Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to today's program entitled Brookfield Asset Management 2020 Year-End Results Conference Call and Webcast. At this time, all participant lines are in listen-only mode, so if you require operator assistance, please press star, then zero. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star, then one. As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's program, Suzanne Fleming. Managing Partner, Brookfield Asset Management. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Brookfield's fourth quarter and full year 2020 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Nick Goodman, our Chief Financial Officer, and Adrian Foley, President and COO of our North America Development Group within Brookfield Properties. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results. And finally, Adrian will give an update on our residential single-family business. 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 today's comments, including in responding to questions and in discussing 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 laws. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks, and future events and results 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. Thanks, and with that, I'll turn it over to Bruce.

Thank you, Suzanne, and good morning, everyone on the call. Despite the extraordinary circumstances of 2020, we ended the year with our best quarter on record. For the year, we earned a record level of FFO and cash available for distribution as well. All of this was achieved despite roughly 20% of our businesses being impacted during the economic shutdown. I use this point to underscore for you one more time the strength of our capital structure and the long-term nature and resiliency of our asset management franchise and the businesses that we own. The environment in 2020 was unusual to say the least. Just a few points. We saw GDP drop in almost every country unprecedented stimulus put into the economies, dramatic increases in unemployment rates, and interest rates dropping to effectively zero in almost every major market. As we now look into 2021, we are seeing positive momentum in global markets, low borrowing costs, The pharmaceutical companies have come through an amazing time, and the vaccines are now being rolled out. We expect economies will normalize as the at-risk populations are vaccinated. We are starting to see this happen now, although unevenly, and as governments and people get comfortable enough to resume normal life, we expect to see a strong recovery in economic numbers starting now and into next year. We expect interest rates to remain low as there is no meaningful inflation on the horizon. This low interest rate environment should continue to provide a very positive backdrop for our asset management business and the real assets that we own. It is worth noting that while our business has been very resilient over the last 12 months, and it is built to perform at all points in the cycle, in general, our operations are more geared to economic recovery. As a result, we should be able to grow the value of our businesses coming out of this recession even more. One business that we own that has been very strong is our residential single family business in the United States. We don't often profile this business, but given what is going on in the residential markets, we asked Adrian Foley to join our call today. You will hear from him in a moment. Looking back on 2020, we raised over $40 billion of capital across a number of diverse strategies. Of note in the year, we saw strong growth in our perpetual private fund strategy. We had a successful first close for the flagship distressed fund, and we saw sizable inflows to other credit. As we look to 2021 and beyond, all indications are that this strong momentum is continuing. We are in the early stages of a fundraising super cycle and remain confident in our target laid out at our investor day of $100 billion for this round of flagship fundraising. The size of our flagship fund offerings differentiate us differentiates us in the scale of things that we do. And this scale in itself creates opportunities. So this is additive to the franchise in many ways. Specifically, we are now in the market fundraising for our fourth real estate flagship fund. And with our private equity and infrastructure funds, almost 60% invested or committed in aggregate We expect them to launch fundraising for their next vintages in the next 12 months. We also recently laid out for you four new growth areas, each which we believe will be meaningful to our long-term growth strategy. These are reinsurance, energy transition, secondaries, and technology investing. Since then, we've been working on two reinsurance transactions and are closing in on $15 billion of long-dated annuities in that business, have made a number of investments and are raising capital for real estate secondaries, established a team focused on technology, and recently launched fundraising for our global transition fund, which we hope to be over $7.5 billion. We have committed $2 billion ourselves to this strategy. This fund is focused on high-quality, sustainable investments that will accelerate the transition of the world to a net-zero carbon economy. As an organization more broadly, we are committed to the movement to a net-zero carbon economy, and our Global Transition Fund will be supportive of this goal. All around the world, we are seeing countries making commitments to this effort, and in some cases, ones who have already done that are accelerating their targets. As we come out of this health and economic crisis, we expect it to be a good time for companies to reset their strategies and focus on sustainable growth. We are in an envious position of being carbon zero across our entire $600 billion asset footprint. As a result, we are well positioned to assist others with this transition. To put it very simply, all companies that want to be around for the long term will need a net zero strategy. This is no longer a choice. Turning to transaction activity, it was obviously slow in the first half of 2020, but we saw a pickup in the second half of the year and a very busy start to 2021. We are very active today with close to $80 billion of capital for deployment. At the same time, selling activity or sales activity out of our funds stopped in 2020, but started again in the summer and has accelerated into 2021. Nick will discuss what is going on in more depth in his remarks in a moment. So before I turn it over to him, thank you for your ongoing support. We look forward to reporting on the progress of 2021 over the year.