Cvc Capital Partners Plc

and good morning everyone today we'll update you on our performance for 2025 we have around 60 minutes for the call we'll begin with a presentation and after that we'll open the floor to questions presenting today are rob lucas ceo fred watt cfo peter rutland president and rob squire head of client and product solutions rob over to you thanks bruce and good morning everyone welcome to our 2025 full year results and thanks for joining the call

2025 was another really strong year of delivery for CVC. We achieved further great fundraising success with 23 billion euros of gross inflows and powerful contributions from credit, secondaries and infrastructure. Importantly, the pre-marketing of our latest private equity vehicle, Europe America's 10, is progressing well. We're seeing strong, very strong growth across the The aggregate value of our private wealth vehicles increased from approximately €800 million as of December 2024 to €3.6 billion as of December 2025. And our recently announced $3.5 billion strategic partnership with AIG illustrates our compelling capabilities in the insurance channel. Our fee-paying AUM increased to €148 billion, now comes from credit, secondaries and infrastructure. These three platforms grew by 12% in 2025, demonstrating the benefits of our diversification of the group. And we achieved record realisations of €21.9 billion in 2025 at highly attractive returns. Over the past four years, we have now returned This is a key differentiator compared with our private market peers, which positions us extremely well as we look towards fund 10. Our strong operating performance translated into record financial performance. Management fees increased by 9% to 1.45 billion. Performance related earnings increased by 39% to 254 million euros. and EBITDA increased by 13% to 1.1 billion euros. But what is it that enables us to deliver such strong operational and financial performance with such an unstable macro? Not just this year, but consistently over time. Well, as I say on this slide, it's the power of our platform which underpins our consistent performance. firstly the cbc network this is the most powerful origination engine within our industry secondly our disciplined focus on running highly diversified portfolios meaning we're never overly exposed to any one sector region vintage year or single investment thirdly our focus on active ownership and value creation over the life of each investment And then if you look to the right of the slide, you can see the result over 30 years, all the way from fund one, consistently outperforming across multiple economic cycles. And the outperformance over time is not just restricted to PE. You can see the exceptionally low loss and default rates in our credit business since inception and the strength of return in secondaries and infrastructure strategies. So it's across the whole business. It's this consistent investment track record that underpins our clients' trust and support for CVC and our confidence in continuing to deliver strong returns and to grow. Despite current events, looking out over the years ahead, we see a very exciting market opportunity, and it's one CVC is extremely well positioned to take advantage of. Let me explain. Firstly, we see clients allocating ever more capital to fewer managers. Given current market volatility, we expect this trend to accelerate with clients allocating their capital to managers they trust, and CVC is and always has been a major beneficiary of this flight to quality. Secondly, we see clients continuing to rebalance their portfolios towards Europe. Our leading position in Europe across private infrastructure means we're extremely well placed to benefit from this ongoing shift. Thirdly, we continue to see significant traction in the private wealth channel, where we believe we are at the early stages of a multi-year growth opportunity. Private wealth clients are looking to increase their private market allocations, and we saw this trend in the very strong private wealth growth we delivered in 2025. CVC's track record, brand and differentiated positioning place us very well in this channel. Finally, we also see very strong growth in the insurance channel as part of a long-term structural reallocation of capital towards private markets. Our partnership with AIG is a powerful endorsement of our ability to serve this channel at scale and our capabilities will be further enhanced by the acquisition of Marathon. We see all these four trends supporting a long-term and durable growth in our MFR. We've been very clear about our strategic objectives and we continue to deliver on these strongly. With 148 billion euros of fee-paying AUM across private equity, credit, secondaries and infrastructure, our business is stronger and more diversified than ever. Over the past 24 months, we have grown our fee-paying AUM by more than 50%, driving strong growth in our management fees. We have significantly scaled our credit, secondaries and infrastructure platforms, which now represent over 50% of our fee-paying AUM. We've broadened our distribution and client channels across insurance and private wealth, complementing our well-established institutional client base. And as a result of this growth and our focus on cost discipline, we've grown management fee earnings by 50% and earnings per share by 43%. Turning now to the operating highlights for 2025. In fundraising, we saw 23 billion in gross inflows with credit, secondaries and infrastructure accounting for 80% of the total. We delivered another year of record realisations, up 67% year-on-year, led by private equity, with exits achieving 3.2 times gross moat and 23% gross IRL, underpinning our confidence in fundraising, including Fund 10. Deployment rates remained strong, led by credit, secondaries and infrastructure, with private equity deployment consistent with our stated three- to four-year fund cycle. We also continue to see strong investment performance across each of our strategies. Across our private equity and infrastructure portfolios, we continue to deliver strong value creation of 11% pre-FX. Let's move to our financial highlights. We saw strong fee-paying AUM growth of 6% in the second half, and in aggregate, fee-paying AUM across credit, secondaries and infrastructure 12% in 2025. You'll see the private equity fee-paying AUM decline slightly in the year. As Fred will discuss later, this is mainly a function of our record year in realisations. Importantly, those distributions back to our clients reinforce our confidence in our private equity fundraising over the next 24 months. In financial terms, management fees grew 9%. We delivered a 39% increase in performance fee earnings and overall EBITDA increased 13% to 1.1 billion euros. Given the highly cash generative nature of our operating model, we are announcing an aggregate dividend for 2025 of 500 million euros. And in addition, a share buyback program of up to 350 million euros. Fred will cover both of these in more detail later. Everything I've been talking about means we are highly confident in growing our fee-paying AUM at a compound annual growth rate over the next three years of 10% or more. This delivers 200 billion euros of fee-paying AUM by the end of 2028. Given our highly diversified model, this growth will come from multiple drivers. The €50 billion increase in fee-paying AUM will be split roughly one-third from private equity, one-third from credit, and one-third from secondary as an infrastructure. Over the next 36 months, Bund 10 and Asia 7 will help deliver a step change in our private equity fee-paying AUM. We see significant continued growth from our existing credit paths. And growth across secondaries and infrastructure will come from existing funds in market on which we have good visibility. These fundraisings are progressing well, and I'll now pass to Rob Squire for a more detailed update on fundraising and the strong momentum we take into 2026.

Thank you, Rob. And good morning, everyone. I'd like to start my section with an overview of the progress that we've made in scaling and diversifying are closed end funds across private equity, across credit, across secondaries, and across infrastructure over the last three vintages. Against the challenging market backdrop, slide nine demonstrates that we have delivered on our growth objectives. As Rob referenced, fee paying AUM grew 50%. That's 50% in the two years from year end 23 to year end 25. Specific to full year 25, we achieved a record year for capital raising volumes for an off-cycle year away from our Europe and America's private equity fund. Throughout the year, we also saw a real acceleration in clients repositioning portfolios with a greater weighting toward Europe. And this was especially the case in the second half of the year. Personally, I expect this trend to continue and in fact likely gain further momentum throughout 26 and into 2027, something that bodes well for CBC. The right-hand side of page nine sets out our forward pipeline of closed-end funds for 26 and 2027. These strategies provide our clients with a series of well-established offerings with proven multi-vintage track records alongside newer offerings in some of the more nascent growth areas of private markets, many of which are crossover strategies, say, between credit and secondaries or infant secondaries. Lastly, on the institutional capital side of things, just a few remarks on key areas of progress from our last poll six months ago. Our secondary race of six continues to progress well, with north of $8.5 billion now aggregated for that program and a strong pipeline through to final close by the end of the summer. CBC Catalyst, our newly launched European middle market private equity strategy, has been very well received. and is significantly oversubscribed for its 2 billion target. That fund will also hit a final close later this summer. And on Catalyst, the reception that we've had there for that offering, combined with this general increase in appetite for Europe, provides me with confidence on our Fund 10 process, which I'll now cover. So if we turn to slide 10, as shown in this high-level overview, we have a very well-established process at CVC for raising our Europe and America's funds. And many of you will have seen a more detailed version of this process ahead of us launching our Fund9 capital raising. A key point to emphasize here is the highly iterative nature of our process. Our team is regularly assessing demand levels on a bottom-up, line-by-line basis from our clients around the world for the 18 months ahead of an expected closing. This process ensures greater visibility and confidence in our final outcome on what is an incredibly complex and scaled process. It's also important to note that this process has delivered for CBC repeatedly at times of significant market disruption and dislocation. For example, our Fund 8 was raised during the initial outbreak of the COVID pandemic in the first half of 2020. And our most recent raise, Fund 9, was executed in the first half of 2023 with markets recoiling from both the Ukraine war and the spike in interest rates that we experienced in 2022. In terms of Fund 10 specifically, we're now just under a year away from our expected launch in early 2027. And sitting here today, I can confirm that we're pleased with the initial feedback that we're receiving from our client base. We would expect to set the target fund size post the summer of this year And our current expectation is that Fund 10 will be the same size or larger than its predecessor. And lastly, from me, on page 11, we cover private wealth. As a reminder, we have been consistent in view of private wealth as a long-term structural growth opportunity for CBC as individual investors and savers allocate an increased share of their portfolios to private markets. We see these evergreen structures as part of a diversified funding base for CVC, and importantly, as a complement to our longstanding strength with pension, sovereign wealth fund, and other institutional investors. In just over 18 months since the launch of CVC CRED in Q2 24, we reached 3.6 billion euros of aggregate value at year-end 25 across our credit and private equity evergreen products. approaching 5x what it was just 12 months ago now given some of the events over the last few weeks i'm also pleased to report that these two vehicles have both had a very encouraging start to 26. aggregate value now stands at 4.2 billion euros through the end of february experiencing one of our largest ever monthly inflows Q1 redemptions amounted to around 15 million euros, that's 1.5, or approximately 0.6% of net asset value. In terms of future private wealth offerings, there are two major updates to provide. Firstly, earlier in Q1, we commenced formal fundraising for CBC PEF, a US-based private equity evergreen structure dedicated to US domiciled individuals. Secondly, we're now well on track to launch our first evergreen secondary offering, CVC PSEC, in the coming weeks. And Peter will cover this shortly as part of the broader AIG partnership. So in summary, despite some recent headlines, we continue to see substantial scaling potential as we roll out additional CVC offerings to individual investors and savers alongside a growing roster of distribution partners around the world. The CBC brand, the CBC investment performance, and the CBC European heritage are each key differentiators to our larger and more established US peers within the private wealth channel. So with that, thank you. And I'll hand over to my colleague Peter now to cover the building momentum that we're seeing in the insurance channel.