EQT AB (publ)

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the presentation of EQT's Q1 announcement 2024. Let me start by saying thank you to everyone who attended our Capital Markets Day in Stockholm a few weeks ago. And for those who were not able to join us, the presentation materials and the recording of the event are available on the shareholder relations section of our website. For today's call, as always, if you've registered ahead of the call, you should have received an email with your personal PIN code to participate in the Q&A. And to make sure that everybody has time to ask questions, we suggest that you focused on the most important topics. And as always, we're available for follow-ups after the webcast. So thank you all for joining today. And with that, I'll hand over to Christian. Next slide, please.

Thanks, Rolf. Good morning, everyone. I'm excited now that EQT has entered its fourth decade. And we did this with a big demarcation of closing our largest fundraising ever, which was EQT 10 at 22 billion euros. This, of course, is a sign of the partnership we have with our clients and their trust in our ability to deliver strong and resilient returns for the long term. Now, a month ago, we hosted our first Capital Markets Day in Stockholm. There, we clarified our ambitions to become the global leader in private equity, top three in infrastructure, while maintaining the number one position within value-add infra, and over time, approach the top three in private real estate, a segment which is quite fragmented today across the top 10 players. Reaching these ambitions comes down to performance for our clients. And this is why we are focused on active ownership. And as we say, we're positively paranoid around all aspects of transforming and improving companies for the future and thus driving fundamental value creation across the cycle. We're also progressing on our sustainability goals and are now supported almost 40 companies in setting science-based targets. This is actually the largest move towards net zero in our industry and will of course also help future-proof our companies and make them more valuable. The key equity funds are all developing on or above plan. Key fund valuations were slightly up in the quarter. We also had some material valuation uplifts in other funds focused on earlier stage investments, such as equity ventures and equity life sciences. Our investment activity continued at quite a good pace in the first quarter. With our thematic and local with locals approach, our deal flow, as we talked about before, remains very, very strong. We have one of the largest deal sourcing machines in the world of private markets. And, of course, this kind of deal flow is exactly what we want so that we can remain selective on which deals we go after. On the exit side, we expect activity to pick up materially over the coming year and years. Of course, near term, this will be dependent on the market. And right now, credit markets are fairly robust, while the equity markets are still in the early stages of recovery. There are geopolitical challenges and other issues, including sticky inflation in the U.S., so this may take some time. Now, from our point of view, becoming less dependent on the market is why we are working to build new capabilities, such as private IPOs, as we call it. And this we're doing in order not to be driven to exit companies and assets that we believe can be grown and developed in the long run. So we're exploring longer-term structures that we can own together with other asset managers and financial investors and continue to develop the company. We're also continuously strengthening all of our capabilities around other exits, including public IPOs. And actually, I'm quite proud of the team and everyone involved in our recent IPO of Golderma, which Bloomberg actually called a case study of IPOs, which is great. Moving to the fundraising market, it continues to be demanding, with fundraising timelines still being prolonged. Compared to a year ago, we've seen a slight improvement, partly as the denominator effect has abated. However, with low exit proceeds across the market, some clients have had less liquidity to enable new commitments. Thus, we'll probably only see a real improvement in fundraising markets once exit volumes really start to be active across private markets. We're making good progress with Infra 6 and fundraising is expected to continue at least throughout the year. And we do expect it to reach the 20 billion Euro target. On new initiatives, the healthcare growth strategy just made its first investment and preparations for an infrastructure transition strategy continued. And this strategy, as you may remember, is to go after the enormous space of scaling up companies that are supporting the energy transition. Fundraising for EQT Nexus, our semi-liquid fund catering to private wealth clients in Europe, continued. And we're preparing additional products with a similar structure, including just launched EQRT, our U.S. Real Estate Investment Trust. And all these products represent solutions that are designed for specific clients or client segments. And these are the kinds of capabilities that we're now building across the firm. Next slide, please. At the Capital Markets Day, we spoke about our strategic priorities and our avenues for growth. We expect EQT to continue to take market share over time, driven by strong returns for clients, created in a responsible manner, and a continued trend of clients concentrating commitments to fewer and larger managers. Specifically, we expect to grow based on four pillars. First, we're going to scale our flagship funds further. Second, we expect to scale recently launched strategies while introducing also new initiatives. And over the next five years, we expect to triple the AUM across our current first-time funds. Third, we'll continue to deepen our client relationships and add distribution channels, including the ecosystems around private wealth. And over time, we expect private wealth to comprise 15 to 20% of fundraisings, up from 10 to 15 in recent ones. Fourth, we'll selectively pursue M&A. As you know, our industry is continuing to consolidate and we expect Nikiti to continue to be a driver of this trend. This could be white space in geography or in a sector, or to create new capabilities to better serve our clients. Yet we remain highly selective And we're only going to go after opportunities that really strengthen the platform. And as always, most importantly, having a very strong fit with our culture and strong performance. Next slide, please. So we continue to see a super investment pipeline across actually all strategies. Digitalization of societies, decarbonization of transportation fleets, the growing need for health care and an aging population, et cetera, et cetera, are all areas that require significant investments. We will continue to put its capital and its expertise to work. And during the strong market environment in 2020 and 2021, we actually exited a large part of our portfolio and pursued several exits ahead of plan at that point in time. As a result, we have top quartile DPI, which is the industry way of saying cash returns in our funds that are in realization mode and exit mode. And today, Only about 10% of the portfolio by capital is five years or older, which is pretty unique. The industry, as you can see, is at a totally different level. And as such, the vast majority of our portfolio is still in value creation mode. And we also don't have a lot of old stuff to manage and deal with. So we have capacity to drive value creation and to do new deals. Having said that, we're, of course, propelling exit alternatives across the portfolio. And we have a number of companies ready for exits this year. Some of those will be in earlier vintages, and some will be in more recent funds, which are not yet in carry mode. Since the global financial crisis, we've been laser focused on owning high quality assets supported by long term secular growth trends. As a result, most of our companies are assets which are less cyclical, which are typically market leaders with underlying growth that also have attractive exit optionality with multiple buyers. And looking across the portfolio, we have quite robust, solid financing structures. As equity enters now our fourth decade, we're in a stronger position than ever. We've created a global platform to leverage insights across geographies and industries from early stage to mature companies. We have deep and longstanding relationships with our clients that we're continuing to build on. The tools to drive fundamental value creation, which we're constantly improving. And that includes, of course, our mother brain artificial intelligence platform as well. The world is changing at an ever-increasing speed. Climate challenges, artificial intelligence, structural changes of demographics, combined with now changing geopolitical landscapes, global conflicts, etc. All these bring challenges for society and for us as a firm to navigate. But such challenges also bring out opportunities. And I'm confident that we have the platform and the teams to continue to be forward-thinking, always challenging ourselves to improve, to manage risk, and to seize opportunities. With that, I hand over to Gustav.

Thank you, Chris. And next slide, please. Good morning, everyone. This quarter, as Chris said, was marked by two fund closes. So, EQT 10 reached and even surpassed its hard cap with almost 22 billion euros of fee-generating AUM, which was almost a 40% increase from EQT 9. The equity future fund closed at 3 billion in total fund commitments and total fee generating commitments to the strategy, which also includes fee generating co-investments totaling 3.6 billion euros. Fundraising continued for infrastructure six with fee generating commitments of more than 15 billion euros at the end of the quarter. We expect that the fund will reach its target fund size of 20 billion euros, and that the fundraising is expected to continue at least throughout 2024. The fundraising environment in real estate continues to be challenging, especially for newer strategies. However, as part of our increased efforts in Asia, we have now begun to raise our Asia-Pacific logistics fund. Today, our real estate business has approximately $12 billion of dry powder. Hence, there will be some time before we raise the next round of flagship logistics funds. As previously stated, given the current investment pace, we expect that our flagship funds to be on an approximately three and a half year investment cycle. This will imply that we would activate BPA 9 towards mid 2025 and then EQT 11 and infrastructure 7 to follow with around six months gaps each. Preparations are continuing for the transition infrastructure strategy, and the healthcare growth strategy made its first investment during the quarter. Moving on to the Evergreen side. EQRT, our Evergreen product aiming to make direct investments in commercial real estate, made its first acquisition, and we would expect to start fundraising for this shortly. We also continue to onboard new distributors for IKT Nexus. Fund NAV is now above 600 million euros and we expect the monthly inflows to increase during the second half of the year as we're scaling the efforts in many countries across both Europe, Asia and Australia. In parallel, we're also preparing for additional private wealth products focused on our core strengths in private equity and infrastructure and expect to launch a couple of new products both in North America and in Europe slash Asia over the coming 12 to 18 months. I've said before, we find this long-term opportunity super interesting, but also that it will take time to scale our evergreen strategies and for these to have a meaningful impact on our financials. And with that, I'll hand over to Olof. And next slide, please.