Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Partners Group AUM Announcement Conference Call and Live Webcast. I am Paul, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the related field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Partners Group management. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Welcome to Partners Group's Business Update and Outlook Call. I hope you all had a good holiday season and are having a good start to the year. My name is Dave Layton. I'm the CEO of Partners Group, and I'm currently joining from the United States. Also presenting on today's call will be my partner and our CFO, Hans Ploos van Amstel . He's on from Switzerland. We'll also have Philip Sauer, a senior member of our business development team in Switzerland, joining us for the Q&A portion of the call. Sarah Brewer, who is the co-head of our Global Client Solutions team, is someone that you all have gotten to know on the last number of these calls. She will not be participating today. She's on parental leave, and she's spending some quality time with her newborn.
This continues to be a very strong market for private investing, but it's a very complex market with inflationary pressures, potentially more modest growth prospects in some sectors of the economy, and of course, the latest iteration of COVID. With that said, we more than ever maintain a strong conviction in our thematic approach to investing. This approach is all about looking past today's noise to identify long-term structural trends. We find sectors and sub-sectors that are well-positioned for transformative growth. We then look for assets that are best positioned in these dynamic sectors to be future market leaders. On the private debt side, we focus on category leaders and non-cyclical defensive sponsor-backed businesses. Hands-on transformational investing is all about rolling up the sleeves and creating and controlling outcomes to the extent possible. In our mind, it remains the best defense against economic ups and downs.
Slide two is a good summary of some of our key messages from this last year. As you can see, this was a successful year across virtually all metrics for our company. We're pleased that our platform continued to demonstrate strength and stability. On the heels of this, we also have a very solid outlook for 2022. In 2021, our clients continued to demonstrate significant demand across all private markets asset classes, entrusting us with $25 billion in new capital commitments. We're humbled by their continued trust in our firm. Our total assets under management reached 17% increase year-on-year, and now stand at $127 billion at the end of the year.
Looking at 2022, and frankly well out into the future, we continue to believe that there's a strong market for our bespoke investment solutions, particularly with the strong investment returns and good track record that we further strengthened and solidified this past year with realization. From our vantage point, we continue to see justification for the sustained structural shift from investors towards private markets. We're confident in our approach of providing bespoke solutions within private markets. This is a unique way to engage with investors, and it helps us to stand out. For 2022, we expect to continue our growth trajectory and forecast to raise $22 billion-$26 billion based on this continued client demand. Turning to the investment side, the strong investing activity, which I mentioned to you on our last call, continued in the second half of this year.
In 2021, we were able to secure a record $32 billion of attractive investment content for our clients. We enter 2022 with a strong conviction that our focus on thematic investing and transformative trends will enable us to navigate the market. That market continues to be extremely competitive. We build businesses by leveraging our entrepreneurial ownership approach to transform portfolio companies into market leaders at scale. Our carefully selected investment themes from prior years, we believe, has been a strong force amplifying returns in today's portfolio. We have some good exits this year. We're getting good feedback from many of our clients on relative performance and on our results. As we've talked about in the past, some of last year's exits were carryovers from a lighter 2020. Moving into the future, our overarching investment strategies remain largely unchanged. Thematic investing is key.
I'll speak a little bit more about investments and realizations later in the presentation, but for now, let me hand over to Hans, who will talk about our assets under management.
Thanks, David. Also a warm welcome from my side. As David already mentioned, we had a great year, which was supported by a catch-up in activity that was postponed from 2020. For 2022, we expect our strong underlying growth momentum to continue. Let's move to slide 4. We grew AUM by 17% to $127 billion in 2021. We're business builders and maintain a strong conviction in our strategy of transformational investing, which combines thematic sourcing with hands-on value creation. This is all about identifying the winning sectors where future growth is, combined with transforming the assets to grow into global leaders. The commitments received by our clients confirm their confidence in the strength of our investment approach and our private markets platform. Let's look at the commitments in more detail on slide 5.
We received $25 billion in new commitments in 2021. In the first half of the year, we reported strong fundraising that was supported by a catch-up in momentum from 2020. As we entered the second half, we saw this strong demand to continue along with the emergence of a highly active investment environment. Combined, those two factors allowed us to accelerate the conversion of more client mandates and interim closings of traditional funds with higher amounts committed. Inflows in our evergreen funds were also very strong in the fourth quarter, which was one of the strongest quarters on record. The stronger second-half results increased our full year 2021 fundraising to $25 billion, which is ahead of our guidance, $19 billion-$20 billion.
Starting with private equity, which represents 50% of the total inflows or $12.4 billion. Fundraising was backed by a solid investment deployment and a strong track record for realization. Another milestone was the closing of our fourth flagship private equity buy-out program, which made up 10% of total fundraising. Private debt represented 24% of new commitments or $6.1 billion. In 2021, our debt business continued to benefit from a favorable market environment. Our debt business was driven by two strategies. The main driver for BSL business was the CLOs. We raised six new CLOs, which contributed $2.6 billion in new assets. Our CLO business represents 6% of our total AUM and is expected to grow strongly in the years to come.
The second strategy was our direct lending business, which mainly stemmed from issuing several senior loan programs. Private real estate represented 99% of total new commitments or $2.2 billion. Real estate growth was slightly below the other asset classes as it's in between fundraising cycles. Real estate is in the early stages of marketing its new flagship fund targeting global real estate opportunities. Therefore, we expect real estate to contribute more in 2022. Private infrastructure represented 17% of new commitments or $4.2 billion. Infrastructure is in the midst of fundraising for its next generation direct offering. We have seen strong demand with a relevant contribution to fundraising over the second half of 2021. Let's now look at the growth across the different client solutions.
Our differentiated bespoke client solutions, which cater to client demand for tailored private market investments, remain the largest contributor at 62% of total capital raised. These solutions include both open-ended evergreens and tailored mandates. Evergreens were $6.5 billion or 26% of assets raised and grew by 30%. We raised an additional $8.9 billion in mandates, a growth of 14%. Our traditional closed-ended programs also continued to grow by 10%, raising $9.5 billion or 38% of total capital raised. It is becoming clearer that more and more clients appreciate the flexibility of choice we offer with our range of non-traditional private markets offerings.
We believe our ability to provide clients tailored access to private markets by creating and actively managing bespoke client solutions to meet their needs for diversification remains unique in the industry and will continue to fuel future growth. With that, I would like to move on to slide 6. Now that we discussed the 25 billion of gross inflows, let's go through the impact of drawdowns, redemption, exchange rates, and performance-related effects. We have good visibility on drawdowns and redemptions and provided the market with a 2021 guidance of around $9.5 billion on those two factors. Starting with drawdowns, they came in at $6.3 billion. This is around $1 billion less than anticipated, mainly driven by a longer holding period for select debt assets.
As a result, these tail downs moved from 2021 to 2022 and are included in our full year guidance for 2022. Redemptions are different. We manage approximately $37 billion in evergreen programs, which provide some form of liquidity. For 2021, the redemptions were $2.2 billion. This is only 6% of the respective average assets under management. Evergreen programs were again a net contributor to growth as their inflows were three times the level of the redemption. We do not have visibility on factors such as exchange rates and other performance-related items, and as a result, we did not guide on them. Foreign exchange rate effects were a negative $4.2 billion.
This was mainly driven by a 7% lower euro versus the US dollar at the end of December 2021 compared to 2020. Remember that 45% of our AUM come from euro-denominated programs. With regard to other performance-related effects, AUM growth in the year was supported by strong performance across our private market portfolio, particularly across our evergreen programs. This led to a positive contribution of $5.8 billion from our portfolio of products that link AUM to the net asset value development. Taking into account the above, AUM grew 17% or $18 billion, supported by strong fundraising and performance across the portfolio. Let's now move to slide 7. It provides a summary of the AUM breakdown and fundraising by asset class.
As discussed before, our largest asset class, private equity, continued to contribute the most in 2021, reaffirming the robust global demand for our unique transformational investing approach and confirming our leading position in the largest segment of private markets. Private debt remains an important contributor to fundraising, driven by CLOs and direct lending solutions. One thing to note, tail downs increased in 2021 as a number of our private debt programs matured, which impacted the net AUM growth. We expect a further increase of tail downs in private debt in 2022. As already mentioned, we expect more growth from real estate going into 2022 as it launches its new flagship fund. Private infrastructure continued its solid growth trajectory.
Its performance is a testimony to the ongoing demand for the resilient and essential platform building opportunities offered by our private infrastructure investments. Moving to the next slide. Let's discuss the outlook for 2022. Our outlook for 2022 reflects a continuation of the underlying strong growth momentum experienced in 2021. We expect a gross client demand of $22 billion-$26 billion. The lower end of the range assumes more potential market uncertainty, and that conditions in transactional markets will soften to a certain extent. The upper end of our guidance assumes that the situation around COVID improves, and that the supportive market environment for both fundraising and investments will continue. Let's now give some color on tailwinds and redemptions.
Tail downs relate to traditional funds, and as these funds mature, it results in a reduction in the assets under management. For 2022, we have several funds that will be maturing. Therefore, we expect tail down effects to be between $8.5 billion-$9.5 billion. Our evergreen products will continue to have redemptions. Potential redemptions from these programs are expected to be between $1.5 billion-$2.5 billion as we continue to grow our semi-liquid business. Combined, the tail downs and redemption are expected to be between $10 billion-$12 billion. Again, we have no visibility to quantify other effects such as performance and exchange rates, hence we do not provide guidance on such matter. Before handing back to Dave, I would like to conclude that we're extremely pleased with 2021.
The structural growth towards private assets continues and our investment and client pipelines are robust, confirming the strength of our approach and giving us great confidence as we enter 2022. We remain committed to relentlessly driving forward our strategy of delivering sustainable returns through our focus on transformational investing, bespoke client solutions and positive stakeholder impact. By doing so, we'll continue to deliver strong, sustainable, profitable growth. Back to Dave.
Thank you, Hans. Now let's move to slide 10. We recently published what we call our Private Markets Navigator for 2021. It summarizes our economic outlook and our key investment preferences that we have. We've been providing this to our clients for a long time. 2021 was a dynamic year. As the firm focused on long-term structural trends, we found that many of our target themes, our strong convictions, have really been validated. Our investment opportunities continue to be vetted by our investment committee, who at the current time remains very focused on a multitude of scenarios to ensure potential assets are diligently tested and assessed. The economic outlook for 2022 is of course uncertain, but we know how to navigate complex economic environments. We hold steadfast to our belief that thematic investing is key to unlocking value creation. Let's turn to the next slide.
For us, we have three overarching giga themes that we're focused on, and those are driving secular growth in a lot of different areas. We've been following and watching these themes for a long time. Within each giga theme, we've identified specific sectors and subsectors with good resilience and superior transformational growth profile. They drive our thematic investing approach and shape the landscape of opportunities that we prioritize across each of our asset classes. In private equity. Let's continue to the next slide. As this slide shows, we have $32 billion of investment volume for 2021. As we previously presented, we started 2021 with a robust pipeline of attractive investment opportunities that we've been. Dave, there's something on the line.
Dave, the last minute was very bad quality. Can you maybe repeat the last minute from the $31 billion invested?
As we previously presented, we started 2021 with a robust pipeline of attractive investment opportunities that we advanced, but which were delayed for a variety of reasons in 2020. Throughout 2021, we were able to transact on this pipeline and indeed add to it meaningfully. All right, I've got a backup line. Let me switch.
Yeah, the last.
All right, let me switch that. I apologize about that. As we previously presented, we started 2021 with a robust pipeline of attractive investment opportunities that we had advanced, but which were delayed for a variety of reasons in 2020. Throughout 2021, we were able to transact on this pipeline and indeed add to it meaningfully. This resulted in a very strong year for new investments. It was also a strong market. Global mergers and acquisitions for 2021 have increased to their highest level on record. Globally, $5.8 trillion in investments were recorded. That's up over 60% compared to 2020. Private equity today, our largest business, operates within a broad and deep market. This market is around $1 trillion of annual volume. Compared to global M&A market, the buyout market is a small fraction of that.
Partners Group's activities make up only around 2%-3% of this sub-market. We're in a growing market, and we have a lot of upside. We believe, and our clients believe, that we can continue to grow our investment activity while remaining selective, providing attractive relative value. In 2021, in terms of strategy, we invested the majority of capital, 66% or about $21 billion into direct transactions, while the remaining 34%, or about $11 billion, went into portfolio assets such as secondaries and primaries and broadly syndicated loans. As Hans said, we've been an active CLO issuer. In the last five years, we raised 18 CLOs in Europe and the U.S.
In terms of geography of new investments, the U.S. was the most active region for Partners Group's investment business during 2021, accounting for 50% of all investment commitments versus 41% in Europe and 9% in Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world. Let's move to the next slide where I'll give you an overview of a few recent investments. In private equity, the market continues to be extremely competitive for new investments. It's therefore of the utmost importance to be proactive and prepared when opportunities arise. A key topic within our commercial services theme has been the growing trend towards outsourcing the maintenance of critical equipment. We made a couple of investments into this theme this last year. One of them was Reedy. Reedy provides aftermarket commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, maintenance, repair, and replacement services. There's strong demand for these services within the U.S.
It's forecast to grow at a growth rate of 3%-5% until 2025. Our transformational strategy for Reedy focuses on really two elements. One is sustainability and two is market consolidation. Repairs and maintenance of this type of equipment dramatically reduces the need for new equipment, and that reduces waste and improves sustainability. Furthermore, the company is in a highly fragmented industry, with local and regional players representing more than 70% of the market. There are opportunities to strengthen the company's competitive advantage by buying and building density through M&A. These factors, we believe, can result in double-digit growth. We have planned a number of key value creation initiatives over the coming years and look forward to working together with the company's management as we govern the execution of this plan. Now turning to the next slide.
Private debt has shown resilience in the COVID downturn and a swift normalization. I think that's both good and bad. The good news is that defaults and losses have been much lower than feared at one point in time. The bad news is that spreads for new issuance have tightened quickly. A few topics of note. The first relates to inflation and rates. Clearly, private debt does benefit from increasing rates because the asset class offers floating rate investments. The second topic of note is economic uncertainty. In this environment, we believe that caution is merited in certain pockets of this market, and we're moving up the capital structure with a greater focus on senior secured debt, such as particularly in unitranche.
In summary, there is an attractive opportunity in liquid loans for investors that can tolerate some degree of illiquidity, and there's a premium available for senior direct lending. We're currently focusing on category leaders in resilient, non-cyclical areas. One example of that is a leading U.K. pet food manufacturer called Inspired Pet Nutrition. This company benefits from broad distribution across a lot of different channels. It holds a very strong 24% market share within grocery. We obviously have a lot of experience in the pet related fields, and we believe that natural pet food will be a resilient double-digit growing market. Let's continue on the next slide, which highlights a few of our real estate investments. In private real estate, we had an active year last year, deploying $3.9 billion. We continue to complement our thematic sourcing with situational investing.
We have a number of interesting themes that our team has been pursuing. E-commerce penetration and housing prices continue to rise in almost all major growth centers around the world. Within logistics, the last mile continues to be the main bottleneck for e-commerce retailers, and we still have an undersupply of logistics storage capacity in many densely occupied areas. To capitalize on this, we recently acquired, on behalf of our clients, a portfolio of industrial assets in the U.S. concentrated in several of our high conviction U.S. markets like Dallas and Phoenix. Our investment strategy for office space is highly nuanced as we continue to overweight residential and modern office assets in very specific markets. We're avoiding large cities. With that, let's move to the next slide on infrastructure. I think we have a great infrastructure business.
It's really shown strong performance over the last few years. Our clients seem to be happy. We had a record year this year, securing $5.4 billion in new investments. Our modern infrastructure investing philosophy combines traditional infrastructure asset development with the private equity-like corporate build out strategy to realize extra upside by delivering more complete infrastructure solutions. Within private infrastructure, we see a strong trend developing under our New Living giga theme. New habits and new living standards are driving the need for social infrastructure that has sustainability and flexibility at its core. We have a number of interesting pipeline assets targeting this topic. We continue to see particular growth opportunities in areas that support the shift towards a net zero carbon economy, and a meaningful % of our investments have been made into renewable energy projects. We remain overweight.
The digitization space, where rapidly rising data consumption globally has highlighted the essential nature of broadband networks. We've made 4 digital infrastructure investments last year. We've committed approximately $4 billion to the digitization theme since inception. EOLO is a new investment that we're excited about. They're Italy's leading fixed wireless access broadband provider. They currently connect over 600,000 households and businesses to the Internet, the majority of which are based in less densely populated areas. Our vision is to build on EOLO's leading domestic position and transform the company into a leading European fixed wireless access broadband platform. EOLO benefits from transformative trends driving increased digitization, ubiquitous connectivity, and network densification, and those are some of the themes that guide our investment approach to digital infrastructure.
In summary, we remain confident that our focus on the right sectors, and by driving private equity like value creation strategies, we'll continue to have good relative outcomes in our infrastructure programs. Now let's move to the next slide. On a portfolio-wide basis, within our controlled private equity portfolio, we've seen double-digit earnings growth. In the 12 months ending June of 2021, our direct private equity portfolio experienced a 25% year-on-year earnings uplift. Now, there's a lot that goes into creating that type of performance, but a couple of important elements include, number 1, carefully selected growth themes. There's a lot of these attractive niches that are out there that seem to be less accessible for public markets investors. I think we've demonstrated to our clients that we have a strong edge as a firm in identifying and capturing investment content in these growth themes.
Number two is platform building strategies. We find strong anchor businesses in fragmented markets with good bones and good teams, and we help them to scale and densify through acquisitions. You'll find meaningful scale being built in this way in many of our companies. The third aspect to generating strong underlying performance today is asset transformation. In this market, which is marked by high valuations for stable assets. You can't expect to generate historical levels of returns just by going long leveraged equity. You have to shape, you have to enhance, you have to transform companies. Today, we've got an eye focused on transformation, and we govern these transformation agendas through our boards. The combination of these factors is producing good earnings growth. If you can drive earnings growth like this, attractive returns tend to follow. That was certainly the case for our investments last year.
Let's go to the next slide and talk about realizations. Buyers today are paying up for quality. We have worked very hard to transform our portfolio into solid leading assets. The market obviously rewarded us for that this past year. Our underlying portfolio realizations reached $29 billion last year. We've talked about this before, but we had postponed several exits previously expected for 2020, and a number of those did indeed close in 2021. That factors into this extraordinary result. We also benefited from several companies that exceeded our initial expectations from a value creation and therefore from a return perspective, and that factors into this extraordinary result. A smaller factor, but still somewhat relevant, is that I would have probably previously, maybe a year ago, assumed that some of this liquidity would have actually come in 2022.
We had one or two events that closed last year due to fast timelines and accelerated value creation work, and that factors into this extraordinary result. These strong exits have obviously helped to further solidify our track record. If I look at the pipeline, I don't currently expect this level of portfolio liquidity in 2022. One example that closed in the second half of this year was the sale of our U.S. digital engineering services company, GlobalLogic, for an enterprise value of $9.5 billion. During our ownership, we've increased GlobalLogic's employee base by more than 7,000 additional software designers, engineers, and data experts. Our investment in GlobalLogic generated an average gross multiple in excess of 5x. We've also completed the sale of Cerba HealthCare, which is a leading European player in the medical diagnosis market.
During our ownership, we led Cerba's transformation by penetrating new international markets, expanding its business into veterinary testing services, and expanding and repositioning Cerba's research business for biotech and pharma companies. Our investment in Cerba generated an average gross multiple of over 2.5x for Partners Group's clients and our co-investors. Another announced exit was the sale of a large US portfolio of industrial real estate with a combined leasable area of 8.6 million sq ft. This investment's generated an average gross multiple of over 2x for our clients. In summary, we had a year of significant performance. Going into 2022, we're confident that our executive team's various growth initiatives and our tried-and-true investment strategy will allow us to continue to develop strong assets and solid performance. With that, I'd like to hand over to the moderator for any questions.
We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question or make a comment may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered the queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use only handsets while asking a question. Webcast viewers may submit their questions in writing via the related field. Anyone with a question may press star and one at this time. The first question comes from the line of Hubert Lam from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. I got a few questions. Firstly, on realizations, just given the strong realization environment in the second half, any change on your guidance on performance fees being 40%-45% of revenues for the full year? That's my first question. Second question is on fundraising. Do you expect any increased demand from the retail or the wealth channel, this year? Any acceleration of growth, expected from this year? I guess also including the DC pension plans, how do you expect that to grow in 2022?
Lastly, I guess on hiring, just given the strong fundraising guidance and investment outlook, do you see any need to ramp up your hiring this year, more than expected just given the strong outlook that you have in fundraising and investing? Thank you.
Thanks, Hubert. I'll take the first and the last question, and Dave will take the fundraising question. As we said, and you saw that 2021 is an exceptional year because of the combination of what happened in 2020, and that we have seen some acceleration from 2022. That this year is exceptional is reflective of our guidance because performance fee, we guided to our 40%-45%, which confirms an exceptional year. Now, what you need to know is two things which I think are important. It's not one-on-one with realization because private markets are a little bit more complicated in nature. These programs we have, right, it goes to over 300 programs and different mandates with different recognition mechanisms and methods between the waterfalls and the high watermark falls. So that's to.
That's something to call out. I think what is important is that what is exceptionally more this year will normalize again in 2022. I think that's the important thing, huh. It's good to see that we have a strong activity.
Next year, what is important to mention, as we said also, it goes back to the range we always have done between 20%-30%. Now, what's important to know as we continue to grow our business, our performance fees will grow at that level, at between 20%-30%. We just need to recognize this year is exceptional and our guidance was reflective of that. On the headcount, yes, we are investing in our growth, and that's something we said in the half year results already. Remember, 2020 had the benefit of the 2019 hiring. We entered the year with on average 12% more headcount, which was good. The hiring we have done made sure we could follow through on the high activity this year.
As of December, we started to increase the headcount. The December headcount is around 5% above where it was in December. As we enter 2022, we continue to deliver on the hiring to support future growth.
On the retail and DC side, I think we have seen good demand this last year as reflected in these results. This has been a channel that I think we've shown some real differentiation in. I would expect for that trend to continue. I don't expect a hockey stick heading into, you know, 2022, but I do expect for the current trend that we're experiencing to continue. For DC, I think it'll continue to be a year where we lay good groundwork, but it's not going to show up with a marked difference in terms of huge assets coming in this year, is my expectation.
Great. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from the line of Arnaud Giblat from BNP Paribas Exane. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Good afternoon. I've got three questions, please. Firstly on the investment activity, H2 was well quite off the charts. Can you talk about how that has impacted your levels of dry powder? I mean, if you could quantify a bit the pipeline you see into H1 a bit more, or give a bit more flesh out a bit for us, that'd be helpful. Secondly, since the Fed has turned a bit more hawkish, I'm wondering what sort of impact you're generally seeing in terms of financing conditions or general prospects on deal activity.
My third question is with regard to the UBS partnership, how is that shaping up, where do you see the potential run rate flow level reaching and how fast? Thank you.
Sure. I'll cover the first question. It was a very solid year for investment activity. We have between 1.5 and 2 years of dry powder that we keep on hand. We have maintained that. Even though we did have a considerable amount of investment, we also had a lot of realization, and some of those realizations came in evergreen structures that need to redeploy that capital. We were able to maintain our target levels of having about 1.5-2 years of dry powder. The pipeline for new investments heading into 2022 is also quite robust.
Because of the thematic approach that we have for investing, our teams don't start the year from scratch, but we have a lot of lines in the water for potential investment opportunities. It's sometimes hard to predict timing, because we have sectors and themes that we're pursuing and actively engaged in, but you don't quite know when, you know, the target company you're most interested in will ultimately come up for sale. The pipeline is actually at similar levels to what it was this time last year, even a little bit higher in certain segments. With regards to financing and general activity, we continue to have robust levels of discussion and activity. Transactions continue to get done and financed reasonably well.
No marked change despite a little bit of noise in the public markets for private activity. Then Hans, UBS partnership is something you're quite close to. Do you wanna speak to that?
Yeah. I think it's another example how we can cater to that part of the market. We have a good start. We already raised a couple of hundred million in 2021, and we do expect over the next 3-5 years that that will grow to $1 billion-$3 billion. This is just another example how we cater to that segment of the market.
That's it. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Campbell Gourie from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.
Hi, good afternoon. Just a few questions from myself. So firstly, in terms of the growth in the evergreen structures, particularly in Q4, you know, what do you think is driving that? Was there any sort of particular client demand for locking up for longer? Or is it to do with more liquidity, sort of, preferences of clients? Just what's been driving that in Q4? Is there anything particular there? That's the first question. The second question, how are you sort of thinking about underwriting of returns? You know, given valuations still remain relatively high, and potentially the cost of leverage is going up as well.
You know, how do you sort of think about the broader underwriting of returns in this sort of environment? Then, finally, just in terms of the, you know, obviously you've done a lot of investing this year. You know, has there been any sort of material shift in the kind of size of deals you're doing and has that been reflected in the guidance you're giving for asset raising in 2022 in terms of the ability to deploy, let's say up to $26 billion? Thank you.
Thanks. I'm happy to take those. We did have good growth in Evergreen. Q4 was strong. I do think in an environment where inflation is being talked about, people are looking for interesting places to go. I f I'm a private client and looking at options, I think getting exposure to a portfolio of solid middle market companies with above average margins and pricing power and strongly experienced boards helping to navigate that terrain, that looks like a pretty good place to be relative to alternatives.
Just anecdotally talking to a couple of, you know, the advisors there, you know, I think our solutions are getting good play, as people landscape there are the alternatives that they have to put capital to work in this kind of interesting market. With regards to the underwriting of returns, as valuations have come up, we have continued to put emphasis on the operational impact that we have on the companies that we acquire. As we've talked about in the past, you know, the impact of increasing prices is erosion returns if you continue to operate in the same way. We've put more emphasis on understanding those companies well in advance.
Coming to the acquisition table with a business plan already in hand with operators already staffed up who are ready to drive those value accretion plans. Our levels of return that we're underwriting are actually quite similar to what they were in a prior period, although we're having to work harder. You asked about how the cost of leverage going up can potentially impact that. We have about a turn less leverage within our most recent private equity portfolio versus what the market statistics suggest the market is applying on their portfolios. We tend to drive our value with operational engagement as opposed to with excess leverage.
It could have an impact on returns, but it should be less in our portfolio than maybe some other portfolios that are out there. With regards to the last question with regards to the size of investment, we have had a couple of larger investments. We tend to, within our controlled private equity portfolio, invest in the middle market between EUR 500 million at the low end and EUR 2.5 billion at the high end. We did have a couple of larger transactions that we completed this last year. It's not a structural shift in terms of how we're finding value or in terms of what we're communicating to the market. We anticipate maintaining the same size.
We are doing a little bit less syndication, a little bit less partnership than what we've done in some years past. We're retaining a little bit more of the equity for our clients as demand has increased. It's not a strategy shift going after larger assets.
Thanks, David. Thank you.
Yep, no problem.
That was the last question from the phone.
Dave, there's one more from the webcast and this is. I'll just read the question: Can you provide us with your view on how valuation of your PE assets are impacted by the current environment characterized by rising rate expectations and as well as derating of high growth sectors in public markets? Have you seen an impact in private markets as well already for such rotations?
Yeah. It's the valuations that we're seeing within private markets have already been quite varied this last year. Quality assets are trading for very strong valuations. Companies that can navigate that environment, companies that have pricing power, strong margins, and the ability to pass on those costs are going at very different valuations than companies where that's not believed to be the case. You know, we factor in expected valuation environment that's very different in the future than it is today, and we price that into our acquisition case. That's how we tend to manage it. We do anticipate some potential volatility, but it's nothing that we haven't navigated in the past, and we're trying to build that into our underwriting.
Thank you.
If there are no further questions, then we'd like to thank you for your participation and ongoing interest in our company and have a great day.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for participating, and thank you for choosing Callsco. Goodbye.