Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Hello, and welcome to Brookfield Asset Management's first quarter 2024 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. I would now like to hand the conference call over to our first speaker, Mr. Jason Fuchs, Managing Director, 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, Connor Teske, our President, Bahir Manios, our Chief Financial Officer, and Hadley Pierre-Marshall, our incoming Chief Financial Officer. Bruce will start the call today with opening remarks, followed by Connor, who will talk about some of the important drivers of our future growth. Bahir will discuss our financial results, and finally, Hadley will provide an update on our fundraising. 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 should have additional questions, please rejoin the queue and we'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 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 U.S. and the information available on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Jason, and welcome everyone on the call. Our business is performing extremely well, and results were strong in first quarter, driven by execution across all aspects of our business and highlighted by robust fundraising, successful capital markets execution, and several strategic transactions. This should lead to excellent growth in overall results in 2024. Improving market sentiment has been growing. Liquidity is returning to the capital markets, and most major economies are performing better than expected. This, in turn, has revived risk appetite among many investors and is fostering an increasingly stable and more constructive market. We raised a total of $20 billion of capital during the first quarter, which included strong first closes for two of our flagship funds. Our flagship funds, along with our private credit funds and insurance solutions channel, have been among where our largest fund flows have come from over the past year. More broadly, we see continued client demand for more than 50 strategies that are in the market and expect our fundraising to continue to build throughout the year. This should lead to an excellent year for fundraising. Continued consolidation in the asset management sector is a tailwind with clients preferring to do more with fewer, larger, and more diversified global managers. The market environment is also more conducive for transaction activity. We are seeing firsthand an improving market for sales of high-quality assets. This is particularly apparent in the private equity and real estate asset classes where transaction volume has been lighter over the past few years, but is now picking up. Most notably, we sold a 49% interest in ICD Brookfield Place, a premier office property in Dubai for approximately $1.5 billion, marking one of the largest real estate transactions globally since the pandemic, at the highest valuation for an office property ever in the region. Over the past year, we also sold or are under contract to sell approximately $35 billion of assets across all of our businesses, generating very good returns on capital. And as we look forward to the rest of 2024, we see more monetizations to come. We're also continuing to take advantage of currently strong debt markets to refinance debt at attractive rates. Thanks to the high-quality nature of our businesses and continued progress on operational improvement plans across many of our portfolio companies within our private equity business, we have been able to successfully refinance over $18 billion of borrowing, resulting in actually a decrease in the overall cost of debt compared to the debt that we replaced. At the same time, there are still many instances where the balance sheets of owners of high-quality businesses and assets cannot withstand the increase of the rates over the past two years or where business fundamentals have not lived up to the expectations of the capital structure that was put in place at the time when they financed the business. This should, therefore, also be an excellent period to invest for both our equity and credit strategies. To support this, we enter this period with over $100 billion of dry powder ready to invest, and a strong balance sheet to support strategic initiatives. To that end, we announced three strategic transactions so far this year. First, we recently added management responsibility for the $50 billion of AEL capital that came to our parents. Second, we agreed to acquire the majority stake in Castle Lake, a best-in-class manager focused on aviation and specialty finance. Third, we expanded our partnership with Oak Tree by acquiring an additional close to 5% interest in the company. Connor will speak to each of these with a little more depth, but we're excited about the opportunity to serve our clients in more ways, bolster the capabilities of our credit group, and further drive fee-related earnings. It's been a very active start to the year, and we look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. Before turning over the call, I wanted to note that Bahir, who has been with Brookfield for 20 years, will be stepping away at the end of this month. Bahir has made a very significant contribution to many of our businesses over the years, helping drive our infrastructure business, insurance, and most recently, assisted with the launch of our asset management business into the capital markets. Thank you, Bahir. And as all of you know, the board-appointed Hadley Peer Marshall, a 10-year Brookfield veteran, who has been driven significant success in our infrastructure group as our new Chief Financial Officer. We are all looking forward to introducing you to Hadley when we have the chance. With that, I will turn the call over to Connor. Thank you for being here.