Deloitte Private Equity Index
Dive into the detail of the Deloitte PE Index
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The annual Deloitte Private Equity (PE) Index explores the impact of the changing dynamics of long-term value creation and assesses the extent to which PE backed consumer businesses are balancing their performance across the three pillars of profit, people and planet.
This is particularly relevant given the investment cycles of PE firms, providing a yearly assessment of how businesses must evolve to ensure they maintain profitable business models and a license to operate within emerging sustainable economies.
Exploring value drivers in an evolving economy
While companies continue to struggle to balance their impact across profit, people and planet there are positive signs of improvement over the last two years.
Our analysis revealed a PE landscape defined by both robust financial performance and emerging challenges. While the majority of companies demonstrated strong revenue and EBITDA growth, a significant number experienced margin contraction due to inflationary pressures. Navigating sector-specific dynamics and implementing careful cost management strategies will be crucial for PE firms to maintain profitability and deliver strong returns in an increasingly complex market.
This report, from which some of the key findings are outlined below, is a call to action for the PE industry to embrace its role as a force for positive change, demonstrating that financial success and a sustainable future are not mutually exclusive, but rather, inextricably intertwined.
Key findings
Looking forward
The PE Index is designed to be an outside-in assessment from publicly available data on large, UK based PE backed companies. This mirrors the information a potential investor gathers during an early-stage sales process, the due diligence a leader might do before joining a team, or what a discerning customer might try to understand about the companies they buy from.
As the PE Index is based on lag indicators, having been built from data collected for financial years ending 2023 with a three year look back to 2020. It does not necessarily reflect the political and economic pressures experienced in 2024 and the first quarter of 2025 or the impacts of new policies and regulations on business.
We scored each portfolio company on their individual performance both against sector and subsector peers and across the entire population. This information and the individual scores are not shared in this report but are available to the portfolio company management and their sponsors in the form of a dashboard. More detail on the methodology can be found within the report.
As data quality and availability increases due to shifts in market expectations and widening regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and potential further diversity and workforce reporting requirements, the Deloitte PE Index scoring and ranking will become an ever more reliable benchmark for value creation in private markets.
The metrics we chose for assessment have been identified as being of critical importance to PE houses, investors, and companies.
In future iterations of the PE Index, we look forward to adapting these measures and the baseline expectations behind them to focus more on action and improvement, as companies continue to embrace a wider definition of value in their strategies and operating models, and improve the transparency and reliability of sustainability reporting.
James Clare
