DWS Group GmbH & Co. KGaA

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the TWS Q4 Full Year 2024 Preliminary Results with Investor and Analyst Conference Call. I am Shari, the Chorus Call Operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be listened only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and 1 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 Mr. Oliver Flade. Please go ahead.

Operator, thank you very much 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 fourth quarter of 2024. And before we start, I would like to remind you that the upcoming Deutsche Bank analyst call will outline the asset management segment results, which have a different parameter basis to the DWS results that we are presenting now. I'm joined, as usual, by our CEO, Stefan Hobbs, and Markus Kobler, our CFO. And Stefan will start with some opening remarks and also with some closing remarks, and Markus will take you through the presentation in between. For the Q&A afterwards, please could you limit yourself to the two most important questions as usual so that we can give as many people a chance to participate as possible, although we have also allowed for a little bit more time than usual in case it is needed. And I would also like to remind you that the presentation may contain forward-looking statements which may not develop as we currently expect, and 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 will now pass on to Stefan.

Thank you, Oliver. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to our Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call. As you wrap up the year and look into what is ahead of us, we have a pretty packed agenda for today's call. In addition to the Q4 and full year 2024 results, we will also provide an updated outlook for this year and we'll share our new medium-term targets. Let me start by recapping on 2024. After the character-building episode in 2022 and the following turnaround in 2023, we view 2024 as the year which paved the way for strong, disciplined growth in the second half of the 2020s. For that, we set ourselves short- and medium-term objectives 12 months ago And I will try to provide an honest self-assessment of how we have done so far. But before we get there, let me summarize the key numbers for 2024. Overall, we are pleased with today's full year 2024 results as they show the success of our disciplined strategy implementation with gains in our flow picture as well as on the profit side. Thanks to the continued trust of our clients, we were able to record strong long-term net flows of 14.4% billion euros in the quarter and 32.9 billion euros for the year. This also helped our assets under management cross the psychologically relevant threshold of 1 trillion euro. One of the key drivers was again our strength in X-Trackers and Passive, which delivered a record high for the year with 41.8 billion euro net inflows. We are also pleased that the flow picture in Alternatives moved into positive territory with the return to net inflows in the second half of 2024. Adjusted revenues were at a record level for the full year, driven by higher management fees as well as additional performance and transaction fees. Together with our continued cost discipline, we were able to improve the adjusted profit before tax to over €1 billion. This has translated into an increased net income which is up 19% year-on-year. All in all, this resulted in an adjusted cost-income ratio of 62.3%, which is at the lower end of our guidance for the full year. As part of our strong commitment to creating shareholder value, we will propose an ordinary dividend of €2.20 per share at this year's AGM, an increase of 5% versus last year. Now let's come to the self-assessment. Looking back, we set ourselves three short-term goals. Solve self-inflicted issues, continue showing strong organic growth, and ensure a high level of alpha creation. On the first item, we feel that we did pretty well in reaching our aspiration of boring is the new sexy. We resolved our transformation program with a hybrid solution. We reintroduced corporate titles. and we mostly succeeded in not creating any new adverse headlines. In that sense, we feel unleashed from the non-business items that were holding us back in the past and use the momentum to deliver on our strategy. On the second item, we continue to show strong organic growth by doubling our long-term net new assets. In the next trackers, we again grew above market share. We are, however, not satisfied when it comes to ensuring a high level of alpha creation. In a continued difficult market environment for active asset managers, we had to recognize a decline in the relative performance of some of our strategies. We reacted to that with a couple of changes, including a new head for fixed income in EMEA, as well as fund-level changes in equities. Most notably, we also announced a new CIO with Vincenzo Veda taking over in December last year. It is our clear goal to deliver performance for our clients, and you will see us being self-aware and disciplined to make sure we successfully do so. Let's turn to the medium-term aspirations we communicated 12 months ago, namely becoming the gateway to Europe, aiming for top five in the top five, and helping to shape the future of finance. Since those goals are slightly less tangible, you may accuse me of being a generous grader. However, we made solid progress on becoming the gateway to Europe as we continue to offer successful strategies for our clients globally to benefit from pan-European infrastructure projects. Another area of focus is to increase our client relationships in the Middle East but we will open an office in Abu Dhabi. Our plan to become top five in the top five particularly focuses on growing our business in Japan, China, and India. Over the past year, we delivered the strongest net inflows in Japan since our IPO. In China, we are seeking to increase our stake in harvest, and in India, we're working hard on building a new strategic partnership. When it comes to future of finance, you may remember us talking about digital assets before it became fashionable lately. In 2024, we successfully launched our crypto ETCs and now on track to issue a Eurostable coin through our AllUnity joint venture with our partners Galaxy Digital and Flow Traders. I will not go as far as suggesting a school grade, but to sum up, we are pleased with the year as we've made further progress in our way to reach our 2025 targets and also strengthen the base for the years to come. More on that later. But for now, I will hand over to my partner, Markus, to explain our Q4 results.