Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management First Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Suzanne Fleming, Managing Partner. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Suzanne Fleming Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Brookfield's First Quarter 2021 Conference Call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Nick Goodman, our Chief Financial Officer, and Stuart Upson, head of our business in Asia Pacific. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results for the quarter. And finally, Stuart will give an update on our business in APAC. 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 law. 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. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Suzanne, and hello to everyone on the call. We started the year with strong results. We earned record levels of both FFO and distributive earnings. What a difference sometimes a year makes. Results benefited from strong operating results across our businesses, supplemented by significant gains from asset sales and carry realized in the quarter. We made progress in executing on our capital recycling initiatives and generated substantial gains for shareholders and clients. Nick will touch on a number of these items in more detail in his remarks. Looking at the market environment, It is clear that we're in a recovery phase in most countries around the world as each progresses their vaccine rollouts and emerges from lockdowns. The snapback of recovery is pleasing to observe. Some countries are recovering faster than others. I would note the United States, the UK, Australia, and many countries within Asia, which Stuart will talk about. And we're encouraged to see these countries begin to return to normalcy. I was personally in a number of cities last week across the United States, and I can attest to travel starting back strong and retail demand recovering. Today we have Stuart Upson with us, as Suzanne mentioned. He's our managing partner and regional head of Asia Pacific, responsible for overseeing activities in that region. He will provide an update on our operations in the region, opportunity set we're seeing today, and insight into what we're seeing in each of those various economies. Stuart stayed up most of the night to be able to speak to you as he's currently in Sydney. So thank you, Stuart, and we hope all of you on the call will benefit in some way from his comments. Capital markets today are very robust. interest rates remain low, and the demand for the type of assets we own is strong and getting stronger. While we expect interest rates will rise slowly over the next few years, we also believe that combined with that, central banks will be successful in engineering GDP growth and employment increases, which has already started. That will mean that global economies are doing well at the same time. This will be a very constructive environment for our asset management business and for the assets we own for a number of reasons. In this lowish rate environment, investors will continue to look for fixed income alternatives to meet required returns. This will drive inflows to alternative strategies, which will further benefit the scaling of our existing flagship strategies. It will also be positive for our perpetual fund offerings. This provides a strong backdrop for our flagship fundraising, including our fourth real estate flagship fund, soon to have a first close, and our global transition fund soon thereafter. More broadly, investor interest for all of our funds is stronger than we have ever seen. As a result, we expect these funds to be larger than predecessors and therefore add significantly to fee-bearing capital. We also continue to deploy significant capital for our two other flagship funds, infrastructure and private equity, and we expect to begin fundraising for the next vintage of each later in the year or early in 2022. As all of you know, global central banks have pushed an enormous amount of stimulus into developed economies to ensure markets recover from this recession. This has led to substantial availability of capital in most markets. This global stimulus has largely been funded through borrowed money and governments will need to consider ramifications of how to pay it back. This will require one of two measures, probably both. Economies will need to grow and generate increased taxes to service the debt, and assets will need to be sold. For governments, asset sales means the sale of or future avoidance of infrastructure spending. As a result, the shift of infrastructure spending is set to increase in a meaningful way and will create opportunities for infrastructure investors like ourselves for decades. And while this is an extremely positive backdrop, the other side of the coin is that many asset valuations are high. It does make it harder to find investment, but allows us to raise substantial cash with asset sales. Through the last quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, we returned $19 billion to clients and $5 billion to our own balance sheet. This generated in the first quarter just just in the first quarter, $6.4 billion of realized gains, and there's more to come in the second quarter we are in. This has put us in the strongest cash position the company has been in ever and also generated substantial realized carried interests, which are our portion of client gains into income. And it looks like 2021 will also be strong in this regard. But as always, we are active putting money to work using our global reach and access to capital to achieve success. In a competitive environment, we need to even be more creative to find value. Since we last spoke, we have further progressed our efforts to spin out our reinsurance business by filing our prospectus, and expect that all regulatory requirements will be cleared in the near term. Your new shares should be in your hands by the end of June or early in July. Lastly, we came to an agreement with the Special Committee of Brookfield Property Partners and their advisors to privatize BBY. We believe that this transaction is in the best interests of our BBY partners and ourselves. The special committee and their advisors agreed with us. This offer gives BBY shareholders a number of alternatives, but for the BAM portion of what they receive, we believe it will give them a greater chance to compound wealth as a part of overall Brookfield than they would otherwise have been able to had we left BBY the way it is. We have more than enough cash to fund the privatization and as opportunities arise to repurchase the BAM shares which are being issued to close the BBY transaction. Thank you again for your continued support and I will now turn it over to Nick to discuss the financial performance in the quarter.