DigitalBridge Group, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Digital Bridge Grouping 4th Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Severin White, Managing Director, Head of Public Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Mark Gansey, our CEO, and Jackie Wu, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor, and then we can get started. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today, February 24, 2023, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent 10-K to be filed with the FCC for the year ending December 31st, 2022. Great. So we're going to start with Mark summarizing the progress we've made in 2022. Jackie will outline our financial results and updated guidance and turn it back over to Mark to outline what we're focused on in 2023. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark Ganse, our CEO. Mark?

Thanks, Sev, and thank you, our investors, for your continuing interest in DigiBridge, particularly as we enter 2023 and navigate the final stage of our transformation. I'd like to start today by putting 2022 and the progress we made this year in context. Most importantly, through a dynamic macro environment, we delivered growth this year, maintaining our position as the partner of choice to top operating management teams and institutional investors that are allocating capital to general infrastructure, which has proven itself to be one of the most durable asset classes. First, on corporate strategy, we established our asset management platform as the strategic growth driver for our business going forward, successfully building out a full-stack profile with new complementary strategies. Next, capital formation. It's our most relevant near-term KPI. When you look forward to revenue and earnings growth, this is where you'll find our best opportunity. Here, we exceeded our fundraising targets for the year, building up significant embedded earnings growth going forward into 2023 and beyond. Finally, and most importantly, our portfolio continued to perform with strong leasing, driving solid outcomes for our investors. The best way to deliver growth in today's environment is to create free cash flow from organic leasing and escalators. Again, this is what matters, portfolio performance. And here is where we really excelled. We'll talk a little bit about that today. Next slide, please. In 2022, DigitalBridge really established our asset management platform as the strategic growth driver for our business going forward. The fundamental shift was about orienting our company around a scalable asset life high return business model. As we've detailed before in our corporate overview, the returns on capital associated with investment management are superior and allow us to establish a leading market position off a smaller capital without having to tap capital markets regularly to grow our business. This is an alternative. We believe a superior alternative way to own digital infrastructure. We achieved a number of key strategic objectives last year that allowed us to advance this roadmap. First, we scaled our full-stack profile both organically with the launch of our core and credit strategies and also through M&A as we telegraphed to you, our investors, with the acquisition of AMP's infrastructure equity business, now rebranded as InfraBridge. This gives us a compelling middle market capability with a digital plus investment focus. We consolidated the ownership of our investment management platform, buying back WAPR's minority stake so that 100% of our investment management earnings flow back to you, DigiBridge shareholders. Finally, we continued to simplify our business profile, starting with the databank recap. This was the first step in deconsolidating our operating segment, which represents the last phase in our corporate transformation. some very important strategic progress this year that sets us up to win in 2023 and beyond.