Navigator Global Investments Limited

Thank you for standing by and welcome to Navigator Global Investments Limited HY26 Interim Results. All participants are in a listen only mode and there will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Stephen Dark, CEO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to everyone joining the call this morning to discuss Navigator's half-year results for the 2026 financial year. I'm Stephen Dark, Navigator's CEO. I'm joined today, as per usual, by my colleagues Ross Zachary, Navigator CIO and Head of NGI Strategic Investments, and Amber Stoney, Navigator's Group CFO. Turning to slide four, the company snapshot. Navigator is the only ASX-listed company focused exclusively on partnering with leading alternative asset managers. We provide growth capital and strategic engagement to a diverse portfolio of 11 managers. As of 31 December, at the partner firm level, Navigator's affiliates manage over US$84 billion, up 6% over the past 12 months. This AUM is managed across 42 investment strategies and invested via 197 products. These strategies typically have low correlation to global equity and fixed income markets and to one another. Turning to a summary of Navigator's first half 2026 financial results on slide five. I'm pleased to report that NGI continue to see strong top line growth and earnings momentum. Our ownership adjusted AUM increased 5% during the period to $29 billion. Higher management fees with higher fee rates and continued strong risk adjusted investment performance leading to higher performance fees drove Navigator's first half revenue to 108.3 million US dollars, up 17% during the period. The group's adjusted EBITDA was 48.2 million US dollars, a 17% increase from first half 25, leading to a 7% increase in adjusted EPS. On slide six, you can see Navigator's Ownership Adjusted AUM over the last 12 months and since 2021. The consistent AUM growth over the past five years continues. Over the past 12 months, we saw a 7% increase in Ownership Adjusted AUM, meaning an additional US$1.9 billion of AUM. During 2025, we saw marginal net inflows across NGI with the growth in AUM driven by continued investment performance from both business segments, but particularly across the range of lighthouse strategies which have performed strongly in volatile markets. Given the 2025 investment performance, recent and prospective new product launches across NGI's portfolio, more positive sentiment from capital allocators and a generally improving fundraising environment across the industry, We expect to see higher net inflows across the NGI's partner firms in 2026. Turning to slide seven, alternative asset managers who aim to generate positive absolute returns for their investors across all market cycles have a strong alignment of interest in the economic performance of their strategies and the returns they generate for their investors. For Navigator's portfolio of managers, this is typically reflected in higher and more sustainable fee yields, which Navigator and our shareholders are a direct beneficiary of. Here we show Navigator's underlying revenue composition, taking Navigator's share of the revenues of our partner firms, including Lighthouse, on a calendar year basis. It's these underlying revenues that ultimately drive earnings for our partner firms and result in high distributions to Navigator, the latter predominantly occurring in the second half of every financial year. 2025 adds yet another year of strong underlying revenue performance to this chart, further illustrating the power and predictability of Navigator's resilient and growing model over the short, medium and longer term. After a very strong year in CY24, total underlying revenues were up again in calendar year 2025, with a higher relative contribution from base management fees and a lower contribution from performance fees. The average total fee yield, the light blue dotted line, over five years increased by five basis points to 101.14%, driven by higher management fees and relatively stable performance fees. NGI's partner firms have shown consistent growth in recurring management fee revenues, the dark blue bars, in line with higher AUM. The average management fee yield is 74 basis points, within the range of 72 to 75 over that five-year period, reflecting a marginally higher average fee yield than the prior corresponding period. Our partner firms have a consistent track record of producing strong risk-adjusted investment performance, and hence performance fees, across market cycles and over multiple years. As a result of that, Navigator generates resilient underlying performance fee revenues annually, as evidenced by the light blue bars. The performance fee yield, as shown by the gold line at the bottom of the chart, has averaged 39 basis points and in a relatively narrow range of 26 to 47 basis points over that period, reflecting the relative stability and expected recurring nature of that revenue stream, especially through challenging investment cycles. The performance fee yield for calendar year 25 was 41 basis points, slightly higher than the long-term average, but lower than the prior year of 47 basis points. Unlike performance fees from strategies that are benchmarked to a market index, the absolute return nature of the strategies managed by our partner firms and the structure of their performance fee mechanics as we outlined at our November Investor Day drive these outcomes and have now done so for longer than five years. Moving forward and based on the long-term track record you can see here, we think it is reasonable to expect performance fee revenues within this range providing a resilient source of recurring income for Navigator. In the appendix we present the latest numbers on the lack of correlation across the NGI strategic partner firms. On slide 8 we show the segment revenue composition for NGI strategic and Lighthouse across management fees and performance fees. In line with growth since calendar year 21 and prior, Navigator has exhibited consistent continued underlying management fee growth across both NGI Strategic and Lighthouse, with an aggregate $216 million US dollar revenues generated for calendar year 25, up 9% on the prior year and slightly ahead of the three-year growth rate of 8%. As you can see on the right-hand side chart, the rolling three-year average performance fee revenue across the business segments has continued to increase. and now sits at $101 million from $94 million in the prior corresponding period. After an historically strong calendar year 24, overall performance fee revenues decreased by 7%, with NGI Strategic generating performance fee revenues more in line with its five-year average. It was pleasing to see Lighthouse performance fees increase again, up 23% by a prior corresponding period and a 16% across across the calendar year. This result reflects an increasing trend towards the growth of Lighthouse's direct hedge fund business, which incorporates a performance fee model for investor alignment rather than a management fee only model. As investors saw from our Q2 AUM and performance update released last month, rather than the reliance on an outperformance of any one strategy, Lighthouse is exhibiting strong risk-adjusted returns across almost all of its strategies exceeding their respective three and five year averages in 2025. The broader diversification of the Lighthouse performance through revenue stream is encouraging as we enter 2026. With additional new products and a continued supportive environment for delivering strong investment returns, we remain confident in the ongoing success and growth of the Lighthouse platform. Importantly, Navigator continues to see no fee pressure in either base management fee rates or performance fee rates across our partner firms and in fact we're observing increases across some strategies and new products as investors are prepared to pay managers who can truly generate non-market linked investment returns across cycles. Amber will address the updated fee rates across our business segments during the presentation of our latest key metrics. Turning to slide 9, you can see the earnings power of the diversified portfolio. In the first half 26, we saw strong adjusted EBITDA across both business segments. NGO Strategic increased its earnings contributions by 32% to $19.3 million due to higher cash distributions received during the six months. Lighthouse generated a record $28.9 million EBITDA during first half, an increase of 9% from prior corresponding period, driven by the higher management and higher performance fees across the platform, with the operating margin in line with PCP. As noted last May, while Navigator continues to benefit from a resilient and diversified earnings base, subject to market conditions and the timing of revenue receipts, Navigator expects full-year adjusted EBITDA to be lower than FY25. This reflects comparatively lower investment performance in the NGI strategic segment relative to the prior strong year, which may result in lower profit distributions in the second half compared with, yet again, a very strong H2 FY25. We are very pleased with the ongoing consistent investment performance, management and earnings generations by our partner firms, which continue to prove to be some of the leading alternative asset managers globally in their respective area of specialties. There has been and there will continue to be material long-term value accruing to Navigator shareholders from the ongoing organic growth of our partner firms who continue to generate that performance and launch new strategies and also a focus on reinvesting our operating cash into new partner firms that we source, diligence and execute that further diversify and grow the NGI portfolio and increase the scale of our earnings. Ross will talk more about this but we remain focused on continuing inorganic growth in 2026. Finally, it's particularly important in this investment environment of heightened volatility to recognise the value of diversification that is generated by a portfolio approach like that that Navigator adopts. This ensures that overall resilience and consistency of earnings should be able to be maintained across market cycles. And secondly, with stable or indeed increasing fee rates and a resilient investment performance from strategies that are benchmark unaware, Navigator's business model can produce growing revenues, higher fee yields and the resulting increased cash earnings over the medium and longer term. Now I'll hand over to Ross to provide the NGO business update for the half.

Thank you, Stephen. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to review more about our business and highlight how Navigator's scale and diversification continue to drive value. On slide 11, what is clear here is that Navigator operates and partners with large established firms who are leaders across a diverse range of unique alternative investment strategies. These businesses deploy well over $100 billion in time-tested strategies across global markets designed and refined over decades to generate strong risk-adjusted returns. Dispersion within and across asset classes, market volatility, interest rate changes, economic cycles, and geopolitical uncertainty all present opportunities to provide their clients strong risk-adjusted returns. These are scaled but growing firms with an average of over 8 billion of firm-level AUM. In today's industry, it's the scale and the related resources that are more critical than ever to attract and retain talent and generate strong results. Lighthouse and our partner firms all benefit from these attributes. In addition, MGI and our partner firms have a clear competitive advantage through our partnership with Blue Al's GP strategic capital division. Their 55 plus person business services platform continues to benefit us across various verticals, such as capital introductions, operational and technology best practices, as well as very targeted human capital advisory engagement. If you flip to slide 12, we have a snapshot of the business composition today. Across the NGI strategic and Lighthouse segments, our earnings are generated from over 40 alternative investment strategies delivered through almost 200 products globally. Not only is the business diversified across liquid alternatives, public and private credit, specialized private equity, real estate capital solutions, and a variety of commodity strategies, but it also generates revenues through a wide variety of fee terms and structures. Today, an estimated 33% of ownership-adjusted AUM in the NGI strategic segment, or 13% across the entire Navigator business, is in long-duration products with highly visible sticky revenues. We expect this contribution from this high-quality and stable earnings stream to continue over time as we add partner firms and the existing partner firms further evolve their product set. We cannot emphasize enough that the diversification available to us by partnering with independent firms has and will continue to benefit the company and our shareholders as we execute our growth initiatives. We flip to slide 13. We'll provide a few select highlights of activity during the period. Our partner firms continue to be at the forefront of their respective strategies and prove out why they are leaders in the alternative investment industry globally. During the period, we've seen our partners at 1315 Capital continue to deploy capital into innovative, growing healthcare companies, as well as realize existing portfolio companies in a difficult environment. Another private markets partner firm, Marble Capital, continues to illustrate their leadership position in a large, highly fragmented asset class with their unique strategy as they specialize in providing capital solutions to high-quality real estate sponsors in regions of America that are experiencing strong, resilient economic growth coupled with an undersupply of housing. They recently announced that they deployed over $350 million in new investments in 2025 across over 8,300 units, illustrating their impressive ability to execute a focused and differentiated strategy at scale. Similarly, Invictus Capital Partners' highly differentiated approach to residential real estate credit continues to attract the most sophisticated long-term oriented institutional clients in the world. This is evidenced by a recently publicly announced mandate for more capital. DSM, one of the partner firms acquired in the NGI strategic portfolio, has continued to demonstrate their clear leadership position in the global hedge fund industry. With over 20 billion of firm-level AUM today, their investment results have remained exceptionally strong, which, as you can see here, continues to result in winning several industry awards in this past year. Please flip to slide 14 and we can review the overall growth of the business this year. On slide 14, you will see that excluding the sale of Barton Hill, which closed in October, both the NGI Strategic and the Lighthouse segments generated positive organic growth in the period. We are very pleased to report this 5% increase in ownership adjusted AUM or 7% when adjusting for the Barton Hill sale in a challenging backdrop for the industry. Our private market partner firms are in the process of raising capital for their flagship funds, and we expect to see additional contribution from these efforts in the second half of our fiscal year. Lighthouse continues to demonstrate their long-term proven track record of innovation, by creating and offering new hedge fund products which leverage the breadth and sophistication of their platform to meet both existing and new client demand. It is important to remember that the underlying returns of Lighthouse, our partner firms, and the public markets show very little correlation to one another. And therefore, we continue to see investment performance across the group as a key driver of AUM and revenue growth. Please turn to slide 15 to review a cross-section of recent investment performance. This slide summarizes certain indicative performance across both segments. The NGI strategic composite is comprised of flagship strategies in the NGI strategic portfolio. And although it generated lower performance in calendar year 25 as compared to recent history, you'll see the three- and five-year performance not only illustrates the strength of the track record across this business, but also how well positioned they are for continued growth and performance. At Lighthouse, performance was particularly strong in 2025, with hedge fund products delivering attractive risk-adjusted returns and a broad contribution across their teams and sectors. From what we see, the environment to generate strong returns remains in 2026. This performance data clearly illustrates the power of our model and how partner firms that show low correlation to one another can generate the continued durable results for NGI shareholders over time. If you go next to slide 16, we can touch briefly on our growth strategy and our focus on continued growth through acquisition. The criteria you see on slide 16 are informed by our deep experience in partnering with, investing in, and operating alternative investment management firms for over 20 years. We continue to build and work through a very active pipeline of established and growth-oriented firms who are acutely focused on positioning themselves for sustainable long-term growth. Today, this pipeline is broad. and includes both firms that specialize in areas of private market alternatives that we believe our partnership may add value to, as well as certain liquid alternative firms that we think may provide diversification benefit and present the potential to enhance the growth profile of our business. Although we increasingly recognize a trend of larger alternative asset managers capturing investor market share, we are focused on a wide universe of specialized proven businesses that will capture share and add tangible value to their clients over time. When identifying new potential partner firms, our goal is to continue to increase the stability, durability, and growth profile of NGI's earnings, which in turn strengthens our competitive position to make further acquisitions over time. Thank you. Amber, I'll turn it over to you for the financial results.