Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management 2019 Third Quarter Results Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield's third quarter 2019 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Lawson, our Chief Financial Officer, as well as Anuj Ranjan, Managing Partner and CEO of our business in India and the Middle East. Bruce will first give an update on our business, followed by Brian, who will discuss the highlights of our financial and operating results for the quarter. And finally, Anuj will talk about our business in India. After our formal comments, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. I'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and in talking about new initiatives and 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 I'll now turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Suzanne, and good morning, everyone. Since we last spoke to many of you at our Investor Day, we completed our previously announced partnership with Oaktree, acquiring 61% of the business with the remainder continuing to be owned by the founders and the management team who are continuing to run the business independently from Brookfield. We're thrilled to be able to benefit from the Oaktree world-class expertise as Oaktree has established itself as a premier credit franchise in the world and we intend to utilize their knowledge to make us better investors in everything we do. Today we're working with them to selectively help them scale up some of their strategies and looking at where we can jointly provide products to our clients. Although it's still early days, we think we're getting some good momentum. Looking longer term, this partnership also better prepares us to capture opportunities presented during periods of market disruption. We are positioning ourselves to put our resources behind Oak Tree to allow it to excel more than ever inevitably when the market turns. But turning to right now, business fundamentals in most markets remain quite constructive. With interest rates negative in both Japan and Europe generally, the market growth is slow, but we're still finding opportunity partly due to our ability to finance for long-term at these low rates. In Europe, we've recently completed term financings sub-100 basis points, and this allows for very strong leveraged returns. India today is under significant capital market stress, which creates opportunity, and that is one of the reasons Anuj Ranjan, our head of the region, is on the call with us today to provide you with a more in-depth update on that front. In the United States, the economy is good. It also appears that we will be in a low interest rate environment for longer than most of us would have imagined. And what that means for asset values like the real assets generally that we own that generate cash flow is that they, in that environment, should be worth more. And then investing in real assets is a very attractive way to earn returns for institutional and other capital. With that in mind, we continue to look for and have been finding opportunities to deploy capital in the United States, and this is increasingly in the form of special situations given where the overall capital markets are. If this low interest rate environment continues, which at the moment it looks like it will, we think that capital will increasingly be allocated to alternatives as a means of meeting required return targets. We think that many institutional investors will continue a push towards holding allocations of up to 60% in alternatives. And as you know, some of the leading groups are at that level, but more and more push towards increased allocations. In this regard, during the quarter and subsequent quarter end, we held additional closes in our current flagship funds in the infrastructure fund, which today is at over $15 billion, and it will be larger when it has its final close later this year. And last week, we announced the final close of our latest flagship fund for private equity at $9 billion. Together with our latest real estate flagship fund that closed in January this year and co-investment capital committed to date, in 2019, we're on pace to exceed our $50 billion of capital we targeted to raise in this round of funds. These funds in aggregate are approximately 45% invested, and therefore we anticipate that we'll be back in the markets for our respective flagships in 2021-22 period. As I mentioned at our investor day, we expect this next round of flagship fundraising together with Oak Tree's flagship distress credit fund could reach $100 billion. Our newer strategies are also seeing significant capital inflows. Our special situations opportunity program continued to raise commitments during the quarter following its successful initial first close in the second quarter. And we raise commitments across each of our real estate and infrastructure core perpetual strategies. We have also been very active in deploying capital. In our infrastructure business, we closed on the acquisition of a data mobile business in New Zealand. Within our private equity business, we signed an agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the largest residential mortgage insurer in Canada. and also acquired 45% of a global infrastructure services company, largely focused in the U.S. We're also actively adding capital in all areas across the business, and while we're cautious about the overall market, I would characterize it that we're still finding attractive opportunities to put capital to work within each of our strategies. With that, I'll pass the call over to Brian, and he's going to give you an update on the results that we had for the quarter.