Cvc Capital Partners Plc

Good morning and welcome to the CBC Capital Partners PLC 2025 half-year results call. Please be aware that this call is being recorded and all participants are currently in listen-only mode. I would like to hand over to Walid Damu to begin the meeting. Walid, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning everyone. Today we will update you on our performance for the first six months of the year. We have 60 minutes for the call, and as usual, we'll begin with the presentation, and after that, we'll open the floor for questions. Presenting today are Rob Lucas, our CEO, Fred Watt, CFO, and Rob Squire, Head of Client and Product Solutions. Rob, over to you.

Thanks, Waleed, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our interim results, and thanks for joining the call. While we're here to talk about our very encouraging H1 results, I also hope that you'll take away from the presentation that we're continuing to make good progress in building CVC for the medium and long term. Our objective throughout the last 40 years has been to deliver top class returns for our stakeholders today, while at the same time building and strengthening CVC for the future. And that is what we're continuing to do. We are incredibly fortunate to be so well positioned in a fast-growing, dynamic market, and we are all on a very exciting journey together. In terms of our first half results, H125 represents another period of encouraging performance. We've seen strong fundraising momentum across CVC. and we're benefiting from long-term structural tailwinds overlaid with clients allocating ever more capital to scaled multi-asset managers such as CVC and increased interest in Europe. We continue to scale and diversify our fee-paying AUM, which has increased from €128 billion as of June 24 to €140 billion today. We'll talk about our investment activities in more detail. But the last 12 months, deployment and realizations both increased by more than 20% year on year. And importantly, these realizations are delivering strong investment performance for our clients. With last 12 months, average realized returns of 3.3 times gross multiple of money and 27% gross IRR. As Fred will walk you through later, this resilient operating performance is translating into strong financial performance. Both revenues and EBITDA grew by 14% over the last 12 months, with PRE tracking our expectations for the full year. And the cash generative nature of our business allows for increased distributions. As a result, in October, we will pay an interim dividend of €250 million, bringing total distributions over the last 12 months to €475 million. As you can see on slide 4, our key medium-term focus remains delivering on the plan we outlined at the time of the IPO, and we are making excellent progress against our strategic ambitions. Rob Squire will talk about this in more detail, but we're delighted with the significant fundraising momentum we're achieving across CVC and we're building an exciting pipeline of future product launches. We're working hard to deepen and expand our institutional client base and to drive further growth through wealth and insurance. And I'll talk a bit later about our achievements across credit, secondaries and infrastructure, which together now represent about 50% of our fee-paying AUM. At the centre of everything we do is our focus on delivering attractive investment performance for our clients. This was very much a feature in the first six months of this year, and we're continuing to achieve significant success with realisations with the last 12 months' period representing a record year. All of this generates a highly attractive financial profile, growing, predictable and cash generative, allowing us to continue building out our business and delivering on our plan. I'll now hand over to Rob for a more detailed update on the fundraising and the successes he and the team have achieved. Thanks, Rob.