Welcome everyone. I hope all of you are safe and healthy and thank you for joining us this morning. Now we all wish we could be doing this in person, but we're quite excited to share with you our views on where Carlyle is heading over the next several years. We haven't hosted an Investor Day since 2013, 1 year after we went public. Since then a lot has been accomplished and a lot has changed.
Today's Investor Day comes at a good moment in time to tell you what we're doing, how we're positioned and why we're so excited about growth in the years to come. I'm going to share with you our strategy and our priorities and our senior leadership team is looking forward to discussing the details underlying our plans. And I think in addition to giving you a good understanding of Carlyle and our path ahead, you'll also get a great feel for the people and culture that make Carlyle so special. Glad. So let's begin by stating that last year Carlyle delivered terrific financial results.
By all measures, whether it's record FRE or record accrued carry balances or strong returns, we performed exceptionally well. Despite challenging conditions and uncertainty everywhere, we remained active and executed across our global diverse platform, investing, realizing and raising large amounts of capital all in a remote environment. The strong results in 2020 reflect our attitude to coexist with all that is going on in this complex environment and our firm's amazing ability to adapt as changes occur all around us. 2020 isn't the culmination of hard work, but rather we believe just the beginning of continued momentum as we generate more growth in the years to come. Now allow me to take a moment and set the stage and look back at how this journey began to get us to where we are today.
Our founders were pioneers in the industry. By investing wisely, fundraising in every region of the world, establishing our brand and shaping our culture, they built the foundation of this amazing company. Just 20 years ago, we were a relatively small DC based firm with $4,000,000,000 in assets under management. Today, we've grown and evolved to become a global leader in private capital markets. We're a firm of 1800 professionals around the world in 29 offices in 19 countries, managing approximately $250,000,000,000 in assets through a broad range of investment strategies across all major asset classes.
And throughout this journey, our values and culture have remained true to our founders' original principles of trust, integrity and partnership. Building on the success of our past. In the last several years, a lot of work has gone into adapting our business model and organization positioned Carlyle for the future. We simplified the structure of our organization into 3 business segments that reflect the way we approach the market, private equity, private credit and private asset portfolio solutions. In doing this, we streamlined our offerings and reduced product proliferation.
We architected our private credit approach from the ground up and recruited world class talent, which has injected new ideas and innovative thinking into our firm. We broke down organizational silos and implemented a global platform oriented approach. By taking advantage of our deep industry specialization with institutional value creation capabilities, we can invest in better, while also driving operating leverage. We embraced a multi stakeholder approach, which for all of you shareholders has meant a deliberate shift away from a historical singular focused on performance fees towards an objective to deliver more FRE and growth of distributable earnings. We transitioned the firm from a private company to a full C corporation with industry leading governance, providing simplicity, transparency and alignment.
One share, one vote. And finally, we've accelerated our approach of building better within our portfolio, embedding and integrating our best in class ESG capabilities directly into our investment processes throughout the firm, thereby supporting value creation to the benefit of our portfolios, limited partners, the communities we live in and ultimately our shareholders. All of this work is about driving change and evolution, which has kept us quite busy over the last several years. Now there really is no rest for the weary because last year, in addition to navigating the complex environment, our leadership team was also hard at work creating a strategic plan to accelerate Carlyle's growth over the next 4 years. We kept it simple and a few key principles underpin our strategic plan.
Namely, we are focusing our efforts to build on and attracting more value from our strengths, pursuing only those strategies that are big and scalable capturing operating leverage as we grow. If we can adhere to these principles and continue to invest wisely, it ought to all come together with terrific performance for all of our stakeholders. Taking a step back, in a nutshell, I am driving Carlyle to think bigger, perform better and move faster. This is today's Carlyle. So let's now dive into the strategic plan.
Big picture, there are 3 major priorities driving our efforts. 1st, we will accelerate our growth by focusing on and scaling our biggest and best platforms. There's a lot here, so please bear with me. Many of you have asked on previous earnings calls, when will your next fundraising campaign start? Well, it's now and we've already begun.
You've also asked how much are you going to be raising? At least $130,000,000,000 over the next 4 years. That's our target. This is a critical component underlying our strategic plan, which will set the stage for investment activity and earnings growth for many years to come. As you can see on this slide, we expect roughly 50% or about $65,000,000,000 of our fundraising dollars to come from our global private equity business.
Our flagship corporate private equity funds will drive much of this growth across the United States, Europe and Asia, targeting fund over fund growth of 20% or more. Our flagship U. S. Real estate fund is already in the market, and we believe that its portfolio's resilience during the crisis attractive historic returns will drive strong demand. The feedback so far is encouraging.
Furthermore, the advantage of our platform approach is that we can pursue more investment strategies through our sector driven teams and therefore raise additional capital around growth oriented in core return private equity strategies. Our confidence in scaling up within global private equity is grounded in our history of consistently delivering for our limited partners. In particular, we have demonstrated an ability to perform responsibly at scale, not only to raise and invest, but return significant amounts of capital through cycles. As you can see, we've invested very large amounts and realized nearly $210,000,000,000 in proceeds since inception, responsibly managing large quantum of capital at scale, which is all about deploying across cycles and performing consistently. This is what our LPs count on us to do.
In the short to medium term, markets permitting, we're anticipating making large distributions back to fund as exits increase and we monetize gains that we have generated in the last few years, reflected in the current record $89,000,000,000 of value in our portfolios, which sets the stage nicely for our LPs to be in a position to re up and recycle the capital that we are returning to them back to us to fuel our growth. Pete Claire and Sandra Horbuck will go into more detail about the strength of our global private equity platform in our competitive advantages, which enable us to consistently deliver for our limited partners and hopefully, you'll share our confidence that we can continue to scale this business. Moving to Global Credit. This platform has doubled AUM in the last 5 years, despite a complete rebuild of our prior approach. And our ambition, it's to double it yet again in the next handful of years, implying we could reach $80,000,000,000 plus within the next 4 years of the strategic plan.
You'll hear more from Mark Jenkins later, our Global Credit segment today is a platform driven balanced business offering broad credit investment strategies across liquid, illiquid and real assets. To reach our AUM ambitions, we're going to lean in and grow existing strategies like CLOs, direct lending and opportunistic credit, growing adjacencies, which represent white space for us, including strategies like infrastructure and real estate credit, and over the very long term, extend our footprint and reach into developing credit markets like Asia. The growth we'd like to capture is supported by strong tailwinds relative to private equity. The private credit asset class is still small, only about 20% of the size of private equity. And in light of the low interest rate environment we're in, we're seeing increasingly more investors rotate from traditional liquid fixed income into private credit to do everything they can to capture more yield.
Now as a reminder, everything we do in credit is helped by the sector expertise, established history and massive resources of our Global Private Equity segment. Because we purpose built this segment with a platform approach, as you see on this chart, we expect the FRE pickup will be enormous. In the past 5 years that we've doubled AUM, FRE went from $8,000,000 to nearly $100,000,000 let me take a moment here and just say, I remember on several earnings calls asking for your patience so that we could build this credit strategy in the right way. I want to thank you for that patience because I believe it's paying off. And with your continued support, we believe we are on a path to hit $200,000,000 or more of FRE in our plans timeframe.
Now turning to our Investment Solutions segment, which operates under the App Invest brand. This segment helps our limited partners better manage their alternatives portfolios through 3 well established strategies. Secondary solutions, a market driven by the maturation of the asset class, which gives LPs access to diversified and seasoned private equity portfolios. Direct investments, which supplement limited partners' traditional commitments with the benefits and efficiency of co invest and primary investments, which is an entry point to alternatives for LPs looking to access multiple managers on a simple one stop and highly diversified basis. Over the last few years, we focused on scaling Alpinvest secondaries and co investment businesses, and we raised over $14,000,000,000 last year alone.
And what enables that type of fundraising? It's simple, investment performance. As you can see, this business has delivered terrific and consistent returns for our limited partners over time, which sets the stage nicely for Alpinvest to continue driving future growth as the alternative asset class continues to grow and mature, portfolio solutions provided by Alpinvest will only become more in demand as more and more limited partners look for solutions and strategies to help actively manage their growing illiquid portfolios. As you scale these strategies, we've gone from fee related earnings of $17,000,000 in 20.12 to $37,000,000 in 2020 and have a plan to potentially double this level by 2024. This segment is a good example of what happens when we focus on our strengths, concentrate on just a few products that are large and scalable and capture operating leverage.
So we have our sights set on raising $130,000,000,000 of capital across all three of our major business segments based on our strong positioning and track record. What I'd also like to highlight are the attractive industry trends that provide additional support with the acceleration and scaling of our platforms. A few important observations. Let's start with the fact that we're all trying to figure out how to invest well in the current low in a straight environment. Our limited partners with long term investment horizons are looking for all the performance they can get.
I know this chart is a little busy. But as you can see, whether it's in buyouts or private lending or real estate, our industry historically outperforms public indices. And whether it's pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, family offices or the high net worth channel, they're all seeking more private strategies to generate alpha. Given this outperformance, if the low yield environment relative to history persists, which we believe is more likely than not, we foresee sustained allocation to private markets for many years to come. Now having more dry powder is great, but what's also happening is the opportunity set for private investing continues to grow.
There's change accelerating all around us, all over the world, in all industries and in all sectors. These changes create investment opportunities for Carlyle. Regions like India and Japan are opening up to private investment. Asset classes like credit and infrastructure continue to expand. New strategies like core private equity are emerging and opportunities to fund new business models for fast growing and disruptive businesses, particularly in technology and healthcare are increasing every day.
Massive shifts like energy transition and sustainability have also created huge capital needs from both a growth and value perspective. And while all this is going on, entrepreneurs and high growth companies in all industries and regions want to stay private for longer as they continue to seek out the alignment and value creation that firms like Carlisle provide. On the other end of the spectrum, as large corporates pursue M and A or refocus on core businesses, they are shedding and divesting non core assets that offer spin out and carve out opportunities for us. No doubt valuations may be high in this current environment. Uncertainty is everywhere.
Markets are volatile and generating growth is always hard, but there certainly is no shortage of opportunity. Within the investor community, we are seeing the largest LPs wanting to consolidate their relationships concentrate commitments with fewer GPs who can deploy and perform at scale. Given our track record of performing cross cycles, we believe we are well positioned to benefit as LPs continue to demand more from less, meaning broader and larger, more strategic relationships with fewer GPs. Demonstrating this point, as you'll hear from Nathan Urquhart later, at Carlyle, 80% of commitments from our largest limited partners come from those with exposure to 4 or more of our funds. And finally, as demonstrated by our capital raising in 2020, a trusted Furman brand is an invaluable asset in a virtual fundraising environment.
So we feel pretty good that our business segments, their performance and industry trends set us up nicely to execute against the first strategic priority. Now let's move to the 2nd strategic priority, namely doing a better job of capturing adjacencies. I want to reiterate our intention to build off of strength, not diluting or proliferating our strategies and focusing on big scalable markets. This lens applies not just to our existing businesses, but to new opportunities as well. So with that in mind, let me touch on just 2 specific areas we are investing a lot of time and attention, capital markets and insurance solutions through our Fortitude platform.
We have a real opportunity to capture significant revenue through our newly integrated capital markets business. Capital markets is about as adjacent as it gets to our main business. In the last 5 years alone, we've generated nearly $300,000,000 of issuance in Carlyle related deals. We have positioned our capital markets professionals to provide placement services on capital markets transactions and to participate in securities underwritings and loan syndications, currently focused on transactions involving Carlyle and our portfolio companies. Internally, we've worked over the past few years to ensure that our capital markets team can our investment professionals and has access to deal flow across the firm.
We believe that capturing more fees from this activity is readily achievable. Historically, Carlyle and our portfolio companies have paid 3rd party firms' aggregates in some years approaching $1,000,000,000 for investment banking and other capital market services, all we are doing here is capturing a small percentage of these fees, perhaps 10% to 20% over time, which is already an established practice in the industry. As deal M and A and exit activity continues to pick up and as our LP platform scales and grows in AUM, we would fully expect our capital markets business to reflect that underlying growth. Kurt is going to go into this in more detail on how we see this area developing in the profitability growing. Now to be clear, we do not want to become an investment bank.
We are and always will be an investment firm. But our capital markets team can be very effective in assisting Carlyle portfolio companies with their financing needs, thereby earning a portion of fees attributable to those financings. Like I said, this business is about as adjacent as it gets. The second very focused way we can expand is through our permanent capital insurance solutions platform. First of all, Fortitude is living up to expectations and performing quite well.
The rotation of assets has begun into Carlyle Funds, dollars 4,700,000,000 has already been investor committed, which we expect will soon increase to $6,000,000,000 in commitments. These commitments are long dated and sticky in nature, meaning we expect these assets to be maintained at Carlyle for some time. These investments have been broad based and deployed across the full spectrum of Carlyle's product offerings with commitments to over 25 products across all of our segments. Also on track are the multiple revenue streams Carlyle derives from this platform. Management fees on our Fortitude co investment vehicle and standard economics on the assets rotated into Carlyle Products are generating approximately $50,000,000 in annual fees.
We're currently benefiting from attractive returns on our balance sheet investment in Fortitude, about 15% annual return on equity on our $465,000,000 balance sheet investment. Importantly, the very complicated carve out was completed successfully to establish a standalone business. This platform is now in place, fully operational, and we are ready to drive future growth at Fortitude through acquisitions as well as new reinsurance activity. The growth will be lumpy and episodic, but we are working hard on a strong pipeline of reinsurance and M and A transactions in the market. And please remember, the market size Fortitude can pursue is massive with an estimated $2,000,000,000,000 of legacy liabilities on insurance company balance sheets that are looking for a home.
While our activity is understandably neither projectable nor predictable, we do expect to consummate several deals in the coming years. I asked for the same patience you gave us as we rebuilt our credit platform because we intend to build our insurance focused platform in the right way. Similar to what I said about our capital markets initiative, just to be clear, we do not want to become an insurance company, but rather we are seeking to extend and grow our investment management capabilities and solutions into the insurance sector. As our capital base grows from retained earnings, we'll be looking for opportunistic strategic acquisitions that are a good fit with our organization we're buying makes sense versus building. What might interest us in the future?
Again, 1st and foremost, it must meet the same we're using to manage our existing business. It plays off our strengths. It's in a big market and it's scalable. For example, opportunities to be a strategic consolidator like we did in the CLO business during the last great financial crisis. Opportunities that give us more permanent capital as we did with Fortitude where we can establish even more recurring and predictable FRE base and secure long term asset management contracts.
And opportunities to build our capabilities in a strategic way, like we did quite frankly with Alpinvest in 2011 or more recently in 2018 with Carlyle Aviation. Anything we do would need to be accretive, a good cultural fit, drive FRE on a recurring basis and have the potential to increase shareholder value over the long term in a move the needle kind of way. So we covered accelerating our existing platforms and capturing adjacencies. Now, let me describe the 3rd strategic priority, continuing to institutionalize the firm. This can mean a lot of things.
But for us, this means first, more disciplined focused on expenses and managing ourselves better, ensuring we're not only effective but efficient. We are committed to continue driving FRE and expanding our margins as we grow. Kurt will provide more details on our ability to achieve 40 in margins by 2024, which is a huge improvement from where we were just a few short years ago. Now while we are enthusiastic about this goal, we do not foresee Carlyle becoming the low cost player in the industry. What we do want to be is the most effective organization at driving strong investment returns and DE over time via our deep global platform and diversified business composition and product mix, which does not necessarily equate to being the firm with the highest in the industry.
2nd, bringing together best in class management and leaders to drive our firm forward. We've already started this effort, over the last several years, we've added key talent across the firm, introducing external views to complement homegrown leaders. Nearly 30% of our partners and managing directors joined Carlyle in just the last 5 years, and nearly 30% have been with Carlyle for 15 years or more. This combination of proven Carlyle track record with new perspectives provides us with a very strong team to drive our strategic plan. 3rd, execution is all about alignment, which is why we put in place stock based compensation with vesting linked to the long term timeframe of the plan in direct links to achieving defined growth and FRE targets, closely aligning success for our leadership with success in executing and taining Carlyle's objectives.
4th, we are continuing to shape and build the culture that makes Carlyle so special. We are widely recognized as a leader in our industry with respect to diversity, equity and inclusion. We have invested in this because we know it makes us the best at the most critical thing we do every day, making important judgments. We understand the fundamental value of an inclusive culture that fosters diversity of experiences and sharing of all perspectives so that we can make the best decisions possible every day. We are committed to continuing our leadership on this front.
And finally, while we are already perceived as a leader in the industry, we are doubling down to do even more in ESG. At Carlyle, ESG and Impact are not a product or fund, but a culturally embedded approach that is integrated into all of our investment processes for creating long term growth and sustainable value. To us, better businesses have 5 key dimensions: diverse and inclusive teams, engaged employees, sustainable growth, climate resilience and community ties. It's important to track, report on and create alignment with these objectives, which is why we're so pleased to have announced last week an industry first financing facility for our private equity funds that is linked to achieving portfolio company board diversity objectives. I'm excited for Meg Starr and Karl Heelander to walk you through the ways we are driving value across our portfolios, what we are doing to make ourselves and our companies better and where we see opportunity going forward.
So, what's the punchline to all of this? Well, when you combine all of the pieces underlying our plan together, accelerating our largest platforms, capturing adjacencies continuing to institutionalize the firm. We believe by 2024, we can achieve $1,600,000,000 in DE, comprised of $800,000,000 in FRE and another $800,000,000 in net realized performance fees. The ramp in DE is expected to stay flat or gradually start to increase this year, but the slope ought to really start to accelerate in 2022 and beyond. This would also mean FRE margins expanding from 30% to 40%.
Of course, there will be challenges and issues we must manage along the way as the world continues to change and be disrupted. After all, markets could correct significantly or the real economy could stall. The past year has demonstrated that Carlisle is resilient and adaptable and that our global diversified platform can adjust responsibly capture opportunity in complex environments. No doubt the environment is challenging as we must navigate uncertainty, high valuations and uneven economic recovery. But I believe Carlyle is well positioned to invest, deploy and create value on behalf of our limited partners who turn to us in good times and bad as a trusted pair of hands to responsibly manage their capital with a long term perspective.
Our historic performance and certainly 2020 demonstrate our ability to adapt, shift and pivot to the most attractive regions, investment strategies, asset classes and industry sectors as we seek to navigate this complex environment, we all find ourselves in. So let me wrap things up with some concluding thoughts. A lot of work has gone into adapting our business model and changing our organization to strengthen Carlyle for years to come. We believe 2020 was just the beginning of some great results. Moving forward, we're going to keep it simple we stick to a few core principles that run throughout the three priorities of our strategic plan to drive earnings growth.
Industry trends should be helpful to our ambitions, and we're grateful to be well positioned with our limited partners. As we build better in everything we do in an aligned way, we are executing as one firm, remaining grounded and centered because of values that have been with us from the very beginning. And finally, we'll always stay true to who we are, a global investment firm creating value over the long term on behalf of all of our stakeholders. As I hand it over to Kirk to give you more details, I want to assure you we are thinking bigger, performing better and moving faster to accelerate growth. This is today's Carlyle.
Thank you for your time, support and confidence. Over to you, Kurt.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Kurt Buser, Carlyle's Chief Financial Officer. I'm excited to speak with you about how the priorities Kew just laid out will impact our results over the next 4 years. I'll cover many of our objectives for 2024, notably around distributable earnings, including fee related earnings and net realized performance revenues, as well as fundraising. Then I'll walk you through how we plan to meet those targets and what that means for our shareholders.
So let's begin. Over the last few years, we focused on growing our fee related earnings and we remain very committed to that priority. Our funds have performed well, which not only benefits our fund investors, it has also driven our crude carry balance to a record level. Given the craziness of this past year, I just want to remind everyone the last January we converted from a publicly traded partnership to a full C Corporation. So now everyone at Carlyle is fully aligned with our shareholders in a one share, one vote, one share class that is simple and transparent.
We think this has made our stock more attractive and easier to own. Now, as you've already heard from Kew, we formulated a strategic plan designed to accelerate our earnings growth, And we have aligned and incentivized our most senior executives with that plan by granting strategic equity awards that best upon achieving the annual milestones in the plan. We believe this creates better alignment with driving shareholder value. The 1st 6 years we were public. We're We average less than $200,000,000 per year in FRE with margins in the high teens.
Since then, we've been focused on growing our FRE and FRE has steadily increased and more than doubled to $490,000,000 in 2020 on an as adjusted basis. At the same time, we've increased our FRE margins by more than 1,000 basis points to 30% last year. Well, let me be very clear. Our main focus is on absolute FRE growth. And as we scale and manage our expenses, margin growth should be a natural output.
Well, maybe obvious, we can support higher dividends with higher FRE, but better margins with the same FRE will result in the same level of dividends. As we focused on growing our platform and FRE, our mix of earnings has also become much more balanced. Thinking back to when Carlyle was founded, the firm operated with a single purpose, mostly just to generate carry. We're When we went public nearly 9 years ago, not much had changed. And while investment performance will always be our top priority, we realize that growing FRE is equally important for our public shareholders.
So even as we have had a cyclically slower amount of carry realizations over the past 3 years, we've been able to actually achieve reasonably consistent distributable earnings given this focus on improving our earnings mix, and we believe we can maintain a more balanced fixed of earnings as we move forward. Even though our realizations may have slowed the last 3 years, our funds continue to deliver strong performance. One of the most important metrics that we track and that you should as well, our accrued carry balance is at a record level and is over 70% higher than our average balance from 2012 to 2017, when we were generating more than $600,000,000 in annual realized net performance revenues. The accrual is a good indicator of future realized performance revenues. The recent decline in our realized performance revenue isn't because our funds weren't performing.
In fact, it's almost the opposite. The decline over the past 2 or 3 years was mainly due to the transition of realizations between fund generations. Our older funds were just about fully realized and our newer funds were just ramping up and not yet mature enough to take cash carry. Also as you've heard from us consistently over the years, we don't like clawback and our LPs don't like clawback either. We try to manage that risk by first returning a lot of capital to our LPs before we start to take cash carry.
Now that our most recent generation of fully invested funds are more mature and have returned a lot of their capital back to LPs, we expect realized performance revenues to ramp over the next few years. So now, let's go back to what you heard from Q1, our strategic plan. We're focused on accelerating our growth across three priorities. Let me explain how each are going to impact the results. 1st, accelerating scale.
We're going to drive higher management fees and operating leverage. 2nd, adjacencies. We're going to generate incremental revenue from newer streams. And third, institutionalize. We will control costs and align our senior executives with performance and as a result, improve our margins.
So first up, let's talk about earnings. Last year, we produced $762,000,000 in distributable earnings, and we expect that we can more than double that over the next 4 years. Accordingly, DE per share of $2.05 in 2020 should increase to the mid $3 per share by 2024, accounting for an increase in our effective tax rate over that same time. As I said on the Q4 earnings call, you should expect effective DE taxes to increase from around 5% in 2020 to the low 20s in 2024, assuming no changes to the current tax laws. So again, we think we can grow pre tax DE at about a 20% CAGR and per share earnings more than mid teens because of the increased effective tax rate.
Our projected increase in earnings is supported by a few factors, a big step up in fee related earnings A threefold increase in realized net performance revenues. FRE was $490,000,000 as adjusted. And by 2024, we believe FRE should reach $800,000,000 with a margin that is up another 1,000 basis points or so from here To about 40%. I mentioned on our earnings call that we see 2021 FRE remaining at similar levels to 2020. So you will see the vast majority of our expected FRE growth in the 3 years 2022 to 2024.
In the near term, growth in Global Credit and Investment Solutions will offset downward fee pressure in Global Private Equity from continued realizations. As we raise our next series of large flagship funds, global private equity FRE will also increase materially from its current levels. On our realized performance revenue, the bottom line is that our investment portfolio is in great shape pleased. Now that you know where we are going, let me describe how we plan to get there. As Kew said, our next multi year fundraising target is $130,000,000,000 Back in 2016, we set a 4 year fundraising target of $100,000,000,000 up more than 20% from the $78,000,000,000 we raised in the prior 4 year period.
And we exceeded our last multi year fundraising target by 8%. So after a great 2020 fundraising year when we raised $27,500,000,000 without fundraising for any of our flagship global private equity funds, ready to set another multi year target, dollars 130,000,000,000 to raise between 2021 2024. As you look at where we've been, this target is big enough to matter realistic to achieve. Nathan will provide a deeper dive into our fundraising plans, but at this stage, we're intensely focused on meeting the objective. As we reload our flagship funds over the next few years, we expect to see our fee revenues grow from $1,600,000,000 over $2,100,000,000 Most of this growth is tied directly to management fees, but some fee revenue growth will also come from greater transaction fees In capital markets revenue, faster growth in global credit will rebalance our overall business mix, making global credit a bigger piece of an even bigger pie.
Remember, our fee earning AUM is very resilient. The vast majority of our capital is committed for the long term And in many cases, a decade or more. As you'll see on the next slide, our fee earned in AUM has an attractive average fee rate and as a key contributor to our earnings growth, the fee rate on our fee earning AUM has been stable at just about 95 basis points on every dollar. And in fact, that average rate should continue to be stable even as our business mix continues to change. Over the years, we've Place lower yielding feared in AUM with higher quality AUM.
You've seen this in our Investment Solutions segment as well as parts of our Natural Resources platform. And we will continue to prune unprofitable product lines because we care more about growing FRE thinking about growing fee earning AUM as not all AUM is the same nor is it necessarily profitable. After growing fee revenues by scaling the business, we want to capture more fee revenues from natural adjacencies. In 2020, we generated $37,000,000 in transaction fees, exclusive of portfolio advisory fees. We see that amount tripling by 20 24.
Our business generates a significant amount of deal volume guiding and placement fees for investment banks, as Kew discussed. Our plan makes capturing more of these high margin revenues a priority. We've already put the teams and structures in place and earmarked the capital to underwrite this business. Insurance is another area that should drive continued growth in our earnings, both from what we've already built, but also as what we continue to scale through acquisitions. From Fortitude, we see opportunities to increase and diversify earnings.
Hugh mentioned we're generating about $50,000,000 in management fees already. And we think that grows as Fortitude rotates more AUM to Carlyle Management. Fortitude is also operating exceptionally well, generating a mid teen return on equity. Our $465,000,000 investment in Fortitude is likely to generate higher investment income over the next several years or Fortitude may retain that capital and self fund additional M and A. Fortitude can grow in multiple ways via new reinsurance contracts or M and A opportunities and that we should both benefit from.
We will certainly keep you apprised of our activities as we go forward. Let me now move to how we're going to run the firm better, something we refer to as institutionalization. We are pleased with the progress we've made over the last few years, but improvement opportunities remain. We've done a good job already growing FRE, as I mentioned before. The $27,500,000,000 in new capital we raised in 2020 creates great momentum as we head into 2021.
But taking a step back, our primary focus in this regard is to ensure we're growing our top line revenue in excess of our costs over a cycle. So in any one year, you may see that bounce around a bit, but we'd like to see a several 100 basis point difference over time we're scaling our funds, while further leveraging our existing teams. Looking back over the past few years, we've already seen this play out Our investment professionals managing more dollars of AUM on average than they have in the past. As our next series of funds are raised, we should expect this trend to continue, meaning we expect to grow the asset size of our funds. And while we will add some people to better manage and deploy those assets, the growth rate of our revenues should far outpace that of additional expenses.
Our goals are to raise larger funds and do bigger deals. And as we increase efficiency, we will drive FRE growth and better margins. Our deep knowledge base and expertise across our firm can help our deal teams collaborate to drive investment performance across more scale. As the day continues, I urge you to listen to each of our business leaders talk about scaling their respective businesses using a platform approach. We've also been methodical over the past few years pruning funds that can't scale, such as our funds in MENA, Mexico or Africa.
This process has the benefit of helping our FRE and margins as those subscale funds did not drive earnings and also helps us focus on our most scalable strategies. Our plan contemplates continued pruning and rebalancing as we go forward. It's not just compensation and headcount that we're focused on. It's our entire expense base. We learned a lot over the past year as our entire firm moved to a work from home environment.
Some expenses like travel and conferences are likely to come back a bit as we start traveling more. But some of what we've learned about virtual meetings working differently will absolutely carry over into lower expenses versus pre pandemic levels. We're 2020 G and A of $271,000,000 which excludes $30,000,000 of one time cost recoveries down 22% from 2019. As I said on our earnings call a few weeks ago, G and A expense is likely to increase in 2021 due to a normalization in travel. But we believe G and A expenses should remain below prior peak levels as we work differently and more efficiently than we have in the past.
All of this should be doable. Now, let's spend time discussing how our strong investment performance should lead to increased realized performance revenues. First, our accrued carry balance of $2,300,000,000 positions us for higher realized carry over the next few years. When you look back over time, we typically realize performance revenue in any 1 year at about 40% of our accrual balance. Now that's a correlation and not a causal relationship.
But historically, it was a fairly reliable guide when we were exiting at a good clip and our funds were taken carry. That percentage dipped in the past few years. As I mentioned earlier, the main reason for the decrease was due to the transition between fund generations And the newer funds weren't yet taking cash carry. But with our newer funds performing well and assuming generally benign macroeconomic environment, after performance revenue gradually increases in 2021 over 2020, we should expect to see a recovery back So a more standard pull through of our accrual balance, helping us surpass our prior annual net realized performance revenue averages reaching about $800,000,000 by 2024. Digging into our accrual a bit more, we see 3 buckets of what makes up our accrual.
1st from those funds already taking carry as these funds are not only performing well, but seasoned enough and having returned enough capital to fund investors forced to feel comfortable taking cash carry. Our biggest contributor here is our most recent fully invested U. S. Buyout fund, which has accrued $1,100,000,000 in net performance revenues. This fund is already marked at 2 times cost with strong performance and value creation still in front of it.
The second bucket is for those funds not yet taking cash carry. We're performing well, just not yet meeting all of the criteria to take cash carry. A good example is our most recent fully invested Asia Buyout Fund, which we think is moving in the right direction to take cash carry sooner rather than later. The 3rd bucket is for newer funds that may come in and out of carry early in their fund lives. We're still a ways away from taking cash carry.
We'll keep our eyes on these funds, but probably a year or more away from carry realizations. A final bucket that isn't shown is the group of funds across our platform they're investing right now that are not currently in accrued carry, but we expect to drive our accrued carry balance in the future. A prime example is our most recent $18,500,000,000 U. S. Buyout fund, Carlyle Partners 7.
At $5,500,000,000 larger than Carlyle Partners 6, we're excited about its potential. The main message is that we have a strong pipeline of performance revenues to come. And that should gradually increase this year compared to 2020 and start to significantly ramp thereafter. One last way to look at our forward trajectory of our performance fees and realization cycle it's just how much money we have in the ground appreciating. Today, we have about $95,000,000,000 in remaining fair value in our global private equity And global credit carry funds, to put that in perspective, that's about 50% higher than the average levels we had in our last cycle of high realized performance revenues.
This should not be surprising as our most recent generation of carry funds are 30% to 40% larger than their predecessors. As our newer funds also continue to scale, we expect remaining fair value to trend in a similar direction. So when you consider that our funds are 30% to 40% larger, our crude carry is 70% higher than it was several years ago and our assets in the ground are also 50% larger, we see strong underpinnings for realized performance revenue to ramp from here and beyond the levels we've produced in the past. Let's move to realized investment income generated from our balance sheet. Over the last 4 years, our balance sheet investments have more than tripled to $1,700,000,000 that includes investments into our funds largely, but also our investment in Fortitude.
Our balance sheet investments will continue to grow alongside our fundraising goal of $130,000,000,000 In 2020, our realized investment income was $73,000,000 which is up compared to prior years, but we think it is at the beginning of a strong growth cycle. In fact, we expect that our investment income can get to about $150,000,000 per year, although that will vary somewhat by what is sold each year. Clearly we have a lot to look forward to, but the future isn't without some challenges. You'll hear a bit more about this from Pete in a few minutes. But let me frame our carbon energy footprint for you.
But more importantly, why we are very excited about the opportunity for us to transition along with the industry towards a greater focus on renewable energy. Without a doubt, we have a big carbon energy business. Our energy funds have provided attractive investment we're pleased with the opportunities for LPs in the past, and we believe they will continue to do so in the future. But the market is shifting, and LP focus is shifting with it. As the demand for renewable energy investments increases, investor interest in carbon assets has decreased.
We've already seen this transition occurring as our carbon based energy AUM has decreased over the past few years from 12% to just 8% today. Over that same time, we've launched New funds in infrastructure and renewable energy to capitalize on the energy transition and our teams are actively investing those funds. One thing to keep in mind, in our strategic plan and the guidance we provided today, we project our carbon energy AUM to decrease and become a a smaller contributor to management fees. That said, we will continue to earn management fees for a long time off this platform. But we do have the potential to benefit from a lack of new capital into the sector, which could lead to energy production shortfalls And potential profit windfalls.
The real takeaway is that we are focused on transitioning our natural resources exposure towards renewable energy through our integrated infrastructure platform. Now let me finish by pulling all of this together, starting with how we think about our balance sheet capital And what that means for our shareholders. As we execute our strategic plan and generate higher earnings, there are several areas we want to focus on to allocate our capital. 1st and foremost, we are focused on maintaining and growing our quarterly dividend. After tax, FRE is the guide point And support for our dividend.
And as we've discussed, we are optimistic on the trajectory of our FRE growth over the next few years, And then on a lag basis, seeing our dividend grow. Direct investments in our funds are also an important use of our capital as it helps align our interests with fund investors it supports our earnings growth as well. We'll also need capital to organically grow new strategies and support our growing capital markets business, we should require more funding capacity from the firm. We constantly evaluate strategic M and A opportunities, which is hard to predict, but ultimately will require capital that we have on our balance sheet today or capital that we'll need to raise. Keep in mind, any completed strategic acquisition will have a positive incremental impact on top of what we've discussed here today.
And over time, plan to limit annual equity dilution to about 1%. These items are not an order of priority, but all are critical to a sound capital allocation strategy. Our priority for Excess Capital is to accelerate platform and earnings growth. Now let me just again highlight what this means on a per share basis for our shareholders. As we accomplish all that we are projecting, we expect to see our earnings growth per share grow at a mid teen CAGR over the next 3 to 4 years, reaching the mid-three dollars range by 2024.
That's attractive growth and something we're excited about and hope you are as well. So before I conclude, let me remind you of what you're going to hear over the next few hours. You should specifically listen to the subsequent presentations for the following: How our respective businesses plan to grow, how we will take a platform approach to scaling each business and improving earnings, and how we create value for our investors. In addition, you will hear how we harness data and use it for better decision making, as well as how we are increasingly embedding ESG into all that we do. So in closing, thank you for your time today.
And I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress over the next few years.
Good morning. I'm Pete Clair, Chief Investment Officer for Corporate Private Equity, and I also serve as the co head of our largest fund strategy, U. S. Buyout, along with Sandra Horbach, who you'll hear from after me this morning. Today, I want to walk you through our global private equity business and how it fits in our strategy to accelerate growth.
I always say to our investment teams, a business can only grow from a position of strength and our global private equity business is incredibly strong. Global Private Equity is our largest business segment and our most successful to date. It has grown to $132,000,000,000 of assets under management, representing more than half of Carlyle's total AUM. Over the last 30 years, we have built out the capabilities that form the very strong foundation of our business today. Starting with just $100,000,000 in AUM, we've grown over the last 30 years to $132,000,000,000 of assets under management.
And we've been able to grow to that size for one reason, investment excellence. Since our founding in 1987, we have delivered very attractive and consistent investing results through a myriad of different economic climates and increased levels of competition. As we delivered those attractive returns, we earned the trust of our fund investors and they committed larger and larger amounts to our strategies. Our global private equity segment is one of the world's largest and most diversified private equity platforms. As mentioned earlier by Kew, our reorganized global private equity segment combines all of Carlyle's equity investing strategies within one segment, enabling us to leverage our global platform, our local insights and our deep industry expertise across sectors.
We believe our size and capabilities give us distinct competitive advantages. In corporate private equity, we have a leading and scaled platform that enables us to pursue the largest and most globally complex investments in a very effective manner. In U. S. Real estate, we are an established leader with a distinct approach to portfolio construction, which has driven attractive historical performance.
And in natural resources, we've constructed a platform which positions us to capitalize on the global energy transition underway today. I want to touch on some of our smaller younger strategies, core U. S. Real estate, core PE and infrastructure. Each of these strategies manages at least $4,000,000,000 to $5,000,000,000 of assets today.
But all of these businesses have the potential to become $10,000,000,000 plus AUM businesses over time given the market opportunity in front of them. So let's go to my favorite topic, our flagship funds in buyout and real estate. Our ability to drive growth depends on delivering attractive investment returns in doing that consistently, fund after fund. Our U. S.
Buyout, Asia buyout, Europe buyout and opportunistic real estate businesses have each been deploying capital for over 20 to 30 years, investing over $100,000,000,000 since inception, and the performance has been outstanding. As you see from the gross IRRs of these funds on this page. I am very proud of this track record. And across our flagship corporate private equity funds, in my opinion, we have delivered the most consistent returns within our industry. And that is our value proposition to our fund investors, invest capital at scale, earn attractive rates of return and do it consistently fund after fund.
That investment performance and consistency has drawn our investors to make larger and larger commitments to our flagship strategies over the last 30 years. As you see on this slide, due to great investment performance, total commitments for the current vintage, the investing vintage on this slide of our flagship funds were 50% larger than the prior vintage, growing from $27,000,000,000 up to $41,000,000,000 Based on our view of the investment landscape, we believe we can scale our flagship strategies by at least 20% in the next vintage. Continuing to scale our flagship funds has a very meaningful impact on FRE given the operating leverage in our business. As we grow AUM, our headcount grows at a much slower rate, driving higher AUM per investment professional and leading the higher FRE margins. Now, I'll go through each of the businesses in Global Private Equity, starting with our Corporate Private Equity business.
We believe our competitive advantage in corporate private equity is driven by 3 key capabilities that we have very intentionally constructed: our global platform, our deep industry expertise and our ability to drive improvements, value creation in our investments. First, our global team. We have over 250 corporate private equity investment professionals operating across 6 continents to source and execute investments, provide local insight and to leverage our global knowledge. Most importantly, we can deploy these global resources very, very effectively. Our senior partners around the world have worked with each other for over 20 years.
They trust each other. They like each other. When we put together a global deal team to pursue a very complex global business, it is seamless in how it operates and we believe provides us with a big advantage on those deals. You'll hear a few examples from Sandra later. Our second competitive advantage is our deep industry expertise.
This is the fundamental pillar upon which our private equity business has been built since the beginning. Deep industry expertise enables us to make better decisions about which businesses to invest in more importantly, what needs to be done to improve and grow these businesses once we own them. The consistency of our coverage of these industries creates deeper knowledge, deeper relationships and a broad network, which enabled us to create an edge in sourcing to quickly focus down on the best opportunities and to develop insights for improvement. The deep industry expertise isn't built overnight. It takes years, even decades to build a reputation and relationships in these industries.
As you see on this chart, we've deployed at least $10,000,000,000 of equity in each of our 6 core industry verticals. Across the globe, tech, industrial and consumer are our largest industry verticals, with healthcare rapidly closing the gap over the last few years. Our third advantage from the global platform is the ability to build a deep team of operating resources to help identify and implement value creation or improvement plans. As valuations have increased due to low interest rates and competition has intensified, we must create more earnings growth and cash flow generation in order to drive returns. So we've developed significant capabilities across our global platform to support our portfolio companies to improve operational performance and grow revenue.
Key to those efforts our dedicated experts in digital transformation, IT, procurement and talent evaluation and organization. At Carlyle, we call these capabilities our global investment resources team. Of all the returns that we generate in our flagship private equity funds, the vast majority has come from earnings growth and cash flow generation. My partner Sandra will talk more about our approach to value creation. The greatest advantage that our scale gives us is that we have built this team with great global reach, deep industry expertise and operational improvement capability, and now we can apply all of that capability to a wide variety of investments.
Our investment teams focus on finding the most attractive businesses in their industry vertical or geography, and we then identify the appropriate pool of capital for investment in that opportunity. We can commit to a $30,000,000 growth deal in China we're a $3,000,000,000 equity investment and a $10,000,000,000 buyout deal in Europe and everything in between. We can invest across buyouts, Growth and core. What matters most is not the size of the deal, but whether that is a great business and how can we help them to grow earnings? One of the keys to generating attractive rates of return over many years is selectivity, see a lot of opportunities and then commit to just a few of the best risk adjusted return opportunities.
And we see a lot of opportunities, deal pipelines are robust today. In our business, everyone talks about rates of return. But I believe the real key to our business, what differentiates the top players from the middle of the pack is your ability to assess risk. How much risk are you really taking to earn that rate of return? And the key to our performance over time is that we strive to build diversified portfolios with lower levels of risk.
Lower risk means fewer losses, which over time results in more consistent returns to our fund investors. So how do we approach portfolio construction? First for each individual investment, we make sure that we fully understand the risk we are taking. Deep industry expertise is the key to that assessment. Then diversification across investments.
We generally adhere to no single investment being greater than 10% of a fund. On average, our commitments tend to be around 5% of a fund. Then diversification by industry. We invest across 4 to 6 industry verticals in each fund and actively manage industry concentration. At the bottom of this slide, you see the top three industry exposures for each of these funds.
You'll see that we develop a local investment strategy in each region. So the top industry exposures differ in each region as they should because the opportunity set is different. But the common focus across the globe on 6 core industry verticals enables us to leverage deep industry knowledge to find the most compelling opportunities. As we've built our global platform, we've increased our ability to deploy significant amounts of capital. This is extremely important as our largest fund investors continue to concentrate their commitments with fewer private equity firms going to deploy capital at scale.
And as you see in the bar chart, our ability to deploy capital has increased from roughly $5,000,000,000 per year in 2012 through 2014, up to approximately $9,000,000,000 per year in 2018 to 2020, a bigger team pursuing larger opportunities across a broader set of investment types. We have proven that we can deploy capital at scale. To wrap up my comments on corporate private equity, everything I've been discussing has helped drive our consistent and repeatable investment performance. And the data on this slide is what I am most proud of. Over the past several decades and across many market cycles, we have delivered over a 2 times return for our fund investors on a very large amount of invested capital.
And our current vintage of funds are on track to do the same by sticking to the industry
as we
understand, building portfolios with less risk and implementing real change and improvement, we deliver consistent attractive returns, fund after fund. Now, I'd like to focus on our leading U. S. Real estate business in their distinct approach to portfolio construction. Similar to our private equity business, our opportunistic U.
S. Real estate business has built a 20 plus year record of investment excellence through a very disciplined approach. Our team employs an individual asset investment strategy focused on mitigating risk through diversification by deal, size, sector and geography. The foundational pillar of the investment strategy is to invest in demographic driven sectors, which will benefit from secular growth, such as senior living, medical properties, residential housing, student housing and self storage. And they seek to minimize exposure to GDP driven sectors such as traditional office, hotel and retail, the most cyclical assets.
Only 5% of our entire opportunistic U. S. Real estate portfolio is in the traditional office, hotel or retail sectors. I repeat that, only 5% of our entire opportunistic U. S.
Real estate portfolio is in the traditional office, hotel and retail sectors. The team also mitigates risk through diversification in its portfolio. Our average investment size across our 3 most recent funds is $21,000,000 per investment compared to our most recent fund size of over $5,000,000,000 This approach reduces exposure to any one it is supplemented by investing across 16 separate sectors in 55 different metropolitan areas across the United States. This approach to portfolio construction has built lower risk portfolios that have historically generated attractive returns. We've employed the same granular approach since 1998 and our track record validates that this strategy generates strong performance.
Attractive returns, fund after fund and done in what can be a cyclical asset class. Our strong investment performance has driven continued growth in our U. S. Opportunistic real estate business. Seeing in the bar chart on the left side of the slide, growing consistently with each vintage.
And in we're 2016, we leveraged our existing investment team to launch a core plus U. S. Real estate strategy. In the past 5 years, we've raised over $4,000,000,000 for our core plus strategy with only modest additional headcount required on the investment team. Our core plus strategy leverages the deep market and sector expertise of our existing team to identify stable lower risk assets.
As both our opportunistic and core plus U. S. Real estate funds continue to increase in size, the management fees and FRE generated by this business will grow. The 3rd component of the Global Private Equity segment is our natural resources business. We are clearly in the midst of a multi decade energy transition, which will require investment both to support the growth of renewable energy and to maintain the supply of carbon based energy in order to avoid shortfalls.
And there is clearly a significant need for investment across the infrastructure sectors globally as population growth puts a trained on investments in place. At Carlisle, over the past decade, we've built an infrastructure and natural resources platform it positions us to capitalize on all of these global trends. Our teams today manage more than $20,000,000,000 to invest in these opportunities. Across the industry, infrastructure assets under management have increased significantly, almost quadrupling in the past decade to $639,000,000,000 Studies have projected that there needs to be almost $4,000,000,000,000 annually of global investment in infrastructure over the next 15 years to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population. This creates a significant opportunity for private capital to play a meaningful role.
Our infrastructure team has deep expertise in renewables, transportation, digital infrastructure, energy and water and is actively deploying capital into each of these sectors. The energy transition will create significant investment opportunities. As this bar chart shows, renewables are expected to account for almost 1 third of all global energy consumption in 30 years. But that will require a huge amount of capital to meet that demand. And that creates a great opportunity for both our infrastructure and renewables teams.
At the same time, oil and gas will still account for half of global energy consumption in 2,050. Given the inherent decline rates of oil and gas wells and the need for storage and transport capacity, we believe a large need for capital and an opportunity to generate attractive returns we'll continue in oil and gas for decades into the future. So where do we go from here? Revisiting what I said at the beginning of this session, Global Private Equity is our largest and most successful business, and we will grow off that strength. A low interest rate environment will cause investors to shift more assets into alternatives and private equity.
And we will benefit from that shift due to our strong and consistent investment returns. In corporate private equity, we'll grow 3 ways, by scaling our flagship funds, by accelerating our growth in adjacencies like growth and core, and by expanding our FRE margin through greater fee revenue and disciplined cost management. In real estate, our growth will be driven by continuing to scale up our opportunistic and core strategy in the U. S. In natural resources, the growth will come from infrastructure and renewables.
Thank you for your time today. And let me turn it over to my partner, Sandra Horbach, who will cover the real secret sauce in our business, how we create value in the companies we invest in. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Pete, and hello, everyone. I'm Sandra Horbach, and I lead our largest Private Equity Fund Strategy, U. S. Buyout, along with Pete Claire. And I've been investing in private equity for over 30 years.
As Pete said, global private equity has delivered value for our companies and our investors for decades. We have built a differentiated model that takes our great scale, our deep industry expertise and our local insights to drive sustainable and repeatable value creation. We believe it is truly a differentiator in how we generate returns for our LPs. We execute on a broad range of deals at Carlyle from the largest, most complex transactions where we deploy $1,000,000,000 or more of equity to smaller emerging growth opportunities of under $100,000,000 of capital and capital flexibility to provide long term solutions. We're we drive value in a systematic way across our entire portfolio.
We put rigor around how we do this across every deal we do. We have what we believe is the deepest bench of global investment professionals with expertise across a range of industries. Our team It's done hundreds of deals in every major country and sector, and in our view, is the preeminent private equity investment team in the world. We also have about 50 operating advisors around the world, all former high level C suite executives that provide our teams with the best insights and right operational expertise to identify great opportunities and drive performance for our portfolio companies. And you heard from Kew earlier today, we are a global leader in debt and equity underwriting every year.
And that expertise once again benefits our portfolio companies. Our global investment resources team helps identify and execute On operational best practices that make our companies better and drive earnings growth across all our investments. As Pete said, this platform is a key part of how we deliver value to each of our portfolio companies throughout all stages of the investment lifecycle. Now, I want to take you through a few specific examples of what we do for our portfolio companies. We have invested in many great companies and help make them better.
I'm going to highlight some of our best transactions. But keep in mind, these individual deals Should be looked at in the context of our overall fund portfolio and are part of the detailed portfolio construction and diversification strategy Pete walked you through earlier. We have invested in some of the largest and most complex PE deals in the world. This deep experience gives us a number of competitive advantages that make us a leader in these type of transactions. Fundamentally complex global transactions like carve outs require an experienced global team.
Our teams work collaboratively across funds and regions to bring a bench of operational resources and expertise that often allows us to underwrite more savings and operational improvement opportunities than our peers. Most importantly, we are focused on partnering with the best management teams who we believe are the biggest drivers of our success. Let's look at a carve out of a global manufacturer that was one of our most successful deals in the past decade. We're We led the carve out of the coatings business from DuPont and renamed it Axalta. For perspective, In the early 2000s, DuPont's strategic focus had shifted increasingly to agriculture and industrial biosciences.
As such, the coatings business was no longer a focus area. We saw the opportunity to reinvigorate and grow the business as an independent entity away from DuPont. When we acquired the business in 2013, the deal ranked as the largest ever carve out in the sector And still remains among the biggest of such deals today. Our investment thesis was clear. Axalta had a large we're a leading global market share in all four business end markets, a strong technology platform and more.
We also identified a world class chemicals executive to lead the new company as CEO and he assembled an industry leading management team. We helped Axalta capitalize on opportunities in rapidly emerging markets such as China and Brazil and leveraged our deep expertise in the industrial and transportation sectors. We helped Axalta achieve significant savings through various procurement strategies, implemented operational improvement initiatives and reinvested upwards of $600,000,000 of capital in the business over 3 years. We carried out a successful public offering in 2014 and our investors ultimately realized an attractive gross gain we're $4,500,000,000 We continue to invest in other large complex buyouts, including success stories such as Autotech And Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, both which recently completed successful IPOs. We also invest in hypergrowth companies.
They want to become even bigger players by expanding internationally, capturing more market share, building out product lines, acquiring other companies and more. We are proud to be a partner of choice for the founders and management teams to bring additional resources we're pleased with the company. In our next example, we partner with a rapidly growing Italian luxury brand. Golden Goose is a luxury footwear and fashion company based in Italy. When we acquired Golden Goose in 2017, the company already had a consistent track record of high growth and had a strong brand in the high end sneaker market.
We set out to drive international retail expansion and strengthen the brand's e commerce channel. Our team saw an opportunity to replicate what we had done previously with Other high end Italian fashion brand, Moncler, to establish Golden Goose as a global luxury brand. We tapped our global resources to enter new markets, build out its e commerce offerings, enhance its supply chain and develop consistent retail store format, enabling the company to roll out 20 plus new stores a year. Bottom line, we're We helped Golden Goose dramatically accelerate growth. Our partnership resulted in 91 new store openings, up from the 8 that they had at the time of acquisition.
Overall, this deal achieved a 3.4 times gross return. Other successes in this area include ZoomInfo, One Medical, Beats and Supreme. As Pete mentioned, the world today is both global and local. With our platform, we successfully leveraged both. Carlyle has been on the ground in the most important markets for decades.
Our global footprint helps us better understand the communities where we invest, making better investment decisions and identify new opportunities. Here is a good example of that. We led a consortium to acquire Folks Media, A Shanghai based digital media company. This take private transaction became the largest ever buyout of a Chinese company And pioneer the privatization wave of overseas listed Chinese companies. Our value add also included a pre IPO stake sale we're.
And relisting in China by expediting the listing process through a reverse merger. This is a great executing on a range of core business improvements. By the end of 2020, the Carlyle Fund made 4.6 times its money on a gross basis. Several other global plus local examples include deals we did with SBI Card in India, MicroPort in China And Wing Art First in Japan. In some cases, we look to invest with a longer time horizon, moving beyond private equity's typical 3 to 5 year investment model.
These longer duration investments allow us to target new opportunities that we may not have been able to previously pursue. This next example showcases the value of this approach. Medforth is a leading for profit educator of U. S. And international students, primarily in the medical field.
We are partnering with an outstanding management team to address the current supply demand imbalance for physicians in the U. S. And globally. We are supporting their long term organic growth plans, looking at accretive M and A opportunities And using our global investment resources team capabilities to support their growth. We acquired Medforth in 2017.
It has a 15 year track record of uninterrupted revenue and EBITDA growth. We expect that track record to continue. Other core examples include NEP and TAMCO. So as I hope you can see, over 3 plus decades of investing success, we have generated enormous value for our LPs through active management that has led to extensive value creation across our portfolio. Maybe the easiest way to see this clearly is looking at our realized and partially realized deals across our buyout funds.
We're We have averaged a 2.6 times return on investment over nearly $40,000,000,000 in invested capital. Most importantly, more than 80% of the gains we have generated have been driven by earnings growth and cash flow. The bottom line is we help good companies get even better. Value creation is what Carlyle is all about. We drive enormous value for our LPs through differentiated active management.
We consider ourselves to be the premier partner of choice for management teams and founders around the world, leveraging deep and flexible capital entrusted to us by our LPs. Our large global portfolio allows us to see trends before most others, which informs our investment strategy and ultimately Helps our portfolio companies benefit from each other. It's all about delivering value for our investors, both those in our funds And our shareholders. Everything you've heard today from me, as well as Pete and Q earlier, is about achieving long term consistent investment performance and we're accelerating our biggest and best platforms And global private equity is at the heart of that acceleration. Thank you.
Good morning. I'm Mark Jenkins, Head of Carlyle's Global Credit Platform. I'm excited to speak with you today about the strong credit business we've built, the growth we've achieved to date and how we will continue scaling our platform. Our approach to growing this business embodies the strategic priorities that Kew laid out earlier today. 1st, we created a diversified platform with an eye towards scaling it.
2nd, with our platform now in place, we are focused on areas where we believe we can continue capturing growth. And 3rd, as we have done from day 1, we will ensure global credit is aligned with and leveraging the strengths of Carlyle operating as an integrated global team that collaborates across the firm. Today, our Platform spans a broad credit risk spectrum built on 3 major pillars: liquid corporate, e liquid corporate and real assets credit. This range of capabilities allows us to provide tailored capital solutions to borrowers and importantly, delivering attractive risk adjusted returns to our investors, depending on their individual investment needs. As we have ramped up our capabilities and product offerings, we have achieved significant growth.
We've more than doubled assets under management in 5 years, and we will continue to scale the business even further to over $80,000,000,000 in the next 4 years with a focus on doubling fee related earnings over that same period. So how will we achieve these outcomes? First,
we
will seek to capitalize on strong sector tailwinds. For the past several years, private credit has been one of the fastest growing asset classes and we expect that trend to continue. Secondly, we'll capture that growth by leveraging the firm's global presence and strengths and by operating as an integrated global credit platform. And finally, as we grow, we will keep our focus on delivering attractive performance for investors while pursuing a measured growth plan for our business. Before I discuss how we'll scale global credit, let me first provide more detail on our platform today.
Over the past few years, we have focused on building a broad, deep and diverse credit investment platform. This approach allows us to deliver a range of investment solutions to meet our limited partners' needs, while also enabling us to pivot to where the new opportunities are through a credit cycle. When we started building this platform, we did so based on a solid credit foundation that goes back over 20 years, starting in CLO Management. Today, our CLO business is fully scaled with over $28,000,000,000 in assets under management and is one of the leading CLO managers globally. From that strong foundation, we expanded into we're illiquid credit, launching our credit opportunity strategy and materially increasing our direct lending capabilities, both areas benefiting from secular trends in the lending market and where we saw the most scalable and most immediate growth opportunities.
We expanded in real assets credit as investors look to diversify their credit portfolios. And for this, we added aviation and infrastructure credit capabilities. We're We then grew our liquid credit offerings to include CLO Investments and revolving credit investments to round out our liquid strategy. And lastly, we began offering cross platform credit vehicles, providing investors access to all of our underlying strategies in a single vehicle, Which is a tangible example of how this platform is helping us serve our investors better than ever. Through all of these actions, we created a platform that gives us tremendous operating leverage as we continue to grow, while improving the segment's operating margins for our shareholders.
With our platform in place, our focus over the next 4 years will be on scaling it to take advantage of that operating leverage. Our path to more than $80,000,000,000 in assets under management is based primarily on our plan to scale our existing strategies with a focus on 4 key areas. 1st, in direct lending. As we've expanded that strategy, we have benefited from the growth in non bank lending to corporates and sponsors and continue to expand our role in larger transactions across different funds and vehicles. We will, as Kew mentioned previously, benefit from the consolidation of allocations to single managers and are poised to materially grow in this area.
Next, opportunistic credit, providing solutions for borrowers in need of capital for complex situations that are not well addressed by the traditional capital markets. We've already seen a lot of demand for this form of capital and based on historic deployment in this space, believe it is an area with a lot of growth potential. Next, infrastructure credit is a sector with an estimated global spend of $3,700,000,000,000 annually through 2,035. So we expect increasing demand for private debt funding. At the same time, we're seeing increased appetite from our LPs in this low rate environment as they rotate allocations out of longer dated traditional fixed income strategies into infrastructure credit.
Finally, cross platform vehicles. They provide 2 discrete advantages. First, the ability for us to develop tailored credit investment strategies for investors who want access to our entire global credit platform in a single vehicle and at scale. Secondly, they help maximize our operating leverage as the investment capital is deployed alongside our current strategies without increased human capital. Beyond scaling our existing strategies, will look to extend it to new adjacent areas where we again would exploit the 1 Carlyle advantage.
Real estate credit is an area we currently invest in out of our illiquid strategies, but we are preparing to launch as a dedicated strategy. And we feel that this is the right time for us to pursue real estate credit given the recent global reset that is occurring in this sector and the increased interest we're seeing from investors. We'll also continue to lever our geographic that we have as a firm, specifically in Europe and Asia, where we've historically maintained a strong presence with dedicated resources on the ground for many years in both regions, and we expect these activities will get us to at least $80,000,000,000 in AUM. Incrementally, strategic M and A would put us well over that target. It is important to note that any M and A activity we pursue would need to meet strict criteria.
And as you heard earlier from Q, any deal would have to be accretive, scalable, fit us culturally and institutionally, and it would have to be something we would not be able to build organically over a reasonable timeframe. This is a plan that will scale our platform. As we execute on this plan, we do so in an environment where current market dynamics are primed for significant growth. So let's walk through what those strong tailwinds are that support our industry. As you can see, the private credit markets look dramatically different than they did over a decade not.
Banks used to be the primary providers of credit and liquidity in the leveraged credit markets. Over time, financial we're regulators have forced banks to deleverage their balance sheets and this has dramatically reduced capital allocated to leverage credit assets by those very same financial institutions. As a result, private credit investors such as Carlyle have stepped in to still the lending void left by those very same banks. We believe the growth of private credit as an asset class is only just beginning. Private credit is essentially where private equity was just over 15 years ago in terms of assets under management.
We believe that the same fundamental drivers we experienced with the growth of private equity will continue to drive private credit growth over the next several years. 1st, a lower return public market environment that leads to a rotation from public into private investments. And secondly, companies and management teams are choosing to remain private for longer periods of time. Couple these Factors with the bank retrenchment from the leverage lending space, we expect the increase in private credit investments over the next several years to continue. On the investor side, as interest rates and yields have come down to near historic lows over the past 30 years, and we expect they will remain relatively low compared to historic levels for for a long period of time pension funds, insurance companies, endowments and other large investors continue to seek higher yielding credit alternatives to help them achieve their portfolio of target returns.
In their search for yield and return enhancement, they have allocated more to private credit. And this is precisely why we built our platform to include the complete range of leveraged credit products. We can meet investors' needs for the more liquid, lower risk strategies all the way up to more illiquid higher yielding strategies given our range of offerings across the credit spectrum. We can tailor solutions to each investor through suite of our offerings or directly into our commingled funds. As we capitalize on these market tailwinds, what will differentiate us and why we are confident in our ability to take our commensurate market share are the developed advantages that come from being part of the Carlyle ecosystem.
Today's market is more competitive than ever and requires an ability to move fast. Informational advantages and relationships are key. It's all about having an edge and making better, more informed credit decisions, Which we get from being part of a global team with the industry and company knowledge to both originate we have leveraged Carlyle's resources to create an investment opportunity for investors, whether that's drawing on the capabilities of dedicated diligence teams, gleaning insights from over 255 Global Private Equity Portfolio Companies Worldwide we're leveraging the expertise of our in house operating executives who represent a number of different industries. It all gives us the Carlisle edge to originate And analyze prospects and help add value after an investment. These advantages enable us to provide optimal solutions for borrowers and better risk adjusted returns for investors.
In addition to the strengths we get from being part of Carla overall, we benefit from working together as one global credit focused business. And as you know, this is a platform we have spent a lot of time building. The end result is a strong credit business with capabilities to scale from an origination, investment and capital raising perspective. For instance, through our platform resources, we have access to information from hundreds of credits at any given time. We share information derived from those positions to make better relative value decisions and to be more selective on where we deploy capital.
As a result, we close on less than 5% of our overall originations. This deliberate and highly selective investment process has led to average default rates for our U. S. CLO business that is over 2 thirds below the market average. On the capital raising front, we have a dedicated product development and investment relations team that allow us to service our LPs better by tailoring solutions specific to credit investors' needs.
High quality investor service is critical not only to attracting new investors, but also in maintaining the existing relationships we have. And what we've built is clearly resonating with our investors. We raised over $10,000,000,000 last year across the platform as we continue to build momentum with both existing and new investors to Carlyle Global Credit. As we draw on the resources of Carlyle and our credit platform, we remain focused on delivering strong performance as we grow. Ultimately our growth and success is dependent on delivering attractive performance for our limited partners.
We're not asset gatherers. We're not doing deals for the sake of doing deals. We're focused on delivering strong performance across a range of assets. What investors are looking for is a level of consistent and persistent returns across a broad credit risk spectrum. Private credit has demonstrated through cycles that it can deliver these outcomes and as a platform have demonstrated our ability to deliver.
It all comes down to performance. Over the course of this presentation, what we've shown is that we've created a purpose built platform that meets the specific needs of our limited partners and borrowers and is ready to scale. We are in a strong position to benefit from the incredible market tailwinds. And as we continue to leverage the power of being part of Carlyle and deliver the performance our investors have come to expect, we will take our commensurate market share. We've already achieved significant growth over the past 5 years.
And as we execute on our strategy, we will grow our platform to over $80,000,000,000 in assets under management by 2024. And we expect fee related earnings to outpace that growth over the same period, resulting from the operating leverage we've created with our platform. We're proud of what we've achieved so far. And given the size of that market opportunity and our ability to capture that growth, we're even more excited about what lies ahead.
Thank you.
We're. Hello, everyone. My name is Ruka Bakhein, and I'm the Head of Investment Solutions. And I'm excited to be here today to present our strategy for Investment Solutions, our strategy for accelerated growth. Investment Solutions is the business within Carlyle that works for clients that want a partner to build their private equity exposure.
And as Kew mentioned earlier, we build tailor made portfolios for our clients through primary, secondaries and direct co investments. We're one of the largest players in the world with $58,000,000,000 of assets under management and we operate as Alpinvest. Some of you may know companies like HarborVest, Hamilton Lane or Stepstone, and those companies are peers in our space. Our business was established in 2000. And since inception, we've been a global business with dedicated investment teams in each product area.
We're. And there are actually not so many who can say the same. We believe that only very few market participants can match our experience and our scale. For 20 years, Alpinvest's core business has been to work with large institutional investors to implement private equity strategies through customized programs. We have built and we've scaled the private equity programs for our founding clients, APG and PDGM.
And today, we do so for many of the largest sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and insurance companies. Our senior team includes leaders we have held senior positions at Large Institutional Investors, and we are familiar with the objectives and challenges facing our clients in this current market environment, an environment in which good portfolio construction is of the essence. We're confident that good portfolio construction is the key to exceptional performance. And this has been demonstrated through the strong we're going to be doing
this in person, but we're going to be doing
this in person, but we're going to be doing this in person, but
we're going to be doing this in person. And today, we'll share our strategy, a strategy for growth. I feel that Albervest is already going on all cylinders, but there is more to come. And this is all about following 4 key points. We're.
1st, we're active in growing markets. More and more players want access to private markets and are increasing their exposures, and therefore demand for solutions is increasing. The second is that we benefit from scale. We've been able to translate Our information and network advantages to superior investment performance. 3rd, our track record has allowed us to raise increasingly larger funds working on this and programs.
And 4th, this has in turn led to improved economics. Let me start with a favorable macro backdrop. Private equity markets have grown significantly in recent years. And as Jason Thomas will walk you through later on, this impressive growth is forecast to continue. While this is well known, what is probably less well known is that the secondary and we're Co investment markets are growing even faster.
Secondaries are increasingly used as a tool by GPs and LPs to manage their portfolios, especially GP led deals have gained momentum. Think of the many fund continuation funds and other fund recapitalizations that we have seen in the markets. That is an area where ObInvest is a market leader and we see something similar in co investments. GPs use co investments to manage their deployment and they like to work together with LPs like us who have strong and proven underwriting capabilities. Undoubtedly we have significant tailwinds from growing markets.
The second point I want to make is that Oppenvest is one of the largest We have a strong reputation of trust from our GPs as we're continuously acting as a professional partner. We cover more than 700 private equity funds of institutional quality, we're And we have a core network of over 300 GPs with whom we transact across the platform. We're often one of the largest LPs in their funds, we're And we are represented on the advisory boards in more than 80% of the funds that we commit to. The integrated nature of our business And our ability to be strategic to these GP relationship allows us to source large volumes of high quality assets. To give you an example, we're We source every year around US10 $1,000,000,000 in co investment opportunities at no fee and no carry, Of which 80% are co sponsor opportunities and therefore only open to those investors like us We can fully underwrite a transaction alongside a sponsor.
Like the direct private equity houses, we have a closing rate of only 5%, selecting only the very best opportunities for our programs. And the other point I make is about our selection capabilities. This is all about talent, Skill, experience and dedicated resources, but also the fact that we have an enormous information advantage. We have data of more than 20,000 underlying portfolio companies and we can leverage Carlyle's global network, which means that we have access to the knowledge of one of the largest and most successful private equity investors in the world. So these two things together, our ability to generate investment opportunity and our capability to select well have translated into a long term and successful performance track record, Which brings me to the 3rd point.
This is about our track record, which speaks, I think, for itself. Had you invested with us through a customized account And followed our model portfolio since inception, you would have earned a gross IRR of 17% on your multi strategy account, A 9% outperformance against the MSCI World PME and a 5% outperformance against the Cambridge Fund to Fund benchmark. It's this performance that has allowed us to raise skilled programs. For instance, the growth that we've realized in our secondary business is significant. We're We recently closed on our new secondary program 7 at the hard cap of $9,000,000,000 almost a 50% step up compared to the previous generation.
Our track record has really been fantastic. The biggest driver of our performance in co investments we're If you compare the mono multiple of all the transactions that we've declined to the mono multiple of all the transactions that we invested alongside our GPs, the deals we selected outperformed the decline deals with 2 68%. We have been refining the selection process over 20 years and this repeatable process is the underlying driver for our sustained long term outperformance. The biggest driver of outperformance of our secondary strategy is similar. We are relentlessly seeking high quality assets.
This sounds like a statement everyone would say, but secondary strategies between peers differ quite a bit. We are not a discount buyer. This is evidenced by the fact that 88% of the returns that we deliver are driven by value growth. You will also not see us buying tail end portfolios. It takes time to create value, and therefore, we typically buy portfolios that are between 3 6 years old.
Lastly, we're prudent and use limited financial engineering. So if you take this all together, our business has demonstrated incredible growth. What you may note is that Our total fee paying assets under management number does not show this immediately. The crux here is to understand that we have been very successful in replacing lower fee earning legacy AUM from our finding clients by higher paying new clients. Our growth trajectory is therefore much better summarized by the dark green bars.
Today, we have a widely diversified client base of over 400 high quality investors that include some of the largest sovereign wealth fund, pension funds and insurance companies in the world, and we continue to grow our business. And this is another example of the benefit for Alpinvest being part of the Carlyle Group. Around 40% of our client base is also committed To Carlos' existing global private equity and credit businesses, our management fee economics are improving, And that's for two reasons. The first I just explained, our new clients are paying market standard and therefore higher fees than our legacy clients. But an other point to be understood is that our secondary and co investment strategies, which are higher fee strategies, are a growing portion of the platform.
You see improved management fee economics, which is reflected in the higher effective management fee rate, which is now at 60 basis points And expect it to further increase to 65 basis points. It's worth noting that just a few years ago, it was less than 50. So significant improvement has been delivered already, and there's more to come as we continue to raise new funds. It's also important to note that when Carlyle acquired Alpinvest, it did not acquire existing carry. Carlyle's carry ownership is in the funds that launched post acquisition.
We're The net accrual balance has grown to nearly $145,000,000 and realized performance income will steadily increase over the coming years. Going forward, the Investment Solutions business is expected to generate more distributable earnings as both we're FRE and Kari are expected to continue to increase in the coming years. In conclusion, if there's one message I would like you to take from this presentation, It is that we are excited that our platform is well positioned to grow, and we've seen the attractive secular tailwinds underpinning our markets, Our distinctive information and skill advantages, our business is scalable as evidenced through our ability to raise bigger programs on the back of exceptional performance and our improving economics, which show a material step up in both FRE and distributable earnings in the next few years.
Good morning. I'm Nathan Urquhart, Global Head of Investor Relations. You've heard from Kew and Kurt on our plans to accelerate growth And from Pete, Sandra, Mark and Rilke on our strong investment platforms and global private equity, confident in our ability to deliver our confidence in raising 130,000,000,000 by 2024. We believe Carlyle is well positioned to continue our strong fundraising track record. We are a market leader in a growing and consolidating asset class.
We have deep strategic relationships with the largest limited partners in the world. And finally, we have fundraising momentum going into the next cycle of our scalable flagship products. Let's start by talking about our asset class. Since the global financial crisis, private markets have experienced rapid growth. Private equity, private debt and real assets fundraising has achieved record highs.
And while we've seen fundraising increase, the number of funds raised has actually decreased, suggesting the industry is consolidating. And that consolidation is exactly what we're seeing in the market. Our limited partners are concentrating their investments with the largest general partners like Carlyle. These are trusted managers who have demonstrated long term consistent performance and the ability to invest in scale. These partnerships have been built over decades.
Fundraising data confirms this consolidation is happening. In 2014, the largest 20 funds represented around 30% of capital raised. That number increased to 45% in 2019 and we expect this trend to continue as the largest managers take more and more market share. Finally, we expect our industry to continue to grow. Public pension plans, which represent our largest investor segment, periodically review their strategic asset allocation.
This strategic asset allocation sets where they will invest their capital over the next 5 to 10 years. So it's a leading indicator of where the growth will be. Now in 2010, when going through their strategic asset allocation plan, Public pensions plan to invest 13% of their pensions in our asset classes. And 2020, that number increased to 23%. And again, this is a leading indicator of where the capital will be invested.
Importantly, our asset classes experienced significant growth in planned investments. Private Equity and Real Estate were up 30%. Infrastructure was up 60%. And private debt is really interesting. It was not a separate allocation in the 2010 study, but by 2020, it was 2%.
And during that time, the private debt market increased by 168 percent to almost $850,000,000,000 Next, I'd like to discuss our deep strategic relationships with the largest limited partners in the world. Carlyle has a strong track record of capital raising. In 2020, our assets under management hit $246,000,000,000 and we've increased the number of investors we work with every year to over 2,600 investors. We're We have a track record of raising capital around the world for many of the highest quality and largest institutions and high net worth platforms. Since inception, we've raised over $300,000,000,000 from over 2,600 LPs in over 90 countries.
And we now work with 65 of the top 100 limited partners in the world. Our strong relationships span investor types with public pension plans, sovereign wealth funds and high net worth investors representing our largest investors and a key area of focus of growth for us. In the past 8 years, we have seen impressive growth across our largest investors by type. We increased commitments from public pension plans by 5 times over this period, we're and we now work with public pension plans in 40 states. We raised over $35,000,000,000 from sovereign wealth funds over this period, representing a 3 times growth rate, And we developed strong partnerships with the largest global sovereign wealth funds.
Finally, we have focused on providing individual investors with access to our products And increased commitments from high net worth investors by over 2.5x. Now earlier, we talked about our strong global relationships And the consolidation in the industry. We have been successful at building strong solutions oriented partnerships with our limited partners, And these partnerships are across multiple investment strategies at Carlyle. In 2012, about 25% of our commitments to our funds from investors who had invested in 4 or more investment strategies. By 2020, we've increased that number to 60%.
This trend is even more pronounced when looking at our top investors by commitments, who have strong partnerships across our firm. Over 80% of commitments to our funds from these top 30 investors our front investors who have invested in 4 or more strategies. We do more than just sell funds to our investors. We're We develop long term solutions oriented partnerships that span multiple strategies at the firm. We have a dedicated a global investor relations team of over 100 people with deep global relationships and a breadth of product and asset class expertise.
Our team includes 50 relationship managers who are located in local markets across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. These relationship managers are led by 8 senior relationship managers who work with our largest clients and partners. And these senior relationship managers have been with the firm for 12 years on average. Our 40 product specialists provide deep expertise across our products and support the entire fund and LP cycle. This team delivers the firm to our clients and develop strong partnerships with the largest limited partners in the world.
Now in 2020, the world changed and we pivoted and embraced this new virtual way of engaging with our investors. In fact, we believe we talk to our investors more than ever in 20 20. First, we provided transparency on their investments as well as Carlyle's global insights and perspective during this volatile and uncertain time. We also had our 1st virtual investor conference with over 1600 of our limited partners attending. And we were very successful at building even stronger partnerships with our limited partners during 2020, raising over $27,000,000,000 Looking forward, we're excited.
We believe this new way of working with our limited partners is just getting started. Q talked earlier today about institutionalizing the firm operating more efficiently. We believe this virtual way of engaging with our limited partners will allow us and our limited partners to work together more efficiently and ultimately raise funds more efficiently. Finally, we're excited about our fundraising momentum going into the next cycle of scalable flagship products. We have a track record of fundraising success.
As Curt mentioned earlier today, in the last cycle, we targeted $100,000,000,000 and we exceeded that number. Going into this cycle, we have taken a strategic approach to our product suite, which is designed to offer solutions across global private equity, Global Credit and Investment Solutions. Our products are diversified across geography, strategy and risk return profile. In Global Private Equity, our flagship private equity and real estate funds will be coming back to the market. These are large and scalable products with strong investment performance and long standing relationships with our limited partners.
In Global Credit, we have developed a differentiated product offering. We have taken a platform approach delivering solutions across liquid credit, illiquid credit and real assets credit. And in Investment Solutions, our flagship funds just completed a fundraising cycle. We'll focus on customized solutions for large institutions across primaries, secondaries and co invest. Taking a step back, we're very excited about this cycle and accelerating our growth at Carlyle.
Our industry continues to grow and it's consolidating as the largest managers take more and more market share. We have strong and growing with the largest limited partners in the world and our flagship scalable products are coming back to market. With this backdrop, we are confident that we will achieve our $130,000,000,000 fundraising target.
Hello. My name is Jason Thomas and I'm Head of Global Research at Carlyle. I'm here today to discuss our use of private data And the future of private markets. As a result of Carlyle's massive global footprint, we have access to thousands of data streams unavailable to anyone else that provide real time insights into the state of the global economy and trends in the investment environment. We subject these data to learning algorithms to separate the portion that is company specific from that which is macroeconomic in origin.
We then use the outputs from those models to inform investment decisions, aid portfolio construction and also deepen our relationships with our largest limited partners. Our analysis focuses primarily but not exclusively on our global private equity portfolio, where our influence or control allows us to access whatever data we want, orders, shipments, inventories, pricing trends from hundreds of businesses operating in industries all over the world. We're able to collect these data on relatively high frequency basis. That means we're able to get data every week, every month, in some cases, we look at data every day. And this provides a great snapshot of what's really happening in the real economy.
As you can imagine, this was extremely valuable in 2020. Now lockdowns today for all of us are old hat. We've been through them. We understand their implications. But entering 2020, it was virtually impossible to imagine a sudden cessation of economic activity, particularly one that would last for weeks on end.
Yet that's exactly what we saw in China. When starting at the end of January, logistics volumes in the portfolio fell to 0 and stayed there for about 3 weeks. This was shocking. We've never seen anything like this. But the shock value of the data actually was really important for preparing our teams in North America and Europe for the risk that they were facing, what could ultimately come and also preparing their portfolios for that eventuality.
These weekly data have also been very valuable to observe the recovery in China, sometimes official data in China, of course, not as reliable. These data have also helped us see how households and businesses in the U. S. And Europe have adapted to the pandemic. That's both in terms of productivity working from home across the portfolio, as well as trends in online sales And then associated logistics volumes.
But we don't stop with raw data. We have models that decompose each time series we look at into the company specific components and then the macro Economic exposures, in some cases, a large number of macroeconomic exposures for a given company. This allows us to then back out implied economic growth rates by industry and geography as the data come in. But more importantly, this search for common trends that exists between portfolio company series and between official statistics allows us to have a very powerful tool to detect inflection points and also to test investment and macro thesis. For example, we have enough data to replicate virtually any macroeconomic time series of interest, Chinese retail sales, India's GDP, U.
S. Industrial orders using an optimized combination of portfolio company data. We also are able to characterize virtually any portfolio company series as a linear function of macroeconomic exposures. So that means if you were looking at a European based business that is exposed to consumer electronics value chains in Asia, we're able to more precisely characterize the macroeconomic risk facing the business. The underlying growth rate in the demand drivers And then also the volatility and cyclical sensitivity it's likely to experience over a relevant holding period.
If you're thinking about portfolio company data As a linear combination of macroeconomic exposures also aids portfolio construction, because in addition to thinking about the diversifying effects of size, industry and geography, you're also able to look through and see the correlation in the underlying macroeconomic exposures. So this really provides some visibility to have a sense of what types of assets are likely to perform best together. That's helpful for funds. It's also especially important when helping large institutions assemble their portfolios of private assets. Of course, some of the predictive insights and data that these models generate are relatively short term nature.
That means that they're not actionable for private investors with long term holding periods dealing in illiquid markets. But these data are greatly valued by large institutions who are always seeking incremental information to help them make better investment decisions. And so we believe that by providing these data, the associated insights, we're actually able to deepen relationships with large institutions and ensure that Carlyle captures the large share Of their increased commitments to private markets over the next 5 to 10 years and make no mistake, commitments to private markets are likely to increase substantially over the next 5 to 10 years. And that's because the private market premium, essentially the return in excess of that available from public markets has gone from about 20% of total returns 20 years ago to as much as 2 thirds Of total returns over the next 5 to 10 years as very low interest rates and very high valuations depressed return expectations in public markets. So today, the private return premium has gone from something that was nice to have To something that is absolutely essential if these institutions are going to hit their return targets.
Now I think this raises a very obvious question. If all of this money comes pouring into private markets, won't this incremental capital just bid up the price of assets that essentially erase this return premium? The answer is no. And the reason for that is because the growth And demand for private capital among founders, entrepreneurs, management teams has actually exceeded cumulative inflows into the asset classes. So really when you think about the private market opportunity set, essentially the number of companies seeking private capital that can expand in ways that accommodate very significant growth in private markets without any diminution in relative returns or that return premium.
When we think about private markets and their evolution over the last 20 years, it's important to remember that these markets were once really a barbell, which is to say That you had at one end, a very active, very robust early stage venture market. At the other end, you had a very robust late stage buyout, principally de listings of public companies. So in this kind of environment, when a business attained a market value of say $500,000,000 they really had no choice but to go public if they wanted incremental capital to grow. And they probably wouldn't be a candidate for private capital again until they were relatively old a public company that had some missteps or otherwise needed to go private to change strategy or reposition itself. The market has evolved over the last 20 years so that private capital is now a comprehensive alternative to public listings.
Private capital is available on very competitive prices and very efficient, very fast processes at virtually every stage of the company's lifecycle. So really when we look at the fourfold growth in the asset class, it's almost entirely explained by private investments in private companies. And the fact that these investments are alternatives to public listings it's also reflected in the fact that IPOs of operating companies have dropped by 75% over the same period. But this isn't just about options or alternatives or choices. It really reflects the economic fundamentals.
Today, business value, business investment increasingly depends on intangible assets, proprietary technology, business methods, algorithms, really ideas. These assets are very hard to value, but they're also very easy to steal. And so these companies, digital businesses, they can go public, they can access public markets, But doing so means that they have to provide fulsome disclosures, maybe go on roadshows to explain how their technology works, the market they're seeking to disrupt, their current R and D programs, really just all the information that's necessary to assign a value to these businesses. But of course doing so in a public forum would almost certainly get back to competitors or would be competitors. So these businesses today rationally choose To access the same capital confidentially through non disclosure agreements in private markets And push off that public listing until they've attained a relevant scale, user base or brand identification where public listing would then make sense.
And so as a result of this pushing off listings, the typical business today Goes public at 9 or 10 years after founding rather than 3 to 5 as was the case 20 years ago. And in fact, when we look at the businesses overall, successful growing startups are more likely to be private after 14 years then they are to go public before 3. So the market has changed quite dramatically. But of course, in these markets, value is a function of time. So the longer the company stays private, the more value that accrues to the private investors.
For example, last year, tech companies that went public in the United States were 17 times larger in terms of trailing revenues than was the case 20 years before. So these companies are much larger and have accumulated much more value. More of that accumulates to private market investors, about 83% of the total based on a recent sample of businesses. So a typical company today could have 4 or 5 or even more private investors over its lifetime. They may undergo 2 to 3 buyouts during this period of private ownership before ultimately going public.
It's important to note, we're talking about the supply of IPOs, not the demand, Because as we look at data over the last year, it's very obvious that when these companies are ready to go public, the demand for their shares is as strong as ever. So valuations of the businesses with over $1,000,000,000 private valuations That went public. Their offer price was generally 2x the value of their last private round or last private investment valuation. Then after going public, these companies typically trade up by another 100% in their 1st week as listed securities. So these data really provide very powerful evidence that that liquidity premium, the price of public versus private assets is as wide as ever.
And that really very likely reflects this cumulative shortfall in IPOs we've observed over the last 15 years. Now I think it's important to note, as Mark Jenkins alluded earlier, the growth in private credit is where the overall growth in private markets is probably going to be most visible over the next 5 to 10 years. That's because private credit starts from a relatively lower base and actually has much more room to grow. Also, although the growth in private credit has been impressive, to date, it's really only been sufficient to offset the very sizable decline in credit market intermediation provided by investment banks And broker dealers, which of course has contracted massively since the global financial crisis. So just to conclude, we have more data and we make better use of it, which helps informs investment decisions, improve portfolio allocation and also deepen relationships with our largest investors.
We expect private markets to grow substantially over the next 5 to 10 years, but people needn't worry that that growth lead to a compression in the return premium because the growth in demand for private capital among founders, management teams, entrepreneurs, it has more than kept pace with those inflows. Thank you so much for your time.
I am Meg Starr, the Global Head of Impact at Carlyle. As we've been discussing today, Carlyle is focused on accelerating growth for an accelerating world. And nowhere is this more true than in our approach to impact. At Carlyle, our impact is rooted in building better businesses, because we believe that better businesses are worth more and deliver better long term value for our stakeholders. As you heard earlier from Kew, Impact is not a product for us, but instead of process.
In a rapidly accelerating world, impact is a lens for finding efficiencies and capitalizing on new growth as we see the market valuing in a wider set of business competencies. To us, better businesses have 5 key dimensions: Diverse and inclusive teams, engaged employees, sustainable growth, climate resilience and community ties. Companies that excel across these dimensions are increasingly outperforming peers. It's why I'm joined by Cara Heelander, we're Carlyle's Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer as we work closely to help our teams and companies improve across these dimensions, which we think will deliver greater value for our portfolios, investors and shareholders. We'll spend this time to walk you through how our approach to building better businesses comes to life in our work and what it means from a shareholder perspective.
We'll delve into key metrics that show how ESG integration and DEI can accelerate we're topline growth, drive down costs, which flow through to our bottom line and strengthen our relationship with our LPs. We will highlight some of our current work As well as where we see Carlyle going from here.
Earnings growth is one of the core levers we have for creating portfolio company value, And the numbers have shown that bringing diversity and decision making is a proven driver. Over the past 3 years, The average earnings growth of Carlyle portfolio companies with 2 or more diverse board members has been approximately 12% greater per year And companies that lack diversity. Given this clear advantage, we're continuing to help our portfolio companies make significant progress in diversifying their boards. We're We have set a goal of having 30% diverse directors on the boards of our private equity controlled companies within 2 years of ownership. In 2020, 56 percent of new directors in our goal eligible controlled companies globally were diverse.
We're also driving change internally as we look to build more diverse teams within Carlyle. Last year, we're 63% of people we hired in the U. S. Were female or ethnic minorities. We've instituted these goals not only because they are the right thing to do, but because they are proven to create bottom line value.
In addition to the more traditional examples, such as driving cost savings through more efficient energy management and procurement or reducing lost time instance through better health and safety practices. We've been working on innovative structures to drive down financing costs for Carlyle and our portfolio companies. In fact, we estimate that these ESG linked financings could save Carlyle and our portfolio companies more than $15,000,000 in interest expense. To bring this to life, let me walk you through a few examples of how we've worked with our portfolio companies to link their performance on material ESG issues to the price of their debt, reducing their interest expense as they drive environmental and social performance. Recently, we acquired a company called Flender from Siemens.
Flender is a market leader in mechanical and electrical drive technology with a core focus on wind power. Our acquisition included €1,000,000,000 of debt linked to how much renewable power Flender helps build each year. We estimate that this ESG ratchet could save Flender up to €1,000,000 a year in interest expense. In In 2020, we worked with another portfolio company, Logoplast, a packaging company, to create the 1st institutional term loan directly linked to ESG factors by tying the cost of its debt to year over year savings in carbon dioxide emissions. In 2019, the firm estimated that its model saved more than 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide compared to alternative technologies in the market.
This is equivalent to the amount of carbon consumed by more than 500,000 trees every year. In these examples, environmental and social progress incentivize more efficient capital structures for our portfolio companies, driving value for our investors and shareholders. LPs
representing more than half of Carlyle's AUM have engaged with us for more information about our DEI we're think that a focus on diversity is beneficial to reaching their investment outcomes. As a member of the 30 Percent Coalition, Carlyle is working with investors representing more than $7,000,000,000,000 in assets under management to increase gender diversity in corporate boardrooms. LPs are basing these commitments on real findings, like the portfolio board data we talked about and a large body of research that links diversity And performance. This issue is critical to our LPs, and it's increasingly critical to the broader context in which our companies operate. Carlyle Investors represent over 80% of the LPs who joined ILPA's Diversity and Action Committee And pledged specific actions to advance diversity.
We expect this number to only increase over time as we continue to experience a generational shift in the investor landscape.
Similarly, a growing portion of the LP community is just as focused on climate change as we are. LPs representing more than $70,000,000,000 of Carlyle's assets under management have made commitments to better manage climate risk and return in their investments. So what have we done about it? As you know, we launched our renewable and sustainable energy platform, a dedicated team addressing the energy transition globally and capitalizing on the tremendous growth we see in the sector. Recently the platform made a $374,000,000 commitment to AMP Energy, a global renewable energy infrastructure manager.
We also did our first ever bottoms up carbon footprint for our majority owned companies in our 3 primary private equity strategies, we're. U. S. Buyout, Europe buyout and Asia buyout. This was to gather important data that is already helping to drive cost savings and revenue growth across portfolio companies.
This is in addition to a host of other climate change work we have pioneered. For example, hosting a climate scenario planning workshop and publishing 1 of the first task force on climate related financial disclosures or TCFD reports of any global private investment firm. LPs want to work with investment firms at the vanguard of these issues. As much as top talent wants to work at firms that are focused on proactively addressing issues like climate change and DEI. We believe that leading from a position of strength across these systemically important issues strengthens our relationship with our LPs And enhances our ability to attract and retain top talent.
As we've said, our impact is rooted in building better businesses. By looking for a more comprehensive set of ways to drive impact within businesses, we can drive better investment results And more sustainable returns for our investors and shareholders. As a core part of this strategy, we believe teams with diverse perspectives, knowledge bases, interests and cultural identities are key to our investment edge. We're We just announced a few days ago that Carlyle is structuring a first of its kind $4,100,000,000 revolving credit facility for our America's corporate private equity funds, with the price of debt directly tied to our goal of 30% diverse directors across our portfolios. We are converging our focus on building better businesses, our commitment to diversity and our innovative use of private equity tools to drive real impact.
This structure provides a clear financial advantage to our limited partners, while encouraging further progress on board diversity, an aspect with tremendous social and financial impact for our portfolio companies. We project this will also save us 1,000,000 of dollars in financing costs.
Ultimately, we are using the tools of private investing to find opportunities at the intersection of financial performance and impact. And this is only the beginning. We recognize that these issues constantly evolve, but by staying nimble And embedding impact into all aspects of our business, we are confident that we will continue to drive long term value in this rapidly changing world.