Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management 2022 Q4 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants 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 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand has been raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Managing Partner, Branding and Communications, Suzanne Fleming.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Brookfield Asset Management's first earnings call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Connor Teske, President of Brookfield Asset Management, and Bahir Menios, our Chief Financial Officer. Bruce will start the call today with opening remarks, followed by Connor, who will talk about some of the themes we're focused on. And finally, Behear will discuss financial and operating results for the business. After our formal comments, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. In order to accommodate all those who want to ask questions, we ask that you refrain from asking more than two questions at one time. If you have additional questions, please rejoin the queue and we'll be happy to take any additional questions at the end as time permits. I'd like to remind you that in today's comments, including in responding to questions and in discussing 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 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 US and the information available on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Suzanne. Welcome to everyone on the call and welcome to the new Brookfield Asset Management. This is our first earnings call since we completed the distribution and listing of 25% of the asset management business in December, which is now trading under the symbol BAM. 2022 was a record year for our business. We raised $93 billion of capital. Our fee-related earnings increased by 25%, and our assets under management currently stand at nearly $800 billion. But here, Emmanuel will go through our operating and fundraising performance in more detail in his remarks. The global macro environment in the past year was characterized by several key dynamics driving market uncertainty and volatility, namely elevated levels of inflation and corresponding interest rate increases. Although inflation appears to have peaked in most countries, it is possible that certain structural dynamics prove harder to abate, such as the effects of de-globalization energy security, and a tight supply of skilled labor. This may result in continued near-term volatility and downward pressure on corporate earnings, which have cyclical exposure. However, at the same time, the recent reopening of markets in Asia has increased both supply and demand for goods and services on a global scale, also providing a boost to the world economy. This uncertainty also resulted in volatility within the public markets, which in many ways underscored the value of a highly diversified portfolio with exposure to alternative investments. Our business proved its resiliency over the past year. Connor Teske will speak more about what our strategies are focused on today, but at a high level, We've aligned our business around the dominant global secular trends of digitization, deglobalization, and decarbonization that we believe will require trillions of dollars of investment over the next decades. These trends will be extremely beneficial for our market-leading infrastructure, renewables, and transition strategies. As a reminder, we own one of the largest portfolios of inflation-protected assets in the world. Our underlying businesses are essential in nature and therefore continue to generate stable and growing cash flows throughout cycles. These assets are highly cash-generative with high margins and are largely inflation-protected, hence are very attractive to investors through market cycles. These factors, combined with our focus on investing in high quality assets and proactive asset management, have continued to strong performance in our underlying businesses despite broader market uncertainty. In addition, we expect the current economic climate will highlight the preeminence of our credit platform. Having one of the most sophisticated credit managers as part of our franchise diversifies our business makes us better investors and ensures that we can raise and successfully deploy capital at all points in an economic cycle. Lastly, I wanted to underscore that while the stock is new in the form of a standalone public company, our asset management business has been 25 years in the making, and this business has been vesting our own capital for over a century. This heritage and long track record provides the foundation for our next phase of growth. Our scale track record over a long period of time is extremely valuable. It means that we're a beneficiary of the capital flows that are increasingly gravitating to the largest multi-asset class managers in a period of industry consolidation. Our business is positioned around the leading secular global drivers of capital across renewable power transition, infrastructure, real estate, and credit. We believe every day, we speak every day to the world's largest institutions and the people that oversee the allocation of these pools of capital. These are the strategies they are highly focused on in this current environment. We have $175 billion of capital across the broader Brookfield organization. This is our own discretionary permanent capital that can be invested along with the funds of Brookfield Asset Management. This is one of the benefits of the broader Brookfield structure and is unrivaled in the industry. Our business is highly diversified. This enables the business to continue growing and keep deploying capital through economic cycles. Each one of the business groups is highly specialized and set up to find opportunities in markets like we are seeing today. And finally, we take an immense amount of pride in the relationships we have built with our global group of more than 2,000 clients. Delivering superior investment performance for our clients is extremely important. Equally as important, though, is consistently providing them with the highest level of service and constantly innovating to meet their needs. Thank you for your continued support, and I'll pass it over to Connor to talk about our themes for investing and a little bit about what we're currently focused on.