Thank you.
Canada is a leader in the clean-tech arena because we have a very strong entrepreneurial spirit. We have an orientation to doing things better and faster and with less, and also with lower environmental impact, and we've integrated those concepts very cleverly. So we are competitive globally for a number of reasons. One is the fact that we have great institutions that have brought forward good ideas.
The other one is--and I have to say thank you for this, really--that the government has different policies around supporting these companies, because they are not able to get enough risk capital in Canada. So SDTC, with its partners, has been able to bridge that gap, that valley of death, and bring them forward and coach them and take them to the markets.
Another illustration of how competitive these companies are is that we have seen the growth in foreign direct investment into the SDTC portfolio companies. In the last five years the Canadian growth in investment has been about 60%. The foreign direct investment numbers have been 200%. A lot of that, in fact 50% of it, is currently from the U.S.
When we talk to U.S. investors and ask why they come to Canada when they have lots of opportunities in the U.S, they say it is because perhaps we don't have as much surplus cash, the companies we grow are used to doing more with less, and also they are very tightly managed. The other part of that is that because our own economy is not huge, we grow companies that start out their business knowing they have to export, so they're very export-oriented from day one. All of those things have contributed to our competitiveness.