Wendel

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Vendel's H1-2026 results conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press star-1-1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. You can also ask your questions on the webcast. Olivier Allot, Director of Financial Communication and Data Intelligence, will read them. I must advise you that this conference is being recorded today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Laurent Mignon, Vendel's Group CEO. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon to everybody and thank you for being on this call in a day where there's a lot of other Financial Communications. So, in a nutshell, this is a solid performance for Vendel during the first half, 2026. We have achieved strong return to shareholders with €450 million which has been returned today to our shareholders and our NAV is up 2.6% compared to last quarter, restated from the dividend pay to shareholders. We will go back on each of those items. Just the key financial highlights of the quarter is that we have asset under management of $48.7 billion. This is not any more pro forma. This is really what we have including a committed advisor. We have fee-paying asset under management of 37.8 billion. This is, if we recall compared to last year, this is up 30%. If we want to look to the dynamic of those fee-paying AUMs at the same parameter, it is up 11%, but Cyril will come back to that. The management fees are 226 million euros for this first half. This is up 56% again, but there's a change in parameter, but nevertheless it shows how much we have quickly developed the asset management that translates in fee-related earnings of 87.1%, up 46%, and if we look to FR and PRE, it's €91 million. One characteristic of our model today is that we are very much FRE geared more than PRE. The gap of the WPI is 3.6 billion. At the end of the second quarter, the share price of BV was slightly down compared to where it was at the end of the quarter. I think it was The reference price was 25.8, something like that, so slightly lower than what it is currently.

We had good operating performance from the unlisted assets.