Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Hello and welcome to Brookfield Asset Management's fourth quarter 2023 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will now need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference over to our first speaker, Mr. Jason Fuchs, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us today for Brookfield Asset Management's Earnings Call. On the call today, we have Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Conor Teske, our President, and Bahir Manios, our Chief Financial Officer. Bruce will start the call today with opening remarks, followed by Conor, who will talk about our growing fundraising capabilities. And finally, Bahir will discuss our financial and operating results for the business. After our formal comments, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take any 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. And if you guys should have additional questions, please rejoin the queue. I'll be happy to take additional questions at the end if time permits. Before we begin, 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're 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, Jason, and welcome to everyone on the call. Our results were strong in the fourth quarter, our best quarter in an overall excellent first year for Brookfield Asset Management. In total, we raised $140 billion of capital, which includes $93 billion raised over the past year and $50 billion coming from the pending close of the AEL insurance account with Brookfield Reinsurance. We were successful fundraising across our flagship funds including new records for our infrastructure and private equity franchises. This past year, we fundraised across a broad set of complementary strategies and with an increasingly diversified set of global investors. We also launched a number of new funds, most notably Oak Tree's Lending Partners Fund, which shows promise in evolving to be a six-flagship series for us. Our goal is to always have a focus on providing exceptional value to our clients. Our goal has always been to generate strong risk adjusted returns by acquiring assets for value, leveraging our operational capabilities to grow cash flows, and compounding capital over the long term. By staying ahead of market trends and continuously innovating, we've been able to help our clients achieve their investment objectives in ways that truly matter to them. At the same time, this past year has been about making the necessary investments in our platform to position us for long-term success and growth. We've been expanding our global fundraising organization as well as building our capabilities within insurance and private wealth, with the expectation that they will grow to become meaningful contributors to our annual fundraising in the near term. Fee-related earnings grew 6% to $2.2 billion, and the distributable earnings grew 7% also to $2.2 billion. The significant capital we raised over the past year sets us up for strong growth in 2024, and with much of the investment in our platform complete, our cost growth should moderate. The combination of faster revenue growth and slower cost growth should mean a strong year for FRE and DE growth. More broadly, it appears that inflation has tempered, interest rates have peaked, and the Fed soon will begin easing rates. Markets struggle in the face of uncertainty, and these actions signal improved stability, resulting in increased investor confidence in pricing risk, and therefore enhance liquidity to capital markets. Transaction volume should pick up as well, which will enable more managers, including us, to monetize investments, return capital to partners, and in turn enable those partners to reinvest in private funds for what should be an excellent environment for investing. We are going into this year with more than $100 billion of dry powder across our businesses, despite investing over $50 billion last year, one of our most active years of investing. We believe the environment will lead to continued consolidation in the industry. This is a theme you've heard us talk about a lot before. We participated in this consolidation five years ago with our Oak Tree Partnership, and we continue to look at strategic opportunities to further broaden and strengthen our franchise. This tend towards consolidation is especially true for areas of the alternative asset management space that are most in favor by investors and should attract more capital. Infrastructure, renewable power, and energy transition are expected to be among the fastest growing alternative asset sectors for very good reason. Investors continue to allocate to the space because these are assets that can deliver four things all investors see. market growth, principle safety in uncertain times, inflation-protected cash flows, and long-term capital appreciation. We were an early mover into these areas after we identified that decarbonization, deglobalization, and digitalization were megatrends that were shaping the global economy. Governments, corporates, and other stakeholders have made commitments to net zero targets and are grappling with energy, security, supply chain resiliency, and meeting the exponentially growing demand for data. These challenges will require trillions of capital investment, and our infrastructure, renewable power, and energy transition businesses are well positioned to deliver solutions. Today, we manage nearly $300 billion of assets across these businesses, making us the largest and most experienced in the space. We've used this first mover advantage to build critical expertise, deep relationships, and we use our scale and source proprietary deals to pursue investment opportunities that are either too large or too difficult for most investors to execute. We believe that our scale, diversity, reputation, and strong track record distinguish us in these areas, and we continue to invest in our franchise and strengthen our brand. and we believe we'll come out of this period of consolidation even more dominant than we entered. With that overview, let me turn it over to Conor to speak about the capabilities and strategy of our fundraising platform.