Man Group Plc New

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Robin Grew, the CEO of Man Group, and I'm joined by our CFO, Antoine Fortier. As usual, I'll start with some highlights and then Antoine will take you through the numbers. After that, I'll provide an update on the progress we made last year against our strategic priorities. It's now been five years since COVID first spread around the world, and it seems that every year since has been one of surprises. 2024 was no different, as US exceptionalism dominated the global narrative. Equities continue to rally, driven by optimism around a potential soft landing for the US economy, the sustained momentum of the AI boom and Trump's pro-business agenda. Fixed income and currencies, however, experienced a more volatile and at times turbulent year. Although the Fed cut interest rates three times, persistent inflation and oscillating expectations of monetary policy easing, that is, kept markets under pressure. Meanwhile, commodity markets were shaped by geopolitical disruptions and evolving supply-demand dynamics. Energy markets in particular saw considerable fluctuations driven by periods of escalation and hopes of de-escalation in the Middle Eastern Europe, unstable supply chains, and the health of the Chinese economy. Elections across more than 60 countries added to market uncertainty throughout. Against this backdrop, I'm proud to report strong financial results for 2024. These results really highlight the strides we have made in diversifying our business, our commitment to collaborating with sophisticated investors to address their most complex challenges, and the outstanding quality of our talent, technology and institutional resources. We delivered positive investment performance across all product categories with overall outperformance of 1%. Listen, this isn't to say that it was all plain sailing. 2024 proved to be an unfavourable market for trend-following strategies, and I'll go into more detail on that later. On the distribution side, although 2024 remained a challenging period for fundraising in the asset management sector, we continue to make progress building deep and long-term relationships with asset allocators and third-party distributors around the globe. This has helped to ensure that client activity remains strong throughout the year. We did, however, see an increase in redemptions as institutional clients faced the combined challenges of macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures on their portfolios, alongside lower-than-expected realisations from private equity allocations. And as a result, we saw net outflows of $3.3 billion for the period. Positive investment performance was offset by these outflows and other negative movements. The latter relate primarily to adverse effects impacts owing to U.S. dollar strength and realizations as we wind down our U.S. single family rental business, as well as capital returned from European CLO strategies. Total AUM, as at 31 December 2024, was £168.6 billion, which is broadly flat compared with 31 December 2023. Meanwhile, core management fee earnings per share was 17% higher at 21.5 cents and performance fee earnings per share more than doubled to 10.6 cents per share. These outcomes reflect the underlying fee earning potential of the diversified business we've built over the past few years. Despite a below average year for performance in our trend following strategies, we delivered earnings per share of 32.1 cents, which compares to 16.2 cents per share in 2020. I'm pleased to report that the board has declared a final dividend of 11.6 cents per share, which together with the interim dividend of 5.6 cents equates to a total dividend for the year of 17.2 cents per share, which is a 6% increase compared to 2023. Following the $50 million share buyback announced and executed in 2024, we're announcing the intention to repurchase an additional $100 million in shares today, demonstrating the commitment to our capital policy, which is 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 $10.9 billion for our clients. Overall investment performance from alternative strategies was 2.4%, with particularly strong returns of nearly 15% from our multi-strategy MAN 1783. The strategy benefits from unconstrained access to around 75 discretionary and systematic capabilities across the firm. And its performance during the year is a great reflection of the breadth of high quality investment content that we have to offer. Alternative risk premium also delivered strong returns during the year, highlighting our judicious approach to portfolio construction and risk management, while target risk once again demonstrated its ability to navigate macroeconomic shifts and adapt swiftly to volatile market conditions. On the long-only side, positive momentum in equity markets together with strong security selection also resulted in gains of 15.2% across our strategies, 16.8% from systematic and 12.5% from discretionary, respectively. As I mentioned earlier, relative investment performance across the firm was positive during the year. This outperformance was driven primarily by our long-only strategies, with particularly impressive results from the manumeric range. What isn't apparent on this slide is the strong run of performance Japan Core Alpha has had for some time now. Over the past three years, the strategy has delivered returns 9.4% above the topic's net of fees on an annualised basis. These outcomes really highlight the value of high-quality active investment management in the long-only equity space. Our credit strategies also continue to perform particularly well, with high yield and investment grade strategies returning 4.4% and 9.5% above their respective benchmarks during 2024. The breadth of long-only strategies generating outperformance not only highlights the expertise and skill of our investment teams, but also emphasises our commitment to continuously innovate and evolve to meet the needs of our clients. It also shows the value our increasingly diversified range of investment strategies and solutions is adding for our shareholders.

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Who says I can't do technology? There we go. Overall, underperformance with alternatives was largely attributable to AHL Evolution, our alternative trend following program, as its indices are predominantly composed of traditional trend followers. And this takes me on to the next slide. As opposed to the much touted black box, we view trend following strategies as a transparent box. And I'd like to spend a couple of minutes talking about trend following performance last year to show the level of clarity we have around what's going on in our models. AHL's alpha return of 3.2% is below its long-term average, but probably in line with both the Sock Gen Trend Index and Barclays B Top 50, representing the industry. And it's undeniably frustrating for this to be the case after a strong start in 2024. So what happened? Well, the program captured trends where they did exist in agricultural commodities such as coffee and cocoa and in equities, particularly U.S. indices, capturing the magnificent seven trend. What caused problems, however, was the lack of trends in fixed income and in particular the frequency of reversals. We entered 2024 with expectations of six 25 basis point rate cuts from the Fed in the following 12 months. By the summer, this had decreased to two. And in October, we're at seven again. What exacerbated the problem was the frequency at which these changes occurred. Trend followers had built into positions at about the same time as fixed income markets reversed. Frequent transitions from short to long positions, and vice versa, are rarely conducive to performance. This also helps us understand why it was a more difficult year for alternative trend following strategies in general, and AHE evolution, which returned negative 6.1%. Gains made in equities and credit were offset by losses in fixed income and commodities, and most notably in positions in natural gas and the electricity markets. Trends in alternative markets were both weaker and shorter in 2024 than in prior years. In fact, the shortest in over a decade, while correlations between alternative and traditional markets were also higher than usual. Importantly, however, the evidence suggests that these effects are temporary. Over the past few decades, our trend following strategies have played an important role in allocators' portfolios, delivering uncorrelated returns, access to liquidity and valuable crisis alpha. As we head into a year of diverging economic trends, we maintain high conviction that our strategies are well positioned to deliver for our clients. Our global sales team of over 290 people remained focused on listening to and addressing our client needs. This commitment drove solid engagement throughout this year. As I said earlier, we delivered gross inflows of nearly $44 billion, our second best year on record, without a single subscription over $1 billion. This is a reflection of strong, broad-based client demand for what we offer. We experienced a particular high level of interest for our discretionary long-only credit strategies, where total AUM increased by $6.6 billion, or 81% over the period. As hopefully most of you are aware, our net flows were impacted by a $7 billion redemption from a single client in systematic long only, following the strategic decision to switch their entire equities allocation to a passively managed index-based portfolio. and 3.9 billion of outflows from low multi-manager solutions. Although net flows were negative in 2024, relative net flows were actually up 0.2%. This metric is a measure of our ability to attract and retain capital in comparison with our industry peers. I'm delighted that we continue to grow our market share, even though we experienced a small number of large, lumpy institutional redemptions during the year. It's a real testament to the strength of our global distribution network. As one of our investment teasers written recently, market predictions frequently missed the mark. In today's environment, investors require tailored solutions that deliver diversified risk adjusted returns backed by long term strategic partners who are innovative, adaptable and forward thinking. I'd like to end this section by reflecting on why clients partner with Man Group. We're one of the largest liquid alternative firms with over 35 years of experience generating uncorrelated returns and a distinctive edge that comes from combining exceptional talent with cutting edge technology. Our clients continue to value the quality of strategies and solutions that we offer. We've also consistently demonstrated our ability to expand our capabilities as allocators look to do more with fewer managers. cornerstone of our strategy has been driving innovation and entering new market segments with highly skilled, specialised teams. We have made substantial strides in diversifying the firm, ensuring we remain relevant and valuable to our clients across varying market environments. Finally, as customization and transparency are of ever-increasing importance, our ability to deliver solutions at scale becomes even more differentiating. We now run nearly 50 highly tailored solutions for institutions globally, thanks to our powerful operating platform and competitive advantage in technology. We are building lasting relationship with allocators that extend beyond the traditional manager-client relationship, which provides the foundation to do more with them in the years to come. I'll now pass you to Antoine, who'll take you through the numbers.