Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brookfield Asset Management first quarter 2025 earnings call. 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'll need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1 1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I'd now like to hand the conference over to 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, and Hadley Pierre-Marshall, our Chief Financial Officer. Bruce will start the call today with an overview of the quarter and then cover how our scale and strategy position us well to navigate the current market environment and to continue to deliver long-term growth. Connor will follow up and cover how our platform and ecosystem give us a strategic advantage in capital raising and deployment. And finally, Hadley will discuss our financial results, balance sheet strength, and recent strategic initiatives. 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 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 U.S. and Canadian 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 the future events and results may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and their potential impact on our company, please see our filings with securities regulators in the US and Canada in the information available on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Jason, and to everyone joining us on the call. We had a strong start to the year, marking our highest quarterly earnings growth since we went public. Fee-related earnings reached a record $698 million for the quarter, up 26% year over year, or $0.43 per share. Distributable earnings grew by 20% to $654 million, or $0.40 per share. Fee-bearing capital now stands at approximately $550 billion, up 20% compared to last year. This performance reflects the continued strength and global reach of our business. We raised $25 billion of capital this quarter, bringing total inflows over the past year to more than $140 billion. Importantly, and exemplifying the resilience of our business, we closed $6 billion of commitments during the first quarter for our flagship real estate strategy, bringing total capital to $16 billion. And when we round out the strategy with the last retail and regional sleeves, this will be our largest real estate strategy ever. We also had a final close of our opportunistic credit strategy on par with our largest ever for this strategy at $16 billion. We are very active on the deployment and monetization front as well. In total, we deployed $16 billion into opportunities globally and we sold $22 billion of assets This generated $9 billion of equity proceeds during the quarter. Together, these results demonstrate the strength and the resilience of our platform, even in a volatile environment. Recently, the broader market faced heightened volatility and equity markets reacted sharply. Despite this, we remain confident in our long-term strategy as the secular trends underpinning our business continue to accelerate. Whether it's the growth in demand for AI infrastructure, the rising global need for energy, or the increasing role private credit plays in capital markets, these trends continue to drive capital market flows globally. We have leadership positions around these secular drivers, having built deep expertise, operational capabilities, and global scale. We believe we have never been better positioned to capitalize. The current environment favors scale, expertise, and capital. Periods of uncertainty often lead to attractive opportunities as they can create compelling valuation and entry points for investors with scale and experience. This kind of environment is not too new to us. We've navigated many similar challenges before. At the onset of COVID, we maintained our discipline, stayed focused on our long-term strategy, and invested when many others hesitated. To make a point, since then, we have raised over $400 billion of capital, nearly doubled our fee-related earnings, and are now better positioned than ever before. Our franchise is more global, more diversified, and more capable. At the center of all of this is our investment and operating teams representing our capabilities in more than 30 countries. This gives us unmatched flexibility to direct capital to the most attractive opportunities globally. We also have a high quality durable earnings base to support the business. Our cash flows are a hundred percent comprised of fee related earnings of which approximately 95% are derived from capital that is either long-term or perpetual in nature. This provides a stable and predictable foundation for distributable earnings. The ongoing growth of our fee-bearing capital base supported by strong fundraising, deployment, and monetization gives us conviction that these earnings will continue to compound over time irrespective of the environment. Our investments are focused on essential assets, power, infrastructure, real estate, and critical business services. These businesses operate locally, serve domestic demand, and are often highly contracted or regulated. That makes them less exposed to global shocks and tariffs and more attractive in periods of uncertainty where investors seek consistency. We also benefit from our diversification across asset classes allowing us to pivot to different strategies and across region. This ensures we can capitalize on disk location whenever or wherever it may emerge. Taken together, our client relationships, scale, brand, access to capital, and long-term track record enable us to maintain steady and growth through volatility. Looking ahead, our priorities are very clear. We will continue to stay disciplined. We'll lean into scale and with our capabilities, and we will continue to find opportunities in market dislocation. Our experience over many cycles has shown us that by focusing on these priorities in times of uncertainty not only helps us navigate through them, but allows us to emerge stronger. We expect to grow through this market cycle as we have in previous ones, just the same. I will now turn it over to Connor and Hadley, who will go deeper into our portfolio, our liquidity position, capital allocation, and the details of our recent deployment and monetization activities. Thank you all for joining us today.