Brookfield Corporation Class A Limited Voting Shares

Hello, and welcome to the Brookfield Corporation third quarter 2024 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker 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, Ms. Angela Yulo, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield Corporation's third quarter 2024 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, and Nick Goodman, President of Brookfield Corporation. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results for the quarter. 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. I would 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 US and the information available on our website. In addition, when we speak about our wealth solutions business or Brookfield Wealth Solutions, we are referring to Brookfield's investments in this business that supported the acquisitions of its underlying operating subsidiaries. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Angela, and welcome everyone on the call. We delivered strong financial results in the third quarter. Distributable earnings before realizations increased 19% to a record $1.3 billion, that was $0.80 per share, for the quarter, and $4.6 billion, or $2.90 per share, for the last 12 months. Nick will cover these results later in the call. Focusing first on the market. A reduction in short interest rates globally combined with solid growth and resilient economic data is increasing the market's confidence in pricing risk. This is leading to liquidity returning to the capital markets and transaction activity picking up. In the past few months alone, we have seen increased level of monetizations totaling over $17 billion across our business. We expect this momentum to continue across the franchise as high quality cash flowing businesses with compelling growth profiles are proving to be highly attractive to both buyers and to lenders. Nick will speak to asset sales that we advanced across the business, all of which are expected to generate attractive returns. At the same time, we committed approximately $20 billion towards new investments, and have a very robust pipeline that we are working on. So while 2024 has been a good year, 2025 should be better. We continue to focus on building long-term wealth for all stakeholders. And the secret to achieving this is to deliver strong compound returns over a long period of time. Our core principles in this regard are very simple. invest in good businesses, run them well, allocate excess free cash flow wisely, align everyone with long-term objectives, and evolve with the world around us. These principles combined with making sound strategic investment and business decisions have been the foundation of Brookfield. All of this has enabled us to deliver compound annualized returns of 19% over the past 30 years and will continue to be extremely important going forward. Our ability to sustain our growth will be driven by our ability to continue to evolve our business with the world around us. A few examples. First, a few years ago, we made the decision to build a wealth solutions business when interest rates were zero. This led us to acquire three insurance companies and reinvest a large portion of our excess cash flow during that period of time into our wealth solutions business. In hindsight, this was well-timed, and today the business is heading towards $2 billion of annualized earnings and is positioned as a top-tier underwriter of annuities in the United States. Next is expansion outside of North America, with business announcing its first transaction in the UK today. and next steps will be growth in Asia. Second, our ability to evolve and adapt with the world around us is critical to our success. 25 years ago, investing in the backbone of the economy meant buying hydro dams, building pipelines, railroads, and ports. While we still build those assets and they're still critical today, Our investable universe has expanded significantly as the trends of decarbonization, digitalization, and deglobalization are reshaping the backbone of the global economy. We have evolved our business accordingly, increasingly raising and deploying significant sums of capital into the energy transition and into infrastructure revolving around AI. On the back of this, we set up our global transition business, which has the potential to be our largest business over time. And we grew our capability around production and relocation of data centers. When you add in the impact of the AI revolution and the expected incremental demand for data centers, compute capacity, chips, clean power, we find ourselves very well positioned around the most significant investment opportunities of this generation. We will continue to invest in a disciplined manner to create value for our clients, but at the same time, we'll remain focused on adapting with the ever evolving backbone of the global economy to ensure we are able to participate in the next emerging investment opportunity. Third, We widened our service capabilities and product offerings to capture the growing demand for alternatives by high net worth and retail investors via our wealth solutions business and our private wealth platform. Looking forward, we are focused on deepening our distribution capabilities, expanding into new markets, and evolving our product offerings. As we expect to scale our private wealth and retail fundraising to nearly $40 billion a year in the next five years, these inflows will add to our already large pool of discretionary capital at the corporation and will at the same time continue to benefit BAM as it manages most of the capital raised across our franchise. All of this should drive significant earnings and cash flow generation for our stakeholders for years to come. Lastly, we spun off our asset management business, which has surfaced significant value for shareholders, now with a market capitalization of $85 billion plus. The business is currently taking steps to position itself for inclusion in the U.S. indices, which should further enhance its shareholder value. We are quite sure that BAM will eventually be included in all major US indexes due to its size and location of business. The only question is when, not if. Thank you for your continued support and interest in Brookfield, and I will now turn the call over to Nick.