Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference call operator. Welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management 2019 First Quarter Results Conference Call and Webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, simply press star and 1 on your touchtone telephone. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, they may signal an operator by pressing star and 0 on their telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner, Branding, and Communications for Brookfield Asset Management. Please go ahead, Ms. Fleming.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield's first quarter 2019 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Brian Lawson, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as Mark Weinberg, Managing Partner in our Private Equity Group. Brian will start off by discussing the highlights of our financial and operating results for the quarter, and Mark will then give an update on our investment in Clarios. And finally, Bruce will give an update on the business. After our formal comments, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. In order to accommodate those who want to ask questions, we ask that you refrain from asking multiple questions at one time. We'll be happy to respond to additional questions later in the call as time permits. I'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives in our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements. including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities law. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They're subject to known and unknown risks, and future events may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S. and the information available on our website. Thank you, and with that, I'll turn it over to Brian.

Great. Thank you, Suzanne, and good morning to all of you on the call. I'll start off by saying that we are pleased with the results for the first quarter of 2019. Funds from operations, or FFO, totaled $1.1 billion, or $1.04 per share. Net income was $1.3 billion, with 58 cents per share of that attributable to shareholders. Both FFO and net income benefited from the continued expansion of our asset management operations and strong performance by the underlying businesses. This includes significant progress in closing new fund commitments, deploying capital into new investments across all our fund strategies over the last 12 months, and increasing returns from the existing businesses through operational improvements. I will first touch on the results of our asset management operations, which include fee-related earnings and carried interest. Fee-related earnings were $238 million in the quarter, which before performance fees is a 19% increase from the prior year. This mirrors the 18% year-over-year increase in fee-bearing capital. The fee-bearing capital increased by $23 billion over the last 12 months, and that's due to additional capital commitments to our private funds, including the current vintage of flagship funds as well as newer product offerings, and an increase in the capitalization of our listed partnerships due to increases in their unit prices. So, now to carried interest. We generated $332 million of unrealized carried interest before costs in the quarter, and that increases the total amount of carried interest attributable to us at this point in time to $2.7 billion before costs. We recorded $119 million of realized carry into our funds from operations, FFO. This, to remind you, is the amount that became no longer subject to clawback during the quarter. as a result of dispositions and distributions to fund investors. In the first quarter, this related primarily to asset sales within one of our global flagship real estate funds. We continue to work on several other asset realizations across our more mature funds, and if successful, we could crystallize up to $1 billion during 2019. So this would be our highest amount of carry realized in a single year to date. but it still represents a small portion of the overall current accrued balance of nearly $3 billion that I referenced earlier, as well as our annualized target carry, which stood at $1.5 billion annually at quarter end. Now, turning to invested capital, excluding disposition gains, FFO from invested capital in the current quarter was $505 million, and that's a 17 percent quarter-over-quarter increase on a comparable basis. FFO benefited from a number of new investments across our business and the performance of our financial asset portfolio, which recovered from the market volatility experienced in late 2018. Disposition gains, above and beyond the amount I just referenced, totaled $223 million in the quarter, and that represents our share of gains on the sale of several investments across our portfolios. These included the partial sale of interest in a Chilean toll road business and the sale of partial interest in three North American hydroelectric sites. We had approximately $36 billion of deployable capital across the business at the end of the quarter. This includes $12 billion of core liquidity and $24 billion of uncalled private fund commitments. We expect this to grow in the second quarter with the first close of our latest flagship infrastructure fund and further funds raised across our other products. Our deployable capital is supplemented by accessing the capital markets when opportunities arise or the timing is right. And to that end, in January, we raised $1 billion of 10-year medium-term notes at a favorable rate. A portion of the proceeds were used in April to repay a maturing note, ensuring that our capitalization remains very strong with a very long-term maturity and a debt-to-capitalization level of less than 20% of book value. Our liquidity is also enhanced by the increasing amount of recurring cash flowing into Brookfield from our asset management earnings and distributions from the capital we have invested in our funds. We refer to this as cash flow available for distribution and reinvestment and provide this metric to provide insight into the free cash flow generated by our business. Since 2015, this cash flow has more than doubled and now stands at over $2 billion being generated annually. We expect this to continue to increase as our asset management business grows, along with distributions received from our invested capital and carried interest, and continues to trend towards a level exceeding $5 billion in five years' time. Finally, I'm pleased to confirm that our Board of Directors has declared a 16-cent quarterly dividend per share, payable at the end of June. And with that, I will hand the call over to Mark Weinberg, who's going to provide an update on our private equity business's recently closed acquisition of Clarios Power Solutions. Thank you.