DWS Group GmbH & Co. KGaA

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the DWS Group Q3 2024 Results with Investor and Analyst Conference Call. I'm Sandra, the course call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in this synonym mode and the conference has been recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Oliver Vlade, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Sandra, and good morning to everybody from Frankfurt. This is Oliver from Investor Relations, and I would like to welcome everybody to our earnings call for the third quarter of 2024. Before we start, I would like to remind you that the upcoming Deutsche Bank analyst call will outline the asset management segments results, which have a different parameter basis to the DWS results that we are presenting now. I'm joined, as always, by Stefan Hobbs, our CEO, and Markus Kobler, our CFO. And Stefan will start with some opening remarks, and Markus will take you through the main presentation. For the Q&A afterwards, please could you limit yourself to the two most important questions so that we can give as many people a chance to participate as possible? And I would also like to remind you that the presentation may contain forward-looking statements which may not develop as we currently expect. I therefore ask you to take note of the disclaimer and the precautionary warning on the forward-looking statements at the end of our materials. And with that, I now pass on to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Q3 2024 earnings call. During our last quarterly call, we outlined our belief that DWS's transformation journey has been completed, and we've become a predictable company with an exciting investment case. based on disciplined cost management and focused investments into promising areas of growth. One part of predictability is stability in management. And as it is indeed my 10th quarterly earnings call, let us celebrate this anniversary by letting Markus do most of the talking, as he will guide us through today's deep dive. Like last time, the aim of the deep dive is to give you more transparency on one key lever on our path to deliver our ambitious 2025 financial targets. As you may remember, we used the Q2 call to describe in detail our client franchise, which trends we see, and how we address them. This time, Markus will explain how we categorize our cost base and address the different cost items. And most importantly, he will shed some light on why we are confident in our ability to deliver our 2025 promise of an adjusted cost-income ratio of below 59% and an earnings per share of €4.50. But before we get there, let me briefly summarize Q3, a quarter of true client focus, hard work, and decisive implementation of our plans. We are steady as we go. Overall, we are positive about today's numbers as they show good financial results and also the resilience of our business. In a quarter that provided some market challenges for the asset management industry, we delivered strong net inflows. Long-term net flows were at a record high for a quarter, mainly driven by the highest quarterly net flows into our passive and extractors businesses and a strong contribution from active fixed incomes. And despite the fact that we saw outflows in alternatives in Q3, we still expect to return to overall net inflows in this asset class for the second half of the year, mainly driven by expected inflows into infrastructure investments in Q4. Assets under management are at a record level, given the strong inflows and market appreciation. Speaking of markets, we are particularly pleased with how our teams navigated the spike in market volatility in August. As an example, the event had no negative impact on the performance of our flagship multi-asset fund Concept Kalde Morgen, for which our expectation of a significant performance feed to be booked in the current quarter has not changed. With increased revenues of 1% and reduced costs of 1%, we delivered an adjusted cost-income ratio for the quarter that is below our guidance for all of 2024. For the full year, we expect the adjusted cost income ratio to land at the lower end of our guidance for 2024. When we look at the composition of our revenues, we are pleased to see a further increase in management fees. And lastly, profit before tax and net income also increased, benefiting from continued operating leverage. All in all, we are quite happy with these results and are convinced that 2024 would be a significant step forward towards reaching our 2025 targets. More on that later. But for now, let me hand over to my great partner, Markus, to explain our Q3 results.