This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.
Operator
Good morning and welcome to the TPG's first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Currently, all callers have been placed in a listen-only mode, and following management's prepared remarks, the call will be open for all your questions. If you'd like to ask a question at that time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you need to remove yourself from the queue, press the pound key. At any time, if you should need operator assistance, press star 0. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. please go to TPG's IR website to obtain the earnings materials. I will now turn the call over to Gary Stein, Head of Investor Relations at TPG. Thank you. You may begin.
Gary Stein
Great. Thanks, Operator. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings call. Joining me this morning are John Winkle-Reed, Chief Executive Officer, and Jack Weingart, Chief Financial Officer. In addition, our Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Jim Coulter, and our President, are also here with us and will be available for the Q&A portion of this morning's call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call may include forward-looking statements that do not guarantee future events or performance. Please refer to TPG's earnings release and SEC filings for factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. TPG undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Within our discussion and earnings release, we are presenting GAAP measures, non-GAAP measures, and pro forma GAAP and non-GAAP measures, reflecting the reorganization that was completed during 2021 and immediately prior to TPG's IPO. We believe it's helpful for investors and analysts to understand the historic results through the lens of our go-forward structure, and please refer to TPG's earnings release for details on the pro forma financial information. We will also be discussing certain non-GAAP measures on this call that management believes are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business. These non-GAAP measures are reconciled to the nearest GAAP figures in TPG's earnings release, which is available on the company's website. Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any TPG fund.
John Winkle - Reed
I'd now like to turn the call over to John Winkle-Reed, Chief Executive Officer. Thanks, Gary, and good morning, everyone.
John Winkle - Reed
Following our IPO in January, we hosted our first public earnings call at the end of March. Since we spoke with you just about six weeks ago, we're going to keep today's prepared remarks relatively brief. I'll touch on our recent performance and discuss a few highlights across our business. I'll then turn the call over to Jack to provide more detail on our financial results, and then we'll take your questions. As of March 31st, we had more than $120 billion of total assets under management. which increased 6% versus the prior quarter and 26% year over year. This growth was driven by a combination of strong investment performance and fundraising across our five platforms, partially offset by a continued pace of significant realization activity. We raised $5 billion during the quarter, driven primarily by strong demand for our fourth opportunistic real estate fund, and we raised $24 billion over the last 12 months. We invested $4 billion in the first quarter and $22 billion during the last 12 months. We also had nearly $5 billion of realizations in the quarter and $29 billion over the last 12 months. In aggregate, our investments generated value creation of 33% for the last 12 months and 7% in the first quarter. Approximately two-thirds of the Q1 value creation is attributable to exit agreements signed during the quarter at significant valuations. Adjusting for these realization events, our value creation for the quarter would have been approximately 2%. In connection with our earnings release this morning, we announced our first quarterly cash dividend of 44 cents per share of Class A common stock, representing 85% of TBG's after-tax distributive earnings. Jack will provide some more detail on the dividend. As we discussed when we spoke with you six weeks ago, The global geopolitical and economic landscape remains highly uncertain due to a number of significant macro factors, including the ongoing tragic conflict in Ukraine, a U.S. inflation rate that has reached a 40-year high, and a rising interest rate environment that has driven U.S. mortgage rates above 5% for the first time in more than a decade. As an investment-led organization operating in this volatile environment, we are continuing to adhere to our strategy and rigorous approach across all our platforms. We've been anticipating the onset of choppier markets, and this expectation has shaped how we've been investing our funds and managing our portfolios. We've been proactively monetizing investments and have returned significant amounts of capital to our limited partners. Over the last 12 months, during a period of very active capital deployment, we have in fact returned materially more capital than we invested. The current market reset is presenting us with a range of investment opportunities, at more interesting valuations, and our pipeline of actionable opportunities is growing at a time when there are fewer competitive sources of capital, such as IPOs and SPACs. We are fortunate to have a substantial amount of committed but uncalled capital available to invest, $30 billion as of March 31st. With this backdrop in mind, I'd like to spend a few minutes walking you through some highlights across our business. starting with our largest platform, Capital, which had $57 billion of total AUM at the end of the first quarter. Our capital funds had value creation of 11% during the quarter. As I mentioned a minute ago, this value creation reflects several significant signed exits. Adjusting for those exits, the first quarter value creation for our capital portfolio was approximately 2%, outperforming broader market indices. The ongoing value creation in our portfolio underscores our distinct investing style and our focus on companies and sectors that continue to grow revenue and earnings despite the volatile macro environment. During the first quarter, our capital funds invested nearly $2 billion in companies such as Confluent Medical Technologies, a leading contract development and manufacturing partner to medical device companies. This investment leverages our capabilities as one of the most active and experienced healthcare private equity investors and builds on our multi-decade thematic focus on evaluated outsourced medical products dating back to our original investment in quintiles. Also during the quarter, TPG Capital Asia announced an investment in Fractal Analytics, India's largest outsourced provider of artificial intelligence solutions to Fortune 500 companies. This investment stems from our position as a leading technology investor and our thematic coverage of digital services on a global scale. For the quarter, our capital funds generated total realizations of approximately $4 billion, including the $14 billion take private of McAfee and the recapitalizations of both Novotek Health Holdings, Asia's largest biotech-focused contract research organization, and Green Cross, Australia's largest pet care company. Let me turn to our growth platform, which had $22 billion of total AUM at the end of the first quarter. This platform provides flexible capital at scale for growing businesses through our growth, tech adjacencies, and digital media funds. Despite the broader market weakness we have been discussing this morning, our growth funds continue to perform well, with aggregate value creation of 1.5% in the first quarter and 23% for the last 12 months. We have built our growth portfolio with a late cycle mindset and a focus on sectors and themes like cybersecurity, ed tech, and healthcare, where secular rather than cyclical growth is the driver of performance. In addition, given the scale of capital we're deploying, we are generally investing in later stage companies that have strong financial profiles and where we can help bend their growth curves with the substantial resources TPG brings to bear. Looking at capital invested in the growth platform during the quarter, In addition to the investments in Project 44 and ExpressBees that we mentioned on our last call, I'd also like to highlight TTAD and Rise's investment in Acorns, a leading mobile savings and investment platform with more than 4.7 million subscribers. This investment is a great example of how the recent market reset is accelerating the pace of investment opportunities for us as competitive sources of capital have been sidelined. Acorns have been planning to raise capital through a SPAC transaction With that market experiencing significant volatility, we were able to invest capital on attractive terms and position the company for continued growth. During the first quarter, we also returned capital to our growth fund investors through several transactions, including the full monetization of our steak and toast, a leading SaaS provider for the restaurant industry, and a partial monetization of our investment in Asia Healthcare Holdings. Moving on, I'd like to briefly discuss our impact platform, which had total AUM of $14 billion, as of March 31st. This includes our inaugural RISE Climate Fund, which recently announced its final close at its hard cap of $7.3 billion. TPG RISE Climate has already committed more than $2 billion of capital to catalyze climate action and scale companies across the sector. Our impact funds had aggregate value creation of 1% in the first quarter and 31% for the last 12 months. During the quarter, our impact funds invested $1.5 billion, including the first tranche of Rise Climate's investment and a newly created electrical vehicle subsidiary of India's Tata Motors. In addition, our Rise and Rise Climate funds announced a $500 million investment in Nextracker, the number one global provider of solar tracker and software solutions for utility-scale solar projects around the world. Turning to real estate, This platform ended the first quarter with $18 billion of total AUM, which increased more than 40% from the prior quarter, primarily due to raising an additional $4.3 billion of capital for our current opportunistic fund, which now stands at $6.4 billion raised. TPG's real estate platform delivered value creation of 6% for the first quarter and 26% for the last 12 months across our opportunistic and core plus funds. In the first quarter, our opportunistic fund made a follow-on investment in Dogwood Industrial Properties, a platform we established in 2019 to build a portfolio of multi-tenant logistics facilities throughout the United States. In addition, our Core Plus funds completed an investment through Doonwood Residential Properties, which is a new platform that is building a portfolio of differentiated multifamily assets in markets with attractive secular growth dynamics and supply constraints. Finally, I'd like to touch on our market solutions platform, which had 10 billion of total AUM at the end of the first quarter across several strategies, including our long short and long only public investing funds and private market solutions, which is our secondaries business focused on GP solutions. In addition, during the first quarter, our debt capital markets group led seven fee generating transactions, including the recapitalization of Green Cross, which we believe was the first covenant light direct lender deal completed in Australia, and one of the largest Unitronge deals ever done in Asia. Taking a step back, I'd like to highlight our talent strategy, a key element of our firm's culture and a topic we discussed in detail with many of you leading up to our IPO in January. Retaining and recruiting the best talent continues to be an important strategic area of focus for us, particularly in this increasingly competitive job market. The strength of our culture, which is enabled by an exceptional group of talented and diverse people, is the result of deep investment over the years, and we work hard to constantly reinforce it. This manifests itself in several ways. For instance, in March, several firm leaders and I hosted a global promotions program for 140 members of the TPG team who were promoted at the end of 2021. Among this promote class, 48% identify as diverse across gender, race, or ethnicity. Our focus on creating career paths with enhanced opportunity and upward mobility has never been more important and will continue to be an area of focus for our entire team. Our effort to continuously develop and engage talent goes beyond the four walls of TPG. Last month, along with a number of our peers, we engaged as a founding partner of Ownership Works, a nonprofit that seeks to accelerate the development of broad employee ownership programs. Given the importance of this initiative, two senior members of our management team have joined the board of Ownership Works, our president, Todd Susitsky, and Marianne Hancock, CEO of Y Analytics. We believe it is important to express our commitment to our people, both at TPG and across our portfolio, and Ownership Works is one important example of how we can drive meaningful engagement beyond our firm. Overall, we're very pleased with our financial and operational results for the first quarter of 2022, which highlights the momentum we are continuing to generate across our five platforms, despite a more challenging operating environment. We also remain intently focused on capital formation as we continue to make strong progress with our broad-based fundraising campaigns. I'd now like to turn the call over to Jack so he can take you through our financial results.
Jack
Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to briefly walk through our financial results and highlight some of the more significant points regarding our first quarter performance. Our total assets under management grew, as John mentioned, from $95 billion at the end of the first quarter of 21 to more than $120 billion as of March 31st. The drivers of this 26% increase during the last 12 months include $29 billion of value creation from our underlying fund investments and $24 billion from capital raising. partially offset by $29 billion of realizations that were returned to our fund investors during the same period. Fee-earning AUM increased from $51 billion in March 21 to approximately $64 billion as of March 31, 2022, and this 26% increase was driven primarily by the raising of nearly $15 billion in fee-earning capital across all of our platforms. At the end of the first quarter of 22, approximately 84% of our AUM and 79% of our fee-earning AUM was either perpetual or long-dated funds with a duration at inception of 10 years or longer. In addition, 78% of our fee-earning AUM had a remaining duration of five or more years as of the end of the first quarter. As of March 31st, we had approximately $9 billion of AUM subject to fee-earning growth including nearly $7 billion not yet earning fees, and our funds had more than $30 billion of available capital for future investment. Turning to our income statement, we recorded GAAP net income for the first quarter of $163 million. On our previous call, I provided guidance regarding our expectations for Q1 non-GAAP results, and our reported results for the first quarter came in at or above that guidance on all key metrics. We reported fee-related revenues for the first quarter of $241 million, and we reported fee-related earnings, or FRE, of $92 million. Our FRE grew 38% versus the pro forma year-ago quarter, driven by a combination of top-line growth in management fees and the ongoing expansion of our FRE margins as we continue to scale our business and generate operating leverage. Our FRE margin was 38% for the first quarter, compared to 34% in the first quarter of 2021 on a pro forma basis. Our after-tax distributable earnings were $199 million, which more than tripled versus the pro forma year-ago quarter, driven by growth in FRE and by realized performance allocations of $122 million. Turning to the non-GAAP balance sheet for TPG Operating Group as of March 31st, which is reflective of our balance sheet-like business model, We are well capitalized with $583 million of cash and $450 million of long-term debt. We also had net accrued performance allocation balance, which represents the 20% allocation to the TPG operating group of $796 million, an increase from the $769 million at the end of 21. I'd like to note that as of March 31st, $107 billion, or 89% of our total AUM, was eligible for performance allocations, and 85 billion, or 71%, was generating performance allocations. On the fundraising side, my comments on the last call regarding the overall market conditions remain true. The market is crowded with managers raising capital, some sooner than their clients expected, and certain segments of the market are temporarily over-allocated. fundraising campaigns industry-wide will likely take longer than usual to complete. Against that backdrop, our fundraising momentum remains strong. As John said, we raised over $5 billion during the first quarter, more than three times the amount that we raised during the first quarter of 2021. On the impact platform, we had a final close last month of our RISE Climate Fund at the hard cap of $7.3 billion. and we expect a first close on our next broad-based impact fund around mid-year. Our next opportunistic real estate fund is oversubscribed, and we will soon hold our final close at the hard cap of $6.5 billion. On the capital platform, as you know, we continue to see strong demand for our three core products, TPG Capital, Healthcare Partners, and TPG Asia. We expect to complete accelerated first closings for TPG Capital and Healthcare Partners around mid-year. followed by TPG Asia's first close shortly thereafter. We will have more to report on these campaigns during the second quarter call. Before I wrap up my prepared remarks, I'd like to provide some additional detail regarding our first quarterly cash dividend as a public company. As a reminder, our current intention is to pay out to shareholders at least 85% of the after-tax distributable earnings attributable to TPG Inc. on a quarterly basis, subject to necessary approvals. Consistent with this approach, we announced this morning a cash dividend of 44 cents per share of Class A common stock, which will be payable on June 3rd to record holders as of the close of business on May 20th. I would note that the non-GAAP effective tax rate in Q1 was slightly higher than what we have previously indicated due to certain IPO-related costs recognized during the quarter that were deferred for tax purposes. Finally, our fully diluted share count at the end of the first quarter, including unvested RSUs, was approximately 320 million shares. Taking a step back, we feel very good about our first quarter results and the progress we continue to make driving growth across our business. Our investment portfolios delivered strong value creation. Despite the turbulent market backdrop, we have maintained a solid pace of capital deployment while also returning significant amounts of capital and profits. back to our investors. In addition, we continue to expect strong growth in AUM and FRE as a result of our broad-based fundraising campaigns.
John Winkle - Reed
With that, I'd now like to turn the call back over to the operator so we can take your questions.
Operator
At this time, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself from the queue by pressing the pound key. We'll take our first question. From Craig Svendla-Haller from Bank of America.
Craig Svendla - Haller
It's Craig Svendla-Haller. Good morning, everyone. John, Jack, hope you're both doing well.
John Winkle - Reed
Thanks, Craig. Hey, Craig.
Craig Svendla - Haller
So just starting with fundraising, and I heard the comments on certain verticals were over-calculated, but you do have a busy calendar this year. You know, it looks like maybe private equity may be the most crowded, plus you're also dealing with the denominator effect of lower public markets. How does this impact the timing of your raises? And then also coming back to what you said, which verticals do you view as the most over-allocated?
Jack
Yeah, thanks, Craig. When you say verticals, I would think about it more in terms of segments of the LP marketplace. And consistent with other discussions that have been had in the industry, The most impacted part of the market we see is in the traditional U.S. pension fund market, who are kind of most over-allocated based on the metrics that you talked about. The outperformance of the alternatives in their portfolio combined with the sell-off in the public markets causing the denominator effect. And the third piece is a lot of GPs coming back to market faster than they had planned. So, it's a crowded fundraising market. And that segment of the market in particular is having to make choices for the first time in a while. And what we see happening is those choices are benefiting the largest, most established GPs with the strongest relationships. And we are fortunate to be part of that group. And I think anyone who's returned a lot of capital to LPs as opposed to really just drawing down capital and coming back to ask for more is also seeing a benefit. And we're clearly in that camp. The other segments of the market, there are lots of pockets of continued growth despite the crowded market, but mostly in some of the international segments of the market, Asia, Middle East, even in Europe. So we see, I think I would expect the result of these fundraising campaigns to in part, we'll see a shift of the composition of our LP base reflecting the different dynamics in those different segments. So that's how I describe kind of the fundraising market overall. As it relates to our timing, like when we went public, we articulated an expected close for the capital funds, which are the largest pools of capital. We haven't yet closed. Real estate, just to reiterate what I just said, We will soon have our final close on the next opportunistic fund. On the impact side, we raised the large climate fund. That finished closing in the first quarter. And so we have the large capital funds and we have the next broad-based impact fund, Rise 3. When we, at the IPO, we talked about the capital funds having a close and activating closer to the end of the year. And we continue to see good momentum in those campaigns. And we continue to expect a first close in the capital and healthcare fund around mid-year, as I mentioned. So we'll have more to talk about the size of those closings in the Q2 call.
Craig
Our next question comes from Ken Worthington from JP Morgan.
Ken Worthington
Great. Good morning. So morning, I guess. TPG had an interest in rounding out its product offering, possibly creditor infrastructure via M&A. Maybe talk about how the further challenging market environment, what that really means for the interest in actually getting something done there, and maybe what you're seeing in the private market valuations versus what we're seeing in the public side at this point.
John Winkle - Reed
Yeah, I think we talked about, this is John, morning. We talked about that on our last call. We talked about that, obviously, when we were on the road. I think that we do have an interest in continuing to grow our platform and diversifying the product base. We've been in a reasonable level of dialogue just in terms of continuing to understand the market. I think we're going to be And this is consistent with what we've said before. We're going to be very thoughtful about what we do, both from the perspective of fit in terms of how it fits with our firm, as well as value, evaluation. And, you know, clearly we've been through over the course of the first quarter, as an example, right, we've been through a, I don't have to tell you, we've been through a substantial revaluation in our own space. And, you know, probably, I mean, I would expect like anything else, just like we're seeing on the deal front, you know, there takes some time for value expectations in terms of where sellers are and where buyers are to adjust. But, you know, we're, you know, we continue to be interested in doing it. There's nothing specific that we have to report to you now on that, but we remain focused.
Craig
Our next question comes from Alex Willstein from Goldman Sachs.
Alex Willstein
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question as well. I was hoping you could spend a couple of minutes on the valuation framework in super volatile markets that we've seen, obviously, over the last several months. And hearing your point about positioning the portfolio to be kind of late cycle proof, and it sounds like the fundamentals of portfolio companies are doing quite well, but I'm more curious about impact of high interest rates and just lower growth multiples that we're seeing in the market today and how that flows through the valuation analogy you guys have in the portfolio and whether or not, you know, that's the headwind we need to be thinking about over the next couple of quarters to extend during sort of delays in the valuation framework. Thanks.
John Winkle - Reed
Yeah, thanks, Alex. I think Todd Sositsky is actually on from our London office is going to respond to that. Sure.
Alex
And there's, Yeah, hopefully you can hear me as well. Thank you for the question. You know, I think there's a few sort of questions built into that. I would tell you that we actually find, you know, we feel very good about our strategy and our brand of, you know, growth and transformation investing in the current market and feel like the companies, as you pointed out, suggested, you know, feel quite positive about how the portfolio, you know, is held in there. It sounds like your question is a little bit more about the go forward approach. You know, I would tell you that in general, there are a lot of positives to this market for us. So this is a pretty exciting time. You know, we have seen historically over the 30 years we've been doing this, that really some of our best investments and vintages, you know, following this strategy have followed a public market reset. And it's happened in the context of a challenging macro environment. I mean, the first big investment that was done after the global financial crisis 2009 was IMS which we we followed for seven years before that but it was really only in this environment that we were able to come up with a with a transaction with management and the board that that worked that companies now IQ via you know a 40-plus billion dollar market cap company so you know the question of whether we were able to find interesting growth opportunities following our strategies environment I understand that you know the macro is but I would tell you the way we think about it, and this maybe is to use a broader construct that we think about when we invest, is that we distinguish between what we think of as interesting to us as investors, you know, the themes and the segments that we want to follow and study over years, and what's actionable, you know, what happens to be for sale. And we actually very intentionally, deliberately focus on what we think is interesting, even if it's not actionable. So what's exciting about this moment in the cycle is we often find The areas that we've studied and are excited about, the management teams we want to back, that we've learned to develop relationships with over years, they become actionable at this moment. And when they do, we really capitalize on all the work that we've done on these themes, and we work aggressively and with conviction and as a firm. So we find it actually to be a very interesting market moment for us, given the strategy that we have.
John Winkle - Reed
Yeah, Alex, it's Jim Coulter.
Jack
Let me take you into the front lines of the market for a second in an area that I'm spending a lot of time, which is in climate.
John Winkle - Reed
The experience last year was often that a company would come in saying that they would like to be financed at a price of X. We would say, no, we're much below that, and it would be financed in the spec or through a momentum investor at, you know, X plus 25%. We sort of scratched our head. This year has been a complete about phase to where that company, which needs to finance, given its capital plan in this environment, essentially is coming in and say they'd like to be financed at X. We say half X. They go away and come back to us pretty quickly. So the market is resetting as you're taking out a series of competitors that were either market-based in their evaluation techniques or momentum-based in what was happening in the growth marketplace. So what we're seeing here is a fundamental reset.
John Winkle - Reed
And as net sellers last year, you know, there's an opportunity to be very disciplined net buyers this year.
Operator
Our next question comes from Robert Lee from KBW.
Robert Lee
Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. You know, Jack, maybe a question for you with indicating that a chunk of the value creation came from, I guess, some signed contracts, you know, on, I guess, potential exits. Can you update us on what we should be thinking about for realization activity Q2, Q3, just given what's already signed and kind of, you know, in the bucket, so to speak?
Jack
Sure. Hey, Rob. Good morning. Thanks for the question. So I talked on the last call about the fact that we had over 200 million of performance allocations to TPG Inc. that were already locked based on signed contracts. What you saw come through in the first quarter of 122 million of performance allocations, approximately, think about about half of that 200 called, 100 million of that came from the transactions that I mentioned on the last call, and the rest came from additional monetizations that occurred during the quarter. So as we look forward, and we don't forecast ERE from potential sales that may or may not happen later in the year, but again, using the framework from the last call, if I just think about the companies that we've already agreed contractually to sell, what's already in the ground. That, as we look forward, we have at least $125 million of additional PRE coming in future quarters this year. The biggest piece of that would be the other deal I mentioned on the first quarter call, which is Wind River, and we continue to expect that to close either late Q2 or in Q3.
John Winkle - Reed
And I think, you know, there's no question we have additional
Jack
monetization activity ongoing across our platforms that we expect to add to that number during the remainder of the year.
John Winkle - Reed
But we'll talk about those as they happen.
Operator
Our next question comes from Michael Cypress from Morgan Stanley.
Michael Cypress
Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I was hoping we could spend a moment on the impact platform with RISE and RISE Climate. Just curious how you think about building that out further from here. it would seem that there could be some opportunities for other dedicated fund strategies. So just curious where that stands in terms of the build-out. How are you thinking about that opportunity set? And to what extent does the more challenging market backdrop that you guys alluded to impact the sort of timing and ability to raise these newer strategies?
John Winkle - Reed
Michael, as we've talked about, we think there is substantial opportunity to expand the RISE platform in a number of directions, and obviously we've been doing that over the last year while also building up for future expansion. So over time, we find interest within our client base for impact-related investing in infrastructure, impact-related investing in public markets, impact-related investing in the credit markets. All of those involved a build and are in the future, but I continue to think that this is a trend that, if anything, will accelerate. One of the points that – the second question you gave, it's interesting. Coming out of some of the activity we've recently seen, we – I'd say the investment activity within the sectors that were focused on the rise is in some ways flattered and continued. If you think about the climate transition, higher oil prices and concerns about energy security suggest a forward build and an accelerating build into a green climate framework. In areas like online ed, We're almost one-to-one on devices. You've seen the recent announcements on pre-internet to underprivileged families. This is an area where I think there's substantial investment opportunity to come. Healthcare access with the rise of telehealth. So we're actually seeing across climate, across healthcare, financial services access and acceleration in the opportunities. So we have, as you know, a large and growing percent of our assets in the impact platform, and we would continue to see the opportunity for that to expand in future years.
Operator
Our next question comes from Finn O'Shea from Wells Fargo.
Finn O'Shea
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Last quarter, you guys touched on the opportunity in preferred equity in the growth market. Just seeing if you could provide an update on that pipeline, if it's expanding as expected. And also, is private credit increasingly a competitor in that arena?
John Winkle - Reed
Well, maybe I can just comment.
John Winkle - Reed
I think that the pipeline, I think, continues to be reasonably healthy in the growth equity market. I think that just reinforcing what i said in my comments um the this the the stage of company the type of company and the type of opportunity that we're focused on you know tends to be later stage um companies that are generating earnings companies that are generating cash flow um but despite that i think when you look at the revaluation and the reset that's gone on in the public markets And I think, you know, it's not unusual. You see a progression go on, right, where you see the public markets begin to reset. And I think people, market participants, are not sure how deep the reset is going to go. And so you see this moment where things slow down a little bit. Things are, you know, companies that are looking for funding or are looking to do transactions or sponsors for that matter, take a breather to try to figure out what their next move is. And then the reset continues, which it has. And when you look at some of these very high, you know, some of the, when you look at the population of companies that have been very fast growers, but have not been profitable, you know, the reset is very broad and very deep. And I think that As Jim was relating before when he was talking about some of the opportunities that we see and valuation expectations and pricing, we're seeing that settle in across the entire market. So the opportunity set I think continues to get more interesting in a lot of respects, particularly for our form of capital. And Acorns that I mentioned as an example in my comments is right down the middle of the plate as it relates to that type of opportunity. Because, you know, in prior markets, I think you probably would have seen that the outcome might have been different there in terms of where they would have sourced capital and our ability to provide growth capital to that company and also you know, frankly, bring to bear other resources that we have, I think is still highly attractive to the types of companies that we like to back. As far as private, I think you asked private credit in terms of whether or not that's providing some form of competition. I think there are strategies in private credit that are trying to cross over into kind of growth equity types of opportunities and maybe sort of hybrid forms of capital. And just a couple of things I would note there. One is that the reason why we grew our growth platform the way we did, which is that we have a growth equity pool of capital, we have our tech adjacencies pool of capital, we have flexible capital across the spectrum where we can be a solutions provider to companies depending upon what kind of capital they're looking for. We felt like given the range of capital solutions in the market and investment opportunities, it was important that we had flexible capital and could do that. But I will say that the credit platforms that are evolving into that space also are set up differently. They don't necessarily have the same kind of business building resources and operational capabilities that are essentially institutionalized and built into our platform. And I think that's very important to a lot of the companies that we're capital partners to. So you're seeing some blending at the edges, I would say, but I think we feel like we're positioned pretty well for this opportunity. Two points I'd add. First of all, any incursion by the credit business into this area is more than offset by the retreat out of the crossover funds that have been very active in that type of investing. And secondly, as you know, the largest growth areas within private credit have been yield-based products, and clearly the ability to get current yield out of the tech adjacency opportunities is limited.
Operator
Next question comes from Brian Bedell from Deutsche Bank.
Brian Bedell
Great. Thanks. Good morning, folks. Two-parter, if I may. Maybe first one for either John or Jack. Just back to the distribution, or I should say the fundraising side of it with pension plans slowing down. I think almost, correct me if I'm wrong, but almost half of your capital is from pension funds. So just I think you mentioned on the other side of that, the international side might be picking up some of that. Near-term slack, maybe if you can just talk about retail as well in terms of your expectations of growing that That channel and then second question would be for Jim just Following up on that and on the rise climate fund. You've already got two billion committed in terms of you know, you know had conversations before of the you know, the strong demand for carbon and investing or, you know, carbon decarbonization, I should say, do you see that picking up to the extent where, I know it's early, but you might be back in the market for a rise climate to, you know, sooner rather than later?
John Winkle - Reed
Hey, Brian, it's Jack. Thanks for the question.
Jack
For the two-part question, on the fundraising point, I did forget to mention high net worth. You're right about that. You reiterated the dynamics pretty well that I referred to, so I won't reiterate the point about the shifting of capital that we expect toward more international pools of capital. On the high net worth side, I would say the same thing I said last quarter, which is it is an important growth area for us. We do expect to place more of our funds with the high net worth channel in this wave of fundraising than we did in the last wave of fundraising, and we are building out a team to address that opportunity. Now, it also remains true that the vast majority of our products are only applicable to the highest end of that market. And as we continue to move toward new areas like credit and other yield-oriented products, I think we'll see an even more significant expansion of our penetration of that client base.
John Winkle - Reed
On the rise climate question, when we launched a little over a year ago, I think there were questions on both sides of what I'll describe. marketplace. Would there be enough focused capital demand out of our investors for this type of product? And secondly, at a $7 billion scale where we ended up, would there be investment demand? A year into it, as our general counsel would say, asked and answered. In other words, there has been very substantial demand on the product side, and we see that growing. And I have been pleasantly surprised by the scale and persistency of opportunity we're seeing in the marketplace. So as you noted, we're seeing good deployment pace here. And that, I think, calls out an opportunity for both the opportunity to scale the strategy and brings forward some of our thinking in terms of when market opportunity return might be.
Operator
Our next question comes from Adam Beattie from UBS.
Adam Beattie
Thank you and good morning. I wanted to ask about the business in Asia. There are some idiosyncratic challenges there recently in addition to some of the global challenges that we've talked about. So just want to get your thoughts on portfolio company operations there, how that's going, also in terms of deployment opportunity. And then lastly, you mentioned that, you know, international markets, and I would expect Asia's included, might be a source of more resilient fundraising opportunities. So if you could talk about that as well, that'd be great. Thank you.
John Winkle - Reed
Sure. I think, first of all, just again for everyone's background, you know, we've been in the Asian markets for a very long time. We started our business there in 94, so it goes way back, and importantly, our focus and
Craig
our Asia franchise is Asia.
John Winkle - Reed
We're in a number of markets there. And I think if you look at, and we've talked about this, we talked about this on the road and we may have even touched on it on the last call. If you look at the distribution of our investing activity for the last, you know, better part of the last probably three to four years, we have been much lighter in terms of our exposure to China, recognizing that China was becoming a more challenging place to invest for a number of different reasons. Things were happening in China and the market there that I think many investors didn't expect to happen. An example is sort of the education sector is one example where government intervention was particularly severe in terms of its impact and a number of other things that we've all read about and have watched and witnessed. So we have been focused on where were there opportunities in the market. We've seen some really good opportunities. And if you look at our performance in Asia, it's been very strong. We've seen some really interesting opportunities. I would probably highlight for you more recently some excellent opportunities across a number of different industries in India. I'd highlight our Australia, New Zealand business. We're now seeing some really interesting opportunities in our Korea franchise in South Korea. and then obviously I think you know we're focused on Southeast Asia as well. So I think we feel pretty good about Asia as a place where we expect there to be, in certain markets and in certain sectors, a high degree of growth. Maybe growth will – it's possible that the growth there will exceed other parts of the world. So we're very focused on it. And we're continuing to allocate capital into certain markets there. I would say our Asia approach is not different than what we do elsewhere in the world, which is we're thematic-oriented investors. So we're allocating most of that capital to certain themes and certain industries where I think we feel like there's going to be secular growth over the long term. It's hard to say exactly sort of in terms of the impact that China is going to continue to have a very big impact in the region. I think it's half the GDP of the region or thereabouts. And so as China changes, probably so will the region change. But having said that, I think we're – We're still feeling pretty good about opportunities that we're seeing and the kind of results that we're generating there. So, you know, more to come on that, but, you know, that's our outlook. With respect to... Hey, John.
Alex
Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I was going to add on the portfolio, just because that was the last piece of the question. You know, we, of course, at times like this, spend a lot of time making sure we understand what's happening and... The portfolio in Asia, which I think is a true statement of Asia and our broader portfolio, has held in, I think, quite well overall. Certainly seeing the effects of wage pressure and the war for talent and inflation, I think one of the outputs of John's explanation of us is really focused on secular growth and on themes in secular growth that we understand. And those themes, by the way, apply across Asia and the U.S. and Europe. we try to pursue them globally, is that we end up typically investing in higher value added companies with competitive differentiation and have just less commodity exposure. So stronger gross margins, healthy relationships with customers, generally with the ability to pass on costs. So I think one of the most important things for us is making sure when we're thinking about our themes that we're in the right neighborhoods and that has a big impact in terms of exposure to inflation.
John Winkle - Reed
You know, we've been targeting secular rather than sickle growth, and so far the portfolio seems to be bearing that out.
Jack
It's worth noting that one of the investments out of our growth fund in India is a company called Campus Activewear. And you probably don't follow the Indian IPO market closely, but in the past 24, 48 hours, Campus Activewear went public very successfully.
John Winkle - Reed
in India at a very attractive multiple relative to our investment.
Operator
Our last question comes from Rufus Hone from BMO.
John Winkle - Reed
Great. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question.
spk03
I was hoping you could spend a moment on real estate and real assets more generally. Clearly, an area that's seeing outsized demand from LPs in the current environment and I know you've just raised a big opportunistic real estate fund, but beyond that, how are you looking to build out that platform? And can you talk through the growth of your permanent capital vehicles? Thank you.
John Winkle - Reed
Yeah, thanks for the question. You know, we're feeling pretty good about our real estate franchise and the potential for growth there. I think, as we mentioned, you know, we've raised the largest opportunistic fund that we've raised to date there. And so that's giving us plenty of dry powder to take advantage of opportunities that we're seeing in the market. Just taking a step back, looking at the real estate market right now, it's interesting. Given this reset that we've seen in corporate valuations and corporate markets, we've seen less of that at this point in real estate. You know, arguably, real estate is a place where people can go to get some protection from inflation because of the ability to reset rents. And the other dynamic that you have going on in real estate is that, you know, you've got because of inflationary pressures and supply constraints, you've got very, very high replacement cost dynamics going on. So when you look at cap rates in the real estate market more broadly, that market is holding up very well. Financing is always a question as it relates to real estate, and I think the financing markets are still actually holding up pretty well, all things considered, although clearly there has been movement in underlying cost associated with financing deals on the real estate side. But, you know, so we're – You know, we're feeling pretty good about that. As you know, also, we just, you know, we just finished completing the raise of our first Core Plus strategy, our first Core Plus fund. So we've added from a product set perspective and the tools that we have to take advantage of opportunities in the market. You know, we feel pretty good about having launched that at a very interesting time. And, you know, we're already deploying that capital. So that builds out that. On the – On the capital side and permanent capital side, I think you're aware we have a commercial mortgage REIT that trades publicly, which is TRTX. We just recently hired a new CEO for the platform, Doug Bucard, who joined us after 20 years at Goldman Sachs, where he ran commercial real estate finance there. We're excited to have Doug on board, and what we expect as a result of that is we'll be continuing to build out our real estate debt business, our real estate credit business, and we'll look to potentially over time see opportunities to build up new pools of capital within that business. But that, I think, positions us well for an environment where with the reset in rates and just the structural, you know, changes that are going on in the market, you know, I think we feel like the overall environment in which to look for opportunities on the real estate credit space is actually improving, even in an upward rate-moving market, based upon, you know, what we see. So, you know, we're excited about what we can potentially build there. Over time, I think, obviously... You know, as we expand our product set and using Core Plus, by the way, which we call TAC Plus as an example, we also think that gives us the ability to think about penetrating other pools of capital to raise money. You know, the real estate market in particular has been pretty successful in sourcing capital through retail channels in various forms. And so... as we continue to invest our core plus pool of capital. When we structured our TAC plus fund, one of the things that we did is we set it up so that over a period of time, we can actually lift that structure into an open-ended fund structure after we get a certain percentage invested in that pool of capital. And after the investment season a bit, we'll be evaluating opportunities to do that with that vehicle. So, you know, feel great about our momentum in real estate.
John Winkle - Reed
Feel like there are a lot of opportunities for us.
Operator
This does conclude the Q&A portion of today's call. I would now like to turn the call back over to Gary Stein for any additional or closing remarks.
Gary Stein
Great. Thanks, Operator. Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Please feel free to follow up directly with me or Ebony if you have any additional questions.
Alex Willstein
We'll look forward to speaking with you again next quarter.
Gary Stein
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.
Operator
This concludes today's TBG's first quarter 2022 earnings call and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day.
Disclaimer