Man Group Plc New

I think we're good. Are we good? Can you all hear us? Excellent, excellent, excellent. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Robin Grew, the CEO of Man Group, and I'm joined by our CFO, Antoine Fortier. Pleased to present my first results. I'll start off with an overview of the year, and then Antoine will take you through the numbers in more detail. After that, I'll provide an update on our priorities going forward, and we'll finish with questions. as is tradition. So let's go through this. I've been at Mangroup now for nearly 15 years and for most of that as part of the senior management team. I'd like to begin by reflecting on the quality of this firm. Mangroup has developed into a world leading, technologically brilliant, active investment manager with a collegiate culture and significant opportunity to grow. Following my appointment, I've spent a lot of time with my executive team and with the board about how we deliver the next chapter of growth. And in doing so, I've been conscious not to overlook the many strengths of our business today. Over the past few years, we've built a high-performing, incredibly resilient firm. Our investment expertise and capabilities, powered by our advanced operating platform, are helping us to solve our clients' most complex problems. The business is in great shape and I have every confidence in our ability to continue on this exciting trajectory. But more on that later. Turning to 2023, it was a year that defied market expectations, not just once, but on multiple occasions. The world grappled with several macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures, while the level and path of interest rates were firmly on investors' minds. Against that backdrop, I'm pleased to report a solid set of results for the firm. We ended the year with $167.5 billion of assets under management. This marks a new high for the firm and a 17% increase compared with December 2022. It was a difficult period for most of the sector. The client-led growth, though, in our business remains strong. We recorded total net inflows of $3 billion during the year across both alternative and long-only strategies. This highlights the continuing demand for the range of differentiated strategies and solutions that we offer. On a relative basis, net flows were 4.9% ahead of the industry, reflecting the true value of our client-centric distribution model and the quality, quite frankly, of our long-standing relationships with allocators around the world. We also delivered positive investment performance across all product categories with overall outperformance of 1.6%. This isn't to say that it was all plain sailing and 2023 proved to be a testing year for trend following strategies. This was for two reasons. First, March's SVB crisis, which was an idiosyncratic event that suddenly reversed strong prevailing market trends. And second, November brought an abrupt change to the market narrative about when central banks would end their hiking cycle. In that context, performance in our flagship trend following strategies was good relative to peers and reasonable overall, with AHL Alpha and AHL Evolution ending the period in positive territory. Both programs have also fared well so far this year. Meanwhile, core management fee earnings of 18.4 cents per share were resilient, demonstrating the diversification our total return and long-only strategies add to our business. Total core earnings per share reflect lower revenue from performance fees in the year. I'm pleased to report that the board has declared a final dividend of 10.7 cents per share, which together with the interim dividend of 5.6 cents equates to a total dividend for the year of 16.3 cents per share, a 4% increase compared with 2022. Following the 125 million share buyback announced and executed in 2023, we are announcing the intention to repurchase an additional $50 million in shares today, demonstrating the commitment to our capital policy, balancing investments in growth and capital returns to shareholders. We are a diversified, active investor, and we ended the year having generated positive investment performance of $9.7 billion for our clients. Overall investment performance from alternative strategies was 1.9%, with particularly strong returns from our discretionary strategy Alpha Select. AHL target risk gained 14.1%, once again proving its ability to navigate hard-to-forecast macro changes and adapt quickly to evolving market conditions. Our long-only strategies also performed well over the period, helped by positive beta in equity markets and delivering overall investment performance of 16.4%. On an asset-weighted basis, relative investment performance across the firm was positive during the year. Our sophisticated risk management and technology-empowered platform meant that we were able to reduce positions quickly during periods of market volatility, driving outperformance of 0.8% from alternative strategies. Our long-only strategies also outperformed by 2.8%, which is a real testament to the skill of our investment teams. I want to draw attention to the fact that the long only highlights on the slide are presented on a relative basis. Our sterling corporate bond strategy finished the year 15% above the benchmark. As I mentioned previously, we saw strong engagement with existing and new clients across the globe in 2023. That was reflected in our net inflows in the year of $3 billion. This is notably strong relative to the industry, which saw average outflows of roughly 3% across comparable strategies in the year. It is one of the best signs of our strength as a business today. Our clients have confidence in our ability to manage and grow their assets and to help them navigate the range of market conditions they're facing. Our breadth of investment strategies, quality of institutional resources and commitment to partnering with clients to build solutions at scale are key differentiators. They have been crucial in helping us deepen existing relationships and add a number of new relationships with strategically important allocators during the past year. I'll now pass to Antoine, who will take you through the numbers.

Thank you, Robin. That has been rehearsed, by the way.

The long and the short of it are in the room. Anyway.