EQT AB (publ)

Good morning everyone and welcome to the presentation of EQT's full year results. 2024 was a record year of investment volumes, increasing exit activity and strong value creation for EQT. It was also a year of continued headwinds for the global fundraising market, yet one where equity closed the largest private equity fund globally for the year. And we continued to build our distribution channels, including our private wealth initiatives. Today, we will reflect on our priorities for 2025 and the future of private markets. With those words, let me hand over to Christian. Next slide, please.

Thanks, Rolf. Good morning, everyone from Davos. I've spent the week here and actually I'm quite encouraged by the positive business outlook shared by most everyone that I've met during the conference. Of course, there are also longer term questions regarding geopolitics, inflation, decarbonisation and AI. that we and other investors are considering when investing capital and managing companies. But EQT, of course, does that in line with our thematic approach. And looking at EQT, our global portfolio is developing quite well with double-digit EBITDA growth across sectors and regions. In 2024, EQT made progress in some key areas. We delivered a value uplift in the funds of 18%. We had a record year for investments as we executed on a strong pipeline across North America, Europe, and Asia. We delivered on our objective to drive exits, and volumes were up 70% with approximately 30 exit events across our key funds alone. We launched two investment strategies across healthcare growth and transition infrastructure, and we now have two active vehicles for private wealth, where of EQRT, our US REIT just started raising capital. And we have another three private vehicles underway this year. Overall, we're entering 2025 optimistic about the deal environment, although, of course, humble about the world conditions. And we expect high exit activity and high deal activity for the year with more than 30 exit events planned. Next slide. So taking a step back, I see five forces that are going to drive the growth opportunity and shape our industry over the next decade. First, a larger share of value creation is taking place in private markets. Yes, public market performance was strong recently, but this, as we all know, was concentrated highly to seven U.S. stocks. And in fact, only 15% of companies in the US with revenues over $100 million are now publicly traded. And the number of IPOs, as we've talked about, has steadily come down. And during this period, private markets have outperformed the public markets across almost all timeframes. So private markets are needed not just to generate returns, but actually also diversification. And that's why both institutions and individuals are attracted to our asset classes. Second, the investment opportunity in private markets is vast. Beyond private equity sectors such as healthcare, software, services, etc., active owners like EQT are driving the digitalization of society, the decarbonization of our economies, and building future infrastructure. In fact, McKinsey estimates that approximately $275 trillion will be spent on physical assets in the transition to a decarbonized economy just until 2050. And to do that, we also need superb cooperation between business and government across the world to make it happen. At EQT, we do have one of the largest global deal sourcing machines in the industry, and that's built to capture those opportunities. And some recent ones include EdgeConnex, which is one of the largest data center providers in the world, or transition-related investments such as Instavolt or Statera in the UK. Third, private markets are expected to double by 2030 and double again by 2040. The growth until 2040 is expected to be paced by something like $8 to $10 trillion in private wealth, $7 to $8 trillion in sovereign wealth funds, and $3 to $5 trillion in pension funds. And as expected, as we talked about before, capital is increasingly concentrated with the larger managers. So in the buyout category, actually, over the last three years, the number of buyout funds has decreased, and actually dramatically more in venture capital. And on the other side, the top 10 funds in the world in the first half of 2024 accounted for 65% of capital raised. So as a result, we believe our industry will continue to consolidate and EQT will continue to be active in bringing together strong teams into EQT and to our platforms. Fourth, the world is facing rapid technological shifts and climate and geopolitical risks. As we all know, the rise of AI is transforming industries and companies and has the potential to create tremendous value and is already doing that. At EQT, with our Mother Brain team, we're going after opportunities both for efficiencies and costs, etc., but also to drive revenues across our entire portfolio, sector by sector. And of course, starting there with tech, as we talked about before. Furthermore, we do also build climate resilience into the strategy of our portfolio companies. And we do that by setting science-based targets for every single company and building that into the strategy of the businesses. And today, 52 of our companies have set their net zero strategies, which means more than 60% of our invested capital. And this creates both resilience for the future and we believe is going to make those companies more valuable. Overall, the key focus this year is at EQT in our portfolio is on future-proofing and driving performance there. That's how we create fundamental value by making companies better and stronger. And we're also then refining our value creation playbook sector by sector, bringing in new talents to our industrial advisory network and making sure that they really help guide and challenge our management teams to perform at their best. Finally, the liquidity and ownership model in private markets is evolving, and we're assessing and working with new areas for our clients in terms of liquidity solutions, more bespoke investment strategies, continuation vehicles, private IPOs, which we are working on in Nord, and GP-led secondaries. Next slide, please. 2024 showed the strength of EKG's global platform with these two axes of being local with locals on the one hand and a thematic investment approach on the other hand. And even if GDP growth in Europe has been slower than the rest of the world, our companies and assets here are performing quite well. So our approach has enabled us to invest in long-term themes, outpacing GDP, such as health and well-being, the energy transition, education, And actually around 90% of our portfolio companies in Europe expect a double digit EBITDA growth over the next year. There's a lot of discussion these days about European competitiveness. We agree with that. We are also engaging with all the stakeholders around those questions. But in the meantime, what's interesting is that this means that EQT can find global leaders in Europe at more attractive valuations than in other regions, particularly the US. And therefore, we've been able to buy companies and take them private, like DECRA Animal Health. So there's some silver lining in these questions. Now, one third of our invested capital is in North America. And the sentiment there, as we all know, is quite strong for the coming period. And we also have solid performance in Asia. For example, our India team has excellent deal flow. That's our largest program in Asia, about 30% of the private equity fund in Asia. And also value creation is very strong. Our Japan team is also very active with plenty of new deals, and we've strengthened our team there with the addition of Tasuku Kubo-Bara, who will be leading our infra efforts in Japan. after a long career of heading up McKinsey in the country. Now, across America and Asia, three quarters of our portfolio companies project double-digit EBITDA growth there in 2025. Looking across to the next slide, you'll see the value uplift in key funds in 2024 was 18%, with Q4 being our strongest quarter in three years. And this is driven by several factors, healthy underlying performance, as you heard, with solid trends on sales and EBITDA, exits or exit processes with good valuation indications, and also reference multiples being more supportive in our sectors. Furthermore, now five of our 10 key funds are expected to perform above plan. And we just upgraded our expectations for BPA8 to perform above plan. Again, back to the strong performance in Asia. And a number of companies in that portfolio are actually performing ahead of the underwriting. And we've already had a first liquidity event, the IPO of Sigility in India, which is actually up more than 50% since listing. Excuse me. So next slide. So of the more than 30 exit actions last year, we've executed a number of large exits with solid returns for both our clients and our funds and also new investors in those stocks. And this has been a quite important focus for us as we own a number of leaders in industries across the world. And I have a couple of examples for you. First, Golderma, that's now generated a 3.7 times return for our clients at the current market value, with a more than $8 billion capital gain for our co-investors, and a more than 100% gain for the IPO investors in the company. performing very, very well in the Swiss Stock Exchange. Then we have Nord Anglia. That's grown from six to more than 80 schools since 2008. It's the biggest private education company in the world. And we're going to continue to invest in that company and participate in the value creation journey along with a number of co-investors in a $15 billion transaction. And there we're also working to create this private IPO concept that we've talked about. And finally, Edge Connects, I mentioned earlier, this has grown into one of the largest data center businesses globally. It now has a high double-digit billion-dollar valuation. And we recently brought in a minority investor and keep investing in growth globally in that exciting sector. So with those words, I'll hand over to Gustav, who is going to give some more color on fundraising.

Thank you, Chris. Good to see everyone. 2024 was a continued tough fundraising year and fundraising timelines remained extended. We do not expect any significant improvement in the overall fundraising market during 2025. And our expectation is that it will take until 2027 before we are back at the same fundraising levels as we saw in 2021. However, as Chris stated, we continue to see that large managers like EQT are gaining market shares, and hence we expect to outgrow the overall fundraising market. For EQT, 2024 marked a year of successful final closes. EQT 10 was closed, being the largest private equity fund globally to complete during 2024. We also concluded the first generation fundraisings of active core infra at close to 3 billion euros, BPA mid-market growth above hard cap at 1.5 billion dollar and equity future at 3 billion euros. All of these important scale levers for us as when we come to the next fund generation. During the quarter, we continue to make progress on infrastructure 6, going from 16.9 to 18.1 billion euros. And we expect to reach the target fund size in the final close by the end of the first quarter. With the launch of BPA 9, we have entered into our next fundraising cycle, where we expect to launch fundraisings equal to at least 100 billion euros. For BPA 9, fundraising is progressing ahead of our expectations. We expect the fund to be activated during the first half of this year, and we expect to approach the target fund size at the first close, which will also take place during the first half of this year. Regarding EQT 11 and Infrastructure 7, the communication is the same as it was in the Q3 presentation. We expect EQT 11 to be activated in early 2026, and infrastructure 6 to be activated around mid-year 2026. As communicated before, this is not exact science, but we do not expect it to be earlier. However, note that the fundraising for both funds will likely be initiated earlier. Next slide, please. On the private wealth side, we continue to make progress on building out our platform. First of all, with great people, the foundation. Today, we have more than 100 people across sales, operations, product development and branding. Secondly, by creating partnerships globally, where we can use our strong banking relationships to get a seat at the table. A table which will be much more concentrated than on the institutional side. Again, benefiting large managers. And lastly, by creating well-performing vehicles suitable for private individuals, where we can use our broad platform to create diversified exposures, which very few competitors can replicate. For EQT Nexus, we've also started to see the scalability. with Q4 being the strongest quarter for inflow so far, and up approximately 50% compared to the average of the other nine months in 2024. The NAV for Ikti Nexus is now around a billion euros, and we're expecting a number of large, both regional and global distributors, to onboard the fund in the first half of this year. On the product development side, we're expecting to launch EQT Nexus infrastructure focused in Europe and Asia, and then move to the US with the launch of two additional vehicles, one for private equity and one for infrastructure. More to come on these in our upcoming reports. And with that, I will hand over to Olof. Next slide, please.