Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1,0, European Business School - International University Schloß Reichartshausen Oestrich-Winkel, language: English, abstract: Private equity companies are seen as high risk investment funds, trying to gain high returns on their investments in a period of around three to seven years. Even if the private equity industry has played an important role in growth or as an external financing source of established companies as well as newly-established companies, private equity investors are not seen as sustainable value creators. In various occasions, private equity funds are even declared as a greedy instrument to earn fast money. In order to analyse whether private equity companies create value in a sustainable way, this study compares the performance of private equity backed initial public offerings (IPOs) with non-private equity backed IPOs. Moreover, it analyses whether private equity backed IPOs outperform the market. This study evaluates the performance of private equity backed IPOs by performing two separate empirical analyses: one focusing on the UK private equity market - the largest private equity market in Europe - and one focusing on the entire European market. The research conducts a quantitative analysis of secondary data, more specifically by using stock prices of private equity backed firms, non-private equity backed firms and applicable benchmark market indices. Such data was obtained from multiple sources, such as the London Stock Exchange, Bloomberg and Yahoo Finance. In general, the study compares the performance of private equity backed IPOs with non-sponsor IPOs with regard to their price development and abnormal returns. The analysis is based on multiple independent analyses of each IPO. In order to provide a general understanding of this issue and to be able to interpret the research results, the paper discusses the theoretical framework and the findings of other authors. In recent decades, several authors have demonstrated their research on private equity based IPOs as well as the value creation of private equity firms. Based upon these, hypotheses are formulated, which are then subsequently tested using multiple research methods. In general, the study indicates that the majority of private equity firms do not create sustainable value. More than 50% of the analyzed private equity backed companies were not able to outperform the market benchmark indices. On average, private equity backed firms were able to significantly outperform the market in the UK. However, they were unable to perform equally well on a European level.