The Private Equity Council, the trade group created by the leveraged buyout industry when its public image was taking a bruising, came out recently with a report on job creation and the LBO industry. The report doesn’t shed much light, though.

The PEC and the academics who assembled the report obviously worked hard on it–and they point out the truism that in fact, in certain cases, PE firms create jobs. But the study took only a tiny slice of the market (42 companies bought by private equity firms). In addition, it didn’t name the individual portfolio companies at the request of the private equity firms that control them. 

“They simply wanted to produce company data on an anonymous basis,” PEC spokesman Robert Stewart said, citing “competitive issues.”

Nevertheless, here are some of its findings:
    Among the 42 companies, 32 or 76.2 percent expanded their
workforces in subsequent years while the remaining 10 cut their workforces. 
    Across all 42 companies, 26,214 net new jobs were created, or an increase of 8.4 percent over their combined employment of 310,420 at the time of acquisition. 
     
Data was provided by Apollo, Bain, Blackstone, Carlyle, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Providence, Silver Lake, and Texas Pacific Group.
 
But without more information on how big a slice of the corporate universe controlled by private equity the surveyed companies represent, and why these particular companies were chosen for the survey and not others,  the report seems to raise as many questions about job creation as it answers.

(Image. PEC’s Doug Lowenstein)