Like for everyone, 2020 was a challenging year for Capria, our network partners, and all of our investee companies. Emerging markets were particularly hit hard on both economic and health fronts; our fund manager partners and company investees are all located in areas that were among the most impacted in the world.
Our network presence ranges from Peru with the world’s highest COVID death rate per capita, to India, where they celebrated beating the virus, only to have wave 2 come into full force in Q1 2021 and unleash suffering on a much greater scale than wave 1 ever did. Our portfolio also extends to countries in Africa that experienced sustained economic shocks in 2020, and today are still waiting and bracing themselves for the delta and lambda variants that are likely much worse than what they experienced in 2020. Finally our network includes the countries of Southeast Asia, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Singapore which pursued a containment strategy as a solution when in fact containment was no more than fingers in a dike that could not hold back the incoming tide of virus over time.
That said, business was pretty good, in fact better than any of us expected: I am not aware of any companies in our portfolio of 80+ that have failed due to the pandemic. That’s simply amazing. Our underlying portfolio companies have shown themselves to be a resilient lot, you can see portfoliolevel revenue growth and impact growth in double and triple digits across our 2020 report. We are proud to have played a small part in helping them not only survive, but in many cases thrive, in these hard times.