financing activity has decreased significantly, the strength of our relationships have continued to provide our investment teams with excellent deal flow.
You can see on the page here that our co-investment deal flow has more than tripled in the past eight years, reaching a record high of 11+ new deals sourced per week in 2023. Importantly, our primary investing business is very healthy and growing. On average, we have committed $3.8 billion on a primary basis to private funds in the past three years. Through our primary and secondary funds businesses, we have active investments in over 700 funds and have strong entrenched relationships with those managers, sitting on over 360 LPACs. Our platform is GP-centric across primary fund investing, secondaries, co-investing, and private credit. We've become a serial or preferred partner to many lead sponsors and with a large, seasoned, and very stable investment team, our team's professional networks also contribute meaningfully to the origination of deal flow.
Given these factors, we feel very good about our market position and deal flow sourcing engine for co-investments. While we think the current market and macro environment warrants cautions, as all markets do, we remain constructive and positive on the long-term outlook for private markets. With tighter debt markets and more expensive costs of capital, new deals require more equity to get done. Fundraising has been harder, and sponsors are no longer deploying their funds as quickly. Hence, sponsors are looking to stretch their fund's capital by more conservatively sizing deals and working with co-investors. Equity syndications in this market can be less reliable, and GPs are less willing to rely on post-deal syndications, preferring to work with a few co-underwriters upfront who can bridge the gap, including professional investors like ourselves. Then there have been real market shifts in the co-investment marketplace.
Many investors are capital-constrained and impacted by poor portfolio allocation issues. This leaves much more room for those professional co-investors with dedicated pools of capital for co-investing, like Neuberger Berman, and hence, we believe we have gained meaningful market share. This may change eventually, but for now, for those of us who are active and professional co-investors, the deal flow environment has been attractive. Finally, this is also a welcome environment for midlife deals. We have proactively been approaching lead sponsors to offer liquidity solutions to their portfolio companies. We continue to execute on what we believe to be the most compelling investment opportunities in the current market, and the key priorities in our approach to investing are, one, to continue to broaden the sourcing funnel, so we have a growing pipeline of potential opportunities to choose from. Two, maintain discipline and high levels of selectivity.
Historically, we have only invested in less than 15% of the investment opportunities sourced each year. Currently, this hovers closer to around 8%. We partner with many of the best, most experienced firms out there in their core areas of expertise. We look to target quality assets in good industries with industry leadership, limited cyclicality, more protected business models with high barriers to entry, pricing power, and revenue resiliency. We look to invest thematically behind key long-term secular growth trends. We look for opportunities where there is an active, hands-on, execution-driven value creation plan for the underlying company, being driven by the lead sponsor and implemented by management. We look to be creative at offering capital solutions to our GP partners through midlife co-investments, GP-led secondaries, structured capital, and other non-traditional investment structures, partnering with the broader private markets team at Neuberger Berman.
Finally, in any environment, it is crucial to maintain a prudent and balanced portfolio construction and diversification. Importantly, we look to build each individual portfolio we manage, including NBPE, on an investment-by-investment basis to align with the needs of the portfolio at any given time, taking into consideration diversification and sector concentration factors, among others. Now, I will hand it over to my colleague, Jennifer, to discuss how we incorporate ESG into our investment approach.
Thank you, David. Neuberger Berman Private Markets integrates material environmental, social, governance factors in the investment process for many of our products because we believe it helps us better identify risk as well as opportunity. Investment teams are responsible for conducting ESG due diligence, and a dedicated ESG investing team within private markets provides the expertise, guidance, and training. We also monitor the ESG risks throughout the lifecycle of an investment, engage with our investees during the ownership period, and provide reporting to our investors. There have been meaningful changes in the evolution of the ESG investing space in private equity over the last several years. Widespread enthusiasm about integrating ESG as a prerequisite for fundraising has become somewhat more measured, especially in the U.S., and generally, there is a divergence of regulation across different geographies, which is more complex to navigate for managers.
Managers are opting into regulatory regimes due to LP requirements, and the scope of regulation is not only institutional, but also related to individual investors, a testament to the diversifying investor base in private markets. ESG data at portfolio companies has gone from a free-for-all to a greater consensus on streamlined definitions and metrics. Lastly, expectations of private equity managers has evolved from larger buyout strategies, only having the dedicated resources and capabilities for ESG integration to a broader expectation across all of private markets, including private credit, secondaries, infrastructure, as well as for smaller managers. The ESG Data Convergence Initiative, or the EDCI, started in 2021 and is a voluntary initiative of GPs and LPs aligning on core ESG metrics to help streamline ESG data requests.
350 firms, 240 GPs, and 110 LPs have committed to the EDCI, representing about $28 trillion of AUM. Across our platform, we send out the EDCI metric request for co-investments and primaries on a look-through basis. Generally, there is a time lag because GPs are committing to new funds and new portfolio companies versus going back retroactively. Also, given it is a voluntary and best efforts initiative, there is a range of data coverage, with most GPs reporting only some of the data metrics. We saw the most coverage for board gender, diversity, and workforce metrics, and more limited re-reporting on Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions, and renewable energy consumption. Clearly, there is still room for improvement, and we expect this coverage to improve each year.
We are involved in a number of industry collaborations where we think we can add value. ICI is a group of private equity managers, and we are part of the Net-Zero Working Group. Most recently, ICI commissioned Bain to produce a roadmap for net zero implementation for private equity, which we contributed to, and cite our Neuberger Berman Net Zero Matrix, a trademarked resource powered by Ortec Finance, that supports portfolio companies, especially those in lower carbon-intensive sectors that are most relevant for private equity, to understand their sector region net zero pathways. We've engaged with a number of GPs on using this tool with their portfolio companies, which is exciting, and more to come here. We are also part of IIGCC, and have posted webinars for GPs to better understand guidance on net zero implementation and private equity.
On the social front, we have joined the Pension Fund Leadership Council of Ownership Works, which is an organization helping private equity-backed companies implement shared ownership programs for employees. In 2022 was our inaugural year to submit our GRESB Infrastructure Fund Management Assessment. We generally aim to focus on initiatives that we believe we can contribute and add value based on where we sit in the private equity ecosystem. Thank you.
Thank you, David and Jennifer. The current investment environment is complicated. We face continued inflation, interest rates much higher than 24 months ago, and continued high valuation multiples. At the same time, in recent months, we've seen strength in some segments of the public markets, and are starting to see an increase in transaction activity. In the face of these conditions, there are a number of key questions we regularly hear from investors. These include: Are private equity managers underwriting new investments to lower rates of return? What's the impact of higher interest rates on private equity? How will private equity be able to generate returns going forward? And most important to our shareholders, how is NBPE positioned in this new environment? Well, let's address the first question directly. Are private equity managers underwriting new deals to lower expected rates of return? The short answer is no.
This chart shows the average EBITDA multiple and the manager's base case return assumptions for co-investments we complete in our platform each year, which we believe is a good proxy for the private equity market as a whole. As you can see, transaction valuation multiples have increased over the last five years or so, and we haven't seen a meaningful decline in the last two years, despite the material increase in interest rates. At the same time, managers are continuing to underwrite new investments today to the same expected return of approximately 24% gross IRR. This begs the question: How is this the case? Well, the main reason is that while managers are expecting the same rate of return, the sources of expected returns have changed.
Historically, the typical private equity manager would assume that approximately two-thirds of their expected gain would come from growing revenues and EBITDA, and the remaining third would come from cash generation and debt paydown. Managers assumed multiples would stay flat, and they would typically not include future M&A in their model. However, in the current environment, most of the projected returns for new investments is coming from revenue and EBITDA growth, while additional value creation is coming from acquisitions. Managers today are actually expecting multiples to decline, meaning they expect to exit a lower multiple of earnings than what they bought the business for. This means that managers are focused on businesses that they believe will have higher organic growth, and/or where they believe that they can shift the growth curve of the business upwards through the operational improvements they execute, as well as being focused on M&A.
They do not expect to generate gains from cash flow generation and debt paydown, as the cash being generated in the company is being used to pay the higher interests, interest expenses, and to fund acquisitions. Now, let's look at this focus on revenue and earnings growth as value creation drivers in NBPE's portfolio. We believe NBPE's portfolio companies have demonstrated resilience, and have been executing particularly well on their value creation strategy. NBPE's portfolio showed 6% revenue and EBITDA growth in 2020, despite months of COVID lockdowns, and then had a strong bounce back in 2021, with revenue and EBITDA growth of 27% and 28%, respectively. We had solid growth in 2022, and are pleased to have shown a 15% revenue and EBITDA growth LTM June 2023. Our companies are, by and large, executing on their underwriting plans.
We are proud of their operating performance to date. This growth is important, but what has happened to capital structures, and what is the impact of higher interest rates? Well, to put these topics in perspective, let's consider the capital structure of a typical private equity investment historically, compared to a typical new investment today. The debt levels in transactions in both time periods are similar, but the enterprise value of the new investment today is higher. This higher price is financed with equity, in some cases, structured equity. The higher valuation multiple is justified because today's investment is expected to grow at a much higher rate, as we just discussed, and indicates that growth, rather than interest rates, is going to have a greater impact on future return generation.
Since debt is a much lower percentage of the capital structure in a deal today, an increase in interest rates has less of an effect on the expected return. Higher interest rates still matter to a private equity transaction, but we believe that the greater impact of higher interest rates is on risk rather than on expected return. Higher interest expense leads to lower free cash flow generation. However, this becomes less of a concern if EBITDA and revenue are growing and a company has a strong interest coverage ratio. We've analyzed the interest coverage ratios for NBPE's top 30 companies, which represent 67% of total NAV. Our average interest coverage ratio is 2.6 x as of June 2023, as compared to a market average of 1.3 x, as shown by Lincoln International's market analysis.
Notably, none of NBPE's top 30 portfolio companies have an interest coverage ratio of less than 1x. Further, we have minimal near-term debt maturities, with the majority maturing in 2027 or later, and the vast majority, or 81% of the debt, is covenant-light. We believe this demonstrates that NBPE's portfolio companies are well-positioned to weather the impacts of higher interest rates. We believe that private equity will remain an attractive asset class over the medium to long term, that private equity will continue to outperform public equities and generate solid absolute returns. However, we believe that generating these returns will require more skill from private equity managers going forward. Historically, private equity managers have had a broad range of methods to make money on their investments.
In the current environment, a number of these tools remain, including investment selection, selecting and incentivizing company management, supporting growth with capital and/or resources, improving operating efficiencies, and supporting M&A. However, others have become more difficult. Cash flow generation and debt paydown have been reduced or eliminated by higher interest rates, and multiple expansion has actually gone negative. What is interesting is that the tools that remain are skills-based, while the factors that have been lost are macro-driven. We are not in an environment where a rising tide is going to lift all boats. We believe that this will result in wider dispersion of performance across private equity managers. Accordingly, we believe NBPE's bottoms-up approach in selecting investments on a company-by-company basis by partnering with top-tier GPs in their core areas of expertise is exactly the right strategy for this environment.
I'd now like to hand over to my partner, Paul Daggett, to share insights into what's driving value in NBPE's portfolio today. Paul?
Thank you, Peter. Peter talked about the importance of companies producing operating growth and generating strong returns in private equity investments, and I'm now going to extend that discussion to NBPE's portfolio. There's often a focus on the importance of exits in driving value in a portfolio, but from a multiple of invested capital perspective, it's generally more important to look at the fundamental value created during the holding period of investments. Looking at the top 30 private companies in NBPE's portfolio, these represent $811 million of total fair value, and these companies have, in aggregate, generated a gross multiple of 2.1x invested capital to date.
To return to Peter's point in the importance of operating growth within the portfolio and driving returns, on a weighted average basis of sales since the time of investment, these 30 investments have grown revenue by 86% and EBITDA by almost 96%. On the right of the page, we highlight that the growth has remained strong over the past year, too, with LTM weighted average revenue and EBITDA growth both above 16%. I think this data illustrates both the long-term drivers of returns within NBPE's top 30 investments, as well as the ongoing health of this cohort. There are different ways to drive growth in portfolio companies. Organic growth is obviously important, but another way to build value over time can be through M&A. As the private equity market has matured, M&A has become an increasingly common component of the investment thesis in many private equity-backed companies.
The chart on the right of this page shows that the number of add-ons has increased steadily over time, and so has the percentage of private equity transactions that are add-ons to existing companies, as opposed to new platform investments. In the first half of 2023, almost 80% of U.S. buyouts were add-on acquisitions. Of course, NBPE's portfolio also reflects this, and 70% of the top 30 private companies in NBPE's portfolio have completed M&A during their holding periods to date. This M&A can broadly be divided into two types: systematic or roll-up M&A, where the original investment thesis was to grow a company's scale through a large number of add-on acquisitions, and transformational M&A, which is sometimes contemplated in the original investment thesis, but can also be more opportunistic as significant opportunities arise during the life of a deal.
This slide highlights some examples of both types of M&A from NBPE's portfolio. On the left are two companies that have completed a significant amount of M&A and grown their scale and capabilities, making them both bigger and better companies. Dan Schorr from AEA will join us later today to talk more about Monroe, and USI is a co-investment we did alongside KKR in 2017, and has since gone on to complete numerous add-on acquisitions in a sector that is highly fragmented. On the right-hand side of the slide, Solenis and Renaissance are examples of companies that have recently completed significant add-on acquisitions. Last year, Jacob Kotzubei from Platinum joined us to talk about the investment thesis and progress made at Solenis, which from inception of NBPE's investment, was itself the combination of two companies.
Solenis has been performing very well organically, but earlier this year, it also completed the acquisition of a company called Diversey, which was a $4.6 billion transformative acquisition. We believe that this was a compelling opportunity to grow the company's scale and product offering, and we took this opportunity to invest additional capital into this investment. Renaissance also completed a meaningful acquisition this year, and we invested additional capital to support this alongside Francisco Partners. These are two examples of us backing strong performers in our portfolio and investing additional capital where we had the option to do this. We've talked about midlife co-investments in the past and in David Stonberg's presentation today. We often like these situations because we're investing in a company that's already well known to the lead private equity sponsor, and this can reduce certain risks in the investment.
Solenis and Renaissance are examples of this, driven by M&A, but midlife opportunities can also occur in existing portfolio companies when we're offered the option of extending the holding period of an investment or taking full or partial liquidity. As you can see on the left of the page, since 2020, NBPE has maintained or reinvested $113 million into five existing companies in this way. These are situations where we had the opportunity to take full or partial liquidity or to recommit to an investment. The five companies on the left of the page are investments we made at different times in various sectors, including consumer and retail, technology, and industrials. In aggregate, at the time of the reinvestment decisions, NBPE's gross returns on these investments in aggregate was 2.9x our invested cost and a gross IRR of 30%.
After a four-year average hold, we were presented with the opportunity to liquidate our holdings or to recommit some or all of our value back into these companies. As you can see, we chose to roll $113 million into these investments, and today they're collectively valued at 1.3 x that reinvested cost, a weighted average of 1.3 years later. In all of these situations, we thoroughly analyzed the opportunities and considered whether to liquidate or to roll, and took this decision to continue some or all of our investment, because we knew the companies were performing well, and the lead sponsor had a value creation plan that we believed meant that the companies could continue to perform well. As you can see on slide 29, so far, this has been the case.
Over the last twelve months, the weighted average LTM revenue and EBITDA growth of these five companies was 22% and 30%, respectively. At this point, I'd like to hand over to Giovanni Camisassi of NB Renaissance, who will talk in more detail about engineering, which is one of the companies where we chose to reinvest in 2020, having originally invested in the company in 2016.
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Giovanni Camisassi, Principal of NB Renaissance. Today, I will take you through our investment in Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, in which we are pleased to have NBPE as a co-investor. I'll start with a quick introduction of NB Renaissance, which was established in 2015 as the spin-off of Intesa Sanpaolo Merchant Banking, sponsored by both Neuberger Berman and Intesa Sanpaolo. We manage EUR 2.8 billion AUM across three funds, and since inception, we have completed 50 investments and 71 add-ons in 23 countries. In my 30 colleagues, we are among the largest teams of investment professionals dedicated to Italy, and we are the most established player in the Italian market. We focus on mid-sized companies with a strong preference for family-owned businesses, with established presence also outside of Italy and potential for further growth globally.
Over 60% of the turnover of our portfolio is generated abroad, and our companies have presence in over 180 countries. We leverage our deep local network to source new opportunities with over 700 generated since inception, but we remain very selective in our investment strategy. We focus on growth stories in which value creation is centered on operational improvement and, of course, top-line growth. We rely on limited leverage, and we prefer to invest cash in scaling up our businesses organically, but also through M&A, as witnessed by the 71 add-on acquisitions performed to date. Last but not least, we have a distinctive feature within the Italian market. Our ticket size can be very flexible, thanks to partnering on transactions with our investors. This way, we can look at larger deals, providing significant co-investment opportunities for our partners.
Since 2019, we generated close to EUR 740 million of co-investments. Now, a few words on the market opportunity we see in Italy. Italy is the third-largest economy in the European Union, and some of its regions, in particular in the northern area of the country, stand among the most competitive macroeconomic areas in Europe. The backbone of these economic areas is represented by successful mid-sized businesses. According to estimates, more than 60% of Italian companies with over EUR 50 million of revenues are family-owned, and 60% of these companies are likely to face succession issues over the next three-five years. This, we believe, provides a tremendous opportunity for us. In order to take full advantage of this opportunity, we have developed and fine-tuned over the years our investment approach.
We seek partnerships with founding families and high-potential management teams with a clear goal of helping them managing successions. We look for leaders, either in global niches or at more local level, but we always look for what we believe can be sustainable competitive advantages to anchor strong growth stories. We prefer export-oriented companies active in B2B sectors that do not depend on local consumer demand. We always prioritize leaders in fragmented markets, which could act as consolidator within their core segments. I'd mentioned earlier our sourcing capabilities. Thanks to our strong presence and network, we have been successfully generating a strong deal flow, but most importantly, a relevant pipeline of primary opportunities, with 80% of our investments sourced directly from entrepreneurs and managers. Lastly, over time, we started to specialize on core investment teams that allow us for greater specialization in both sourcing and value creation.
As a result, our fund three is currently invested in four core teams: technology and professional services, specialized industrial, environmental sustainability, and healthcare. Now, a quick glance to our team, which you can see on the slide. It is the largest team dedicated to Italy. It is led by a seasoned and experienced leadership. In fact, our senior partners have been investing in Italy since 2007. As mentioned before, we can be very flexible in terms of investment size. Combining this with our strong origination capabilities has allowed us to generate a lot of co-investment for our partners. In 2019, we generated close to EUR 740 million of co-investment across six investments out of the nine currently in fund three. This represents a one-to-one co-investment to fund ratio for fund three.
One of the most relevant examples is our investment in Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, an Italian champion in digital transformation, in which we are glad to have MVP as a co-investor. Engineering Ingegneria Informatica is the largest Italian IT services provider, employing approximately 15,000 FTEs and generating a turnover of approximately EUR 1.7 billion, with an EBITDA of EUR 250 million. The group provides IT services, including digital transformation, system integration, and consulting services across various end markets: financial services, public administration and healthcare, and enterprise. One distinctive feature of Engineering Ingegneria Informatica is its highly profitable portfolio of 30+ proprietary solutions, which represents approximately a third of the total revenues of the group. Fund three invested in Engineering Ingegneria Informatica in July 2020, alongside Bain Capital, with a 50/50 governance setup. Why we like Engineering Ingegneria Informatica? First of all, the market.
Engineering's core market, which is Italy's IT services and software, was expected to grow at 5%-6% CAGR, driven by the digitalization secular trend, plus a clear need of catch-up of Italy's IT spending. This proved even more true following COVID, as the pandemic further accelerated corporate and public administration demand for digital transformation, and tailwinds provided by the EU Recovery Fund further accelerated such demand. Second, the positioning of Engineering. With 10% market share, it already was the leading Italian independent player, and thanks to its recognized delivery capabilities, competence, and scale, Engineering was, and still is, a reliable go-to partner of Italian blue-chip companies. This, in a context of supplier consolidation, as clients looks for true technological partners rather than simple vendors, is setting up Engineering as a clear net winner.
Third, I already mentioned Engineering's distinctive portfolio of proprietary solutions, which, together with a cost-competitive talent pool and sizable digital offering, represented a sustainable competitive edge versus more traditional IT service providers. Clearly, this required investments, and Engineering was already well-invested, with an average R&D spending of EUR 40 million per year. Fourth, we like the investment also given Engineering's strong and resilient financial performance. Top line proved to be resilient through the cycle and had accelerated in recent years, with double-digit growth, thanks to a very recurring baseline, compounded by new digital projects and M&A. Profitability, at approximately 14%, was already solid, but we saw room for further operational improvement to achieve best-in-class margins, while cash flow generation was solid and consistent through time. Finally, the market fragmentation and the company's track record in synergetic add-ons.
With 20 acquisitions integrated over the previous five years, Engineering was an ideal platform to continue to consolidate the market, which is still very fragmented. Moving on to our value creation initiatives. We started with the management, and we successfully executed on the generational change of the entire top management. That was among one of the mandates with the founder. We relied on external talents to bring new and fresh blood to the organization, but also looked at internal promotion to preserve Engineering's strong company culture. We worked with the new management to lay out the foundation of our strategic ambitions, and we all agreed that we needed to revise the organization to better push the digital capabilities and software solutions of the group.
As a result, we decided to upgrade the organization with a new matrix model by adding specialized delivery centers focused on technology and solutions that would cut across the market verticals responsible for the go-to-market. These delivery centers would provide product and digital specialists focused on technologies and solutions that would allow, first, to push to the market in a more proactive way, Engineering digital capabilities, and two, a more focused approach on how Engineering manages its software portfolio and accelerate the SaaS transition. We are now in the implementation phase, with all relevant action plans already well underway. M&A, I said before, is another major initiative for Engineering. We continued in our bolt-on strategy to accelerate the group's intake of digital capabilities and talent.
We completed 10 acquisitions to date, the most relevant of which is Be Shaping the Future, a EUR 250 million business that we have closed at the end of 2022. This has been a transformational transaction for our financial services vertical. It added consulting capabilities, process know-how, and scale, while reinforcing our competitive positioning and increase our share of wallet in all major Italian banks. In 2021, we also completed the spin-off of OverIT , a software company with a highly regarded software solution for field service management. We are currently scaling it up into an international staff software company. Finally, ESG, which we believe is of paramount importance in a people business like engineering. To keep the company up to date in terms of capabilities and know-how, we kept investing on our people.
Last year, we've hired over 2,000 new employees, and in our internal IT and management school, we provided an average of 26 hours of training per team. This is a 24% growth year-on-year. This academy has been an extremely valuable asset in establishing new partnerships with college and universities, providing engineering access to the best new talent available. Lastly, we strengthen a lot our internal ESG organization, and we are finalizing our 2026 ESG plan, which will include a path for decarbonization in line with the science-based target initiatives. This concluded my overview of Engineering, and I thank you for your time.
Thank you, Giovanni. I'm now going to continue the review of NBPE's portfolio, focusing on the operating performance of the portfolio companies. The portfolio is well diversified, with 89 direct equity investments alongside 54 different private equity sponsors. As you can see in the pie charts at the top of the page, the portfolio is weighted to the U.S. with 74% of the portfolio there, but a meaningful proportion is also in Europe, at 24% of the portfolio by value. We're well diversified by sector, with technology, media and telecom, and consumer and e-commerce being the largest two sectors at about 20% of the portfolio each.
Looking beyond industry sector at the underlying themes in the portfolio at the bottom of the slide, as we've described for many years now, the two main themes remain businesses with low expected cyclicality, either because of the market in which they operate or because of their specific business model, and businesses where we think there are long-term secular growth trends that can drive their revenue and EBITDA growth over the long term. We think that this portfolio construction has served us well across different environments in recent years. The portfolio continues to perform well, and you can see at the top of the page that the weighted average LTM revenue and EBITDA growth for the portfolio as of the thirteenth of June, were both approximately 15%. We're pleased to see this performance in a market that still has all the challenges that we described earlier.
The valuation multiple remains very similar to where it was at the end of the year, at 15.4x EV/EBITDA, and this again reiterates the point that strong revenue and EBITDA growth are critical to driving portfolio value. Now I'll go through each of NBPE's five largest sectors and give more color on the underlying performance by sector. Starting with TMT, this is the largest weighting in NBPE's current portfolio, with $306 million of fair value. The large majority of this portfolio is EBITDA positive, and this illustrates that this is a buyout portfolio, not a venture or growth portfolio. That said, the portfolio continued to show good growth, particularly on the revenue line. EBITDA growth was somewhat slower than revenue growth, but this was for company-specific reasons.
For example, a company changing revenue model and one company investing for growth, et cetera. The valuation, multiple and leverage in this sector are higher than in other sectors, but this is as expected given the types of companies in the portfolio and average valuations in this sector. Within consumer and e-commerce, revenue growth was strong and EBITDA growth was even stronger. This was driven by the two largest investments in the portfolio, Action and StubHub. All of the companies were EBITDA positive, but there was more variability in growth rates than in some of the other sectors. Of course, retailers had to deal with not only input cost inflation and supply chain pressures, but also other issues such as destocking in some cases.
As we've described, we look for investments alongside private equity sponsors in their areas of expertise, and we feel confident about the actions that have already been taken where necessary in some of the companies in this sector. NBPE's financial services portfolio saw particularly strong average growth in its companies over the last year. This is a small portfolio in terms of company numbers, with only six companies, but is still the third largest sector exposure with $188 million of value. There are currently three themes within this sector: wealth management, insurance, and advisory. Notably, three of these six companies are now in the top 10 largest positions in NBPE's portfolio, with Osaic, which was formerly known as Advisor Group, USI, and True Potential, all performing very well over the past year.
The industrial sector also performed very well, with EBITDA showing particularly strong weighted average growth over the year. M&A was a component of that growth, and as you heard earlier, both Solenis and Monroe have grown meaningfully through acquisitions as well as organically, and you'll hear more about Monroe soon. The last of the five sectors to cover is business services. Business services saw good average revenue growth, but EBITDA growth was somewhat slower. There are only seven companies in this sector. The largest companies are Constellation, Staples, and Addison Group, and an undisclosed company. Based on the three disclosed companies, you can see the diversity of end markets and business type within this sector, with used cars, office supplies, and recruitment of IT, healthcare, and finance and accounting professionals all being completely unrelated markets.
There were a number of companies that faced unrelated challenge in this environment due to challenging end markets, but we continue to believe that these companies are well-positioned for the long term. I'll now hand over to Dan Schorr, a partner from AEA. AEA has been a strong partner to Neuberger Berman for many years, and NBPE has a number of investments alongside AEA in its portfolio. Today, Dan is going to talk about one of the more recent investments, Monroe Engineering.
Thank you. I'm Dan Schorr, and I'm a partner in AEA Small Business Private Equity Fund. I'm here to talk about Monroe, first, I'll introduce AEA Investors. AEA was founded 55 years ago by family interests of the Rockefeller, Mellon, and Harriman families in the U.S., and Warburg family interests in Europe. We're a $19 billion asset under management, middle-market investment firm focused on middle and lower middle-market private equity buyout strategies, in addition to growth, equity, and private debt businesses. We are a global firm and have an expansive network of business leaders stemming from our heritage and founding. On this next page, this is an overview of our small business fund and a snapshot of where we play and how we invest. SBF has an extensive background investing in the industrial manufacturing and distribution sectors, and we have been investing in them for 55 years.
These are demand characteristics we know very well. We believed the industry landscape for OEM critical component suppliers had not evolved to meet the growing service needs of customers, nor had the segment embraced forward-thinking sales and marketing solutions, such as digital marketing. We set about finding businesses that have built a fundamentally better model, playing an old school industry in a new way, leveraging technology and creating a scalable business, innovating in these sleepy markets. Our thesis was predicated on finding a scaled player in the hardware component segment who had developed a differentiated and competitively disruptive model, which would enable them to, one, consistently take market share to enable above-market organic growth rates over time and in all economic environments, regardless of near-term macro dynamics.
And two, become an accretive acquirer of businesses to accelerate organic growth and improve the company's strategic position as it relates to product, customer, and end-market mix. And do so while de-risking acquisitions through a well-defined M&A playbook and integration plan. Monroe, consistent with the other investments across our portfolio, was at an inflection point, having begun to do M&A and prove out the power of their model, but wanting to step up the acquisition scale and pace, and invest even more heavily in data and technology to further their competitive gap. This is all being done behind an ambitious team with a long-term track record of winning, that wants to build a billion-dollar company and has a plan to get there regardless of short-term macro environment. They were seeking a partner to help them realize their vision. So what is Monroe and where do they play?
Monroe is a leading supplier and distributor of mission-critical, often custom component hardware to a wide variety of OEM customers. It's an incredibly diversified business with no customer, SKU, product category, application, salesperson, or end-market concentration, which bolsters stability and mitigates cyclical risk. They focus on the products on the bottom right of the page. These are never primary focuses of their customer base, but are huge pain points if they are not delivered at the right time, in the right quantity, by the supplier who they have custom-specced the product with. This is where Monroe comes in, solving customer problems in a massive, incredibly fragmented, and growing set of products and end markets. Further, they have created a digital marketing engine that allows them to find these customers and fulfill their needs with unmatched lead times.
Finally, they can apply their differentiated model to a wide variety of highly fragmented acquisition targets, which can be bought at accretive multiples. The market Monroe competes in is valued at roughly $30 billion in North America alone and is largely comprised of unsophisticated mom-and-pops and slow-moving large broadliners. These mission-critical parts are often afterthoughts for their customers but are essential. While Monroe is well-diversified, it also has meaningful exposure to growth industries, including renewables, medical, and aerospace. So why did we like this opportunity? We're excited about the Monroe opportunity because it was competitively disrupting this massive, fragmented, and essential industry. Monroe competes against both large distributors, like a Fastenal, and more notably, a vast ocean of niche players. We focus on bringing world-class engineering and production to all those products no one has time to really focus on or bid out.
The large guys don't want to focus on these custom orders, as they are built to fulfill orders of generic products they have in stock, and the small guys focus on one product category, often in one narrow end market. We created systems to control the design and engineering, but outsource the production to thousands of vetted suppliers, primarily domestically. So our economic model is that of a virtual OEM with better cash flow, variable expense, and an infrastructure to rapidly incorporate add-ons. As a result, Monroe offers a broad one-stop shop with the industry's deepest product set, simplifying the full component design and procurement process for its customers. Most of Monroe's products are custom-designed to meet an OEM's needs, and nearly all are specced into customer product blueprints, which entrenches Monroe with the customer and has resulted in 95%+ customer retention and drives recurring demand.
Through acquisitions, Monroe has added to this product set over time and built scale and in-house expertise across products and end markets. Finally, we grab an unfair share of customer leads by investing in a highly sophisticated digital marketing lead generation engine that mom-and-pops can't compete with, and broadliners don't want to focus on. All of this has combined to create a rapidly growing business organically and through acquisition, growing organically over a long period of time, twice as fast as their markets. On the digital side, Monroe has developed a deep, robust, and sustainable digital marketing engine to find customers looking for our unique outsourced procurement solutions for these point-of-pain component parts. Our content library is unmatched for these components, leading to five million annual website visits, and shockingly for fasteners and casters, 1.3 million social media followers.
This results in top performance across both organic and paid search for the product categories our customers are searching for. This is critically important because our customer decision-makers are getting younger, they have less time, and are trained to go to Google when they have a problem. We've built a state-of-the-art lead attribution and funnel system to track and monitor these leads, which helps enable market-best lead times and customer service. So again, why were we so excited about this opportunity? Monroe is a great example that encapsulates how we think about investing and where we find value in building companies. With 65,000 SKUs and growing for all of the essential little C and D parts that go into everything, but are not the primary focus of our customers, we're fundamentally starting with an index bet on the broad economy with outsized exposure to secular growth markets.
So in whole, not a hugely volatile and directionally upward economic bet. But fundamentally, this is a bet on a better model that is disruptive in its competitive universe and market. Whether GDP is up or down 2% doesn't matter as much as training a better professional sports team to compete against high school athletes. Monroe has been a share gain leader over the long term and applying their model to a vast universe of M&A, growing double their market rates with a better demand generation engine, fulfillment back-end, and a compelling economic model of a virtual OEM, again, with better cash flow, variable expense, and an infrastructure. On M&A, Monroe is a proven acquisition platform with ample runway for growth. The company has completed 10 acquisitions in the 20 months we've been partnered together.
This is all with a playbook that has led to compelling and consistent post-close performance. Acquisitions are fully integrated with consolidated One Monroe branding, a centralized inside sales organization, and single IT infrastructure. Fundamentally, Monroe views itself and markets itself to acquisition targets as a sales and marketing organization, which can step up the game of the selective, sleepy mom-and-pops it acquires. Acquisitions have been critical to unlocking above-market organic growth, as Monroe can provide a broader product set to acquired companies' customer lists, and resell newly acquired product categories and capabilities to their existing customer base of over 15,000 accounts. The Monroe technology engine helps to identify product gaps in the newly acquired entity's customer base, as well as where the new products can be sold through existing customer relationships.
The acquired company also gets access to the lead generation of the broader Monroe platform, better accessing customers in its specific product and/or end market niche. Finally, what does this mean from a results perspective? AEA has been investing heavily alongside our management partners to continue to scale the business and accelerate growth, regardless of near-term economic environment. As noted on the prior page, we have meaningfully increased the pace and scope of M&A. Prior to our investment, management had been somewhat limited in scale and quality of acquisitions they prioritized. We have opened that aperture with a focus on high-quality assets that continue to make Monroe a more valuable strategic asset, including differentiated sourcing capabilities. We are investing behind the team's digital strategy to further gap them ahead of competition.
The team has been leveraging insights from AEA's broader B2B digital marketing expertise and in-house digital experts, including an emphasis on video content creation with a new video studio and talent. Furthermore, we're investing in AI tools to give our sales teams quick, bespoke, flexible marketing collateral, and content to drive even more differentiated customer conversion and close rates. Additionally, the company is in the early stages of weaponizing its vast trove of data to make their cross-selling engine more automated and insightful. While it's early days, the team has been leveraging AEA's in-house data science team as they build out this competency, which should only improve our long-term organic growth rates and market share gains. And again, this is all above and beyond the baseline organic growth engine and accretive M&A machine that's already been built.
As you can see on the right side of the page, this has resulted in very impressive growth for a company operating in mid-single-digit growth industries, and we continue to believe investing behind this team will lead to a billion-dollar enterprise, ultimately. Thank you for your time and your interest in the Monroe AEA story.
Thank you, Dan. I'll now cover NBPE's performance and returns, and with that, hand over to William for his summary. NBPE has produced strong NAV and share price performance over three, five, and ten years, both on an absolute basis and compared to relevant public indices. Looking at NAV total returns on the left of the slide, over one year and year to date, NAV performance has remained solid, and the private portfolio has performed well operationally, driving a gross valuation increase of 3.8% year to date and 7.9% over the last year. However, public equities within, within the portfolio, which NBPE holds as a result of IPOs in 2021 and before, have been a headwind over this period, and as shown on the chart, lowered these total returns year to date and over one year.
All of these investments have been very successful for NBPE over the long term, and we've had some recent sales on this part of the portfolio, crystallizing value for NBPE. We hope that more of these public positions will be sold down in the short to medium term. On the right of the page, you see that the share price returns in sterling have held up well in the shorter term and have been very strong over three, five, and 10 years, and significantly outperformed the FTSE All-Share Index over these time periods. NBPE's NAV performance has been driven by equity co-investments for some time now, and 93% of NBPE's portfolio is in direct equity investments today. You can see the performance in the form of gross IRR for this asset class has been strong across time periods.
Exit activity over a five-year period has also produced strong results, with a 2.4x multiple of invested cost and 38% average uplift on realizations over that time period. Continuing with that point on liquidity, cash receipts in 2023 year to date already exceeds the whole of 2022 on a pro forma basis, including exits that have been announced but not yet closed. Although 2021 was obviously particularly strong, even if you compare 2023 year to date with 2019 and 2020, the cash receipt activity we've seen still compares reasonably well, despite a much more difficult exit environment.
It's worth pointing out that the decisions we made to continue with investments that I covered on slide 28 are not included in these numbers. In other words, we had the option for higher liquidity in each of 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, but we preferred to continue with these investments for the reasons discussed earlier. Looking in more detail at exits announced in 2023 year to date, starting at the top left of the page, we've seen full or partial liquidity from eight different public stock positions in the portfolio. Looking at these investments in total, which includes all realized and unrealized value and proceeds, these investments have collectively returned 2.3x cost to date. At the bottom left of the slide, we've had two full exits announced from the private portfolio and partial liquidity from two more.
The aggregate multiple of invested capital in these investments, which again includes realized and unrealized value in the partial realizations, is 3x invested cost. On the right of the page, the pie chart shows NBPE's portfolio, with each segment representing the fair value of one of NBPE's investments, and the exits and partial exits are highlighted with their logos. As you can see, most of the exit activity has been coming from relatively small and generally quite mature investments in the portfolio, and we're pleased to have the opportunity to reinvest the proceeds from these successful investments into new companies over time. While we can't predict exit activity, I'd also add that the average holding period of the equity investments in NBPE's portfolio is now 4.7 years, and we think that this is an attractive portfolio of private equity investments.
We believe that NBPE's portfolio is well positioned for potential exits, of course, subject to market conditions and any additional hold versus roll decisions that arise. NBPE's balance sheet remains strong. We have $345 million of pro forma liquidity, with a combination of cash and short-term investments, available credit facility and receipts from announced but not closed investments. We think NBPE is very well positioned, being 109% invested with a strong balance sheet, no significant unfunded commitments, and a credit facility that matures in 2029. We have $79 million of ZDPs outstanding at August 31, and you'll see in our interim results that the board intends to repay these at the maturity date in October 2024. In summary, we're pleased with NBPE's portfolio performance and NBPE's position today.
Underlying companies continue to perform well in a difficult environment. Realization activity in the portfolio has been very good despite the challenging market, and the portfolio appears to be well positioned for additional exits over time. The balance sheet is strong, with capacity to make new investments when we find opportunities that we believe are the right fit for the portfolio. And as David Stonberg described, we're seeing very strong deal flow on the NB platform to help us do this. We think NBPE's model is working well and remains differentiated in the market with our focus on equity co-investments, our ability to control the investment decision through direct investments, and the fee efficiency of the co-investment model, in which we rarely pay a management fee or carry on the underlying investments. I'll now hand it back to William to give his concluding thoughts before we open up for Q&A.
Thank you.
Thank you, Paul. NBPE has a 10-year history of maintaining or increasing its dividend, and since inception, it has returned $375 million to shareholders by way of dividends and buybacks. You can see the dividend record in this chart over the last 5 years. The board is totally committed to its policy of paying out an annualized yield of 3% or more on NAV. In addition to the dividends, we've also bought shares back. This year, we bought back 5 million at a weighted average discount of about 32%, which has led to a small NAV increase. The board is focused on 3 core pillars to drive long-term shareholders' returns. The first is long-term performance, and we've got a really impressive record here of 83.9% growth in NAV over the last 5 years....
and more than 220% over 10 years, which of course, is largely driven from the great return SmartD rive, direct private equity portfolio. The second pillar is operating really world-class investor relations, and this is an area we've ramped up enormously over the last year or two. I'm particularly pleased in this context that NB has hired a dedicated U.K. person who will be leading our IR efforts in this area. The third pillar is sound governance, especially ESG. We've operated with a fully independent board with complementary skills, and I'd particularly like to highlight our dedicated responsible investment policy, which leverages the strength of NB's world-class ESG credentials. We're delighted that we are succeeding in attracting new institutional shareholders and further investment from current institutions.
We're also still enjoying exponential growth in our retail investors, particularly through the platforms. I'd like to conclude today by stressing NBPE's value proposition. It provides an access to portfolio of direct private equity investments made alongside some of the best private equity world, investors in the world. We've generated a very attractive record of returns, as I've highlighted earlier, and it leverages the strength of our managers' very large private equity business. The co-investment model allows NBPE to be in control of its balance sheet and capital deployment and respond quickly to market dynamics. We invest globally, although with a particular focus on the U.S. market. Finally, we offer a fee-efficient model. I would now like to open today's session to Q&A, which Paul Daggett will monitor.
Thank you, everybody. So at this point, we'd like to move to the Q&A session. On the left-hand side of your screen, you should see a button that says, "Ask a question." So there's still plenty of time to submit any questions you have. We have had some questions coming in during the course of the presentation, and I'll start with a question for William with regards to buybacks. You've invested $5 million in 2023 in buybacks to date. How do you think about capital allocation between buybacks and new investments? And do you expect to buy back more shares in the short term?
Thank you, Paul. The answer is, first, I'd like to stress in the context of buybacks, is that we primarily consider them a means of returning money to shareholders. Dividends do remain our primary method of returning shareholders, as I stressed earlier. I'd particularly like to emphasize that we've returned more than $300 million through dividends since inception. But as you rightly say, we do do buybacks as well, as we've done this year, particularly when we think the discount's very wide. Obviously, the share price remains a bit of a frustration for us, given the... we don't think it reflects the value of the portfolio or the track record. We appreciate that when you do a buyback, it is an accretive acquisition.
It generates a good IRR. You're buying a portfolio that our manager knows really well. So it's really considered as an investment decision. But, and this is exactly what the questioner was alluding to, there's a balance. Because over the long run, our shareholders' returns are really driven by making new investments, which realize multiples of capital invested. And as we've seen earlier, the average returns, money multiple return, has been nearly 2.5 x over the last five years. While a buyback, even at the current discount levels, is only achieves about 1.4 x. So we've got to try and strike that balance.
And also, as we've heard, you know, whilst our manager is still generating such a, an interesting, deal flow of attractive new investment opportunities, we're very conscious that on every dollar spent on buybacks is not a dollar spent on making new investments. So in short, we're really conscious of that balance that we're trying to strike. And I don't want to get drawn into making forecasts, about whether we'll do any more, but we, we remain very alive to the opportunity and that balance.
Thank you, William. There was a question that came in, which is essentially about the allocation policy for co-investments on our platform, and I can take that one very quickly. Obviously, we manage $120 billion of commitments, including $34 billion for co-investments. A lot of that is institutional investors investing through separate accounts, as well as various type of investors investing through commingled funds. And all of these different programs can potentially receive allocations to co-investments. Very simply, the short answer to how co-investments are allocated is, it is pro rata, according to demand schedule, what each of those investors wants in a particular investment. So that capital is then allocated, if there is a constraint, pro rata, according to the desired investment amounts of each of those investors.
Importantly, it is overseen by our legal and compliance department in a regular meeting that takes place to allocate investments. I'll move on to a question which I think is for Peter, really. It was to do with the slide that he talked about, return expectations in private equity investments over time. The question is that there hasn't been a significant change in the return expectation yet. And what Peter's point was was that underlying revenue and EBITDA growth is accounting for more and more of that, and doesn't that require a meaningful increase in earnings growth versus historical levels to be able to sustain those types of returns? Peter?
Sure. Well, thanks, Paul. The answer there is yes, it does require investing into companies that are expected to have higher growth levels. So while there have always been some buyouts that were based on higher growth, when rates were lower, a buyout could still generate its target returns even with a slower growing company, I'll call it, let's say, a GDP plus grower, if that company had strong free cash flow, allowing for significant debt paydown. With current interest rates, it would be much harder for a deal such as that to generate target expected returns. Now, deals don't necessarily have to have growth rates at the level of NBPE's current portfolio to generate, you know, appropriate target returns, but they do need more than just sort of a GDP level of growth.
But that could come either from organic growth and/or through meaningful M&A activities. There are still lots of tools in the toolbox, you know, as I mentioned earlier, for a manager to use, to achieve that. So it's not just about only going and investing in very high organic growth companies, but there are more levers that a manager needs to be pulling today. It's not just a matter of the free cash flow generation.
Great, thank you. And then there's a related question, which I can take, which is similar. It's, there's a focus of growth within the portfolio, but we're potentially going into a weakening environment. Is there too much reliance on growth? And I would say, to add to everything Peter just said on this subject, first of all, really, for many years now, we've been talking about the positioning of our portfolio, and this started even before COVID. We'd been in a ten-year economic expansion, and we began to underwrite investments that were based really on two core themes. One being companies where we felt they had more defensive end markets or defensive business models.
An example of that could be a software company, where the input cost of that software is relatively small for the business using it. So, you know, ultimately, that tends to be a very predictable revenue stream over time. Or on the other end of the spectrum, businesses where we felt there was a long-term secular growth driver. And so I think across both of these themes, if we are going into a weakening environment, then we've underwritten investments for the long term. And because of those two themes, throughout the portfolio, we feel good about the long-term prospects for growth within the portfolio.
And then layered on top of that, I thought Dan Schorr made some comments which were actually very good answers to this question about looking for disruptive business models, looking to gain share, not just looking for GDP growth. And of course, then there is also potentially in many of our companies, bolt-on M&A. And so, you know, I think we do have a reliance on growth in the long term, but importantly, we think we're well positioned in the shorter term if the environment does weaken. In the long term, you know, we underwrote investments to be able to go through cycles and we would hope that that would position us well in that event. So that is the questions on growth.
Maybe moving on, a question on public shares in the portfolio and that we still have a meaningful position in public shares and what are we doing to manage this? The answer there is that in the majority of situations, we don't control the timing of sale of those public shares. They are controlled by the lead private equity firm and sold down on a pro rata basis as that lead private equity firm chooses to sell. So we don't have any information on when those sales will occur. I will say that, you know, they have, as I mentioned in my earlier comments, they have, of course, been a headwind this year that actually continued in September and with the share price performance of a couple of those publics underperforming.
So, you know, in the long term, we would like to sell those down. We, we would hope that will be the case. And on that note, we have had $33 million of sales so far this year from that public portfolio. So I cannot tell you it'll continue at that pace, but I think the signs are that sponsors have been looking for opportunities to sell down. And of course, we, we hope that can continue to be the case, so we can have that capital back and, of course, choose how to allocate it. Just looking at the other questions that have been coming in, there's, there's a couple of questions around capital structure of companies, and, and interest rate risk.
And maybe, Peter, I'll try to combine two questions into one, which is, you know, what are companies doing to manage interest rate risk within the portfolio at the moment? And then in terms of expected returns with high debt, which may not be as hedged. You know, what is the expectation of what that impact could be to returns going forward?
Sure. So the main thing is, and I'm pointing out in the slide 22 of the deck, had some of these figures, but just for your own reference. But importantly, in our portfolio, 85% of our companies in our top 30 companies, which is 67% of NAV, have maturities that are 2026 or later, right? So having maturities pushed out is important. And importantly as well, 81% of the debt is covenant-light, right? So the covenant-light aspect is particularly important.
And as I mentioned before, we're pleased to have a much better interest coverage ratio than the private equity industry as a whole with our 2.6 x average interest coverage ratio. So those are things that we're very focused on. So as Paul said, we, when we underwrite a transaction, we very much look at what is the downside protection in this business, right? And so we're very much looking for businesses that even if things were to go south macro-wise, you know, shortly after investment, that we'd still be in a position of having the company have a stable capital position, right?
But with all of that, you are seeing private equity managers working very diligently with their portfolio companies, you know, to reduce the need for working capital. You know, cash is very precious, right, in this sort of environment, and so we're working very hard on either cost reduction plans and/or, you know, trying to wring as much working capital out of businesses as possible. And that's where it goes back to the theme I mentioned. It, it's going to be very much based on skills. Returns going forward are going to be very much skills-based on how well private equity managers can work with their portfolio companies on these and on the growth initiatives, but also on initiatives to maximize the free cash flow.
Thank you, Peter. So there's only one other question, which, I think we haven't answered yet. There's still time if anyone has any other questions. But in the meantime, there's a question on the FCA investigating private equity valuations. I would say that I can't comment on that, but I can tell you that our valuation policy is what we call practical expedient, which involves us using the valuations of underlying private equity firms, but of course, also monitoring those. And when we monitor those, we look at how those companies are valued, and they're typically valued based on public companies, comparable private transactions, discounted cash flow, would be the main three, typically.
And the other point I would say is, there has been a contraction over the past year in the valuation multiple within the portfolio. So you can see, the public markets are factoring into those private valuation within NBPE's portfolio, and that valuation multiple has decreased over time. But you know, in terms of what the investigation might look at, and the details, I really can't comment at this point, except to say, that our valuation policy has been very consistent over time. And of course, we're also audited at year-end, so that there is a lot of oversight in terms of how NBPE's valuations work, and it has been very consistent over time. And I don't see any other questions coming in.
I'll maybe give 30 seconds in case anybody has any other questions. And I'm not seeing any other questions. So I think with that, we'll move to wrap up, and we really appreciate everybody taking the time today. Hopefully, it's been insightful and helpful. We're always available to answer any questions, so please do reach out if you have any questions on today's presentations or anything else. And in the meantime, thank you again for your time and attention today.
Thank you, everyone.
Thank you.