Brookfield Business Corporation

Welcome to the Brookfield Business Partners third quarter 2024 results conference call and webcast. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, simply press star 11 on your touchtone phone. Now, I would like to turn the conference over to Alan Fleming, head of investor relations. Please go ahead, Mr. Fleming.

Thank you, Operator, and good morning. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that in responding to questions and talking about our growth initiatives and our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I encourage you to review our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the U.S., which are both available on our website. We'll begin the call today with a business update from Anuj Ranjan, our chief executive officer. Anuj will then turn the call over to Adrian Letts, head of our business operations team, to provide an update on a few of our strategic initiatives. We'll end the call with Jaspreet Del, our chief financial officer, who will review our financial performance for the quarter. After we finish our prepared remarks, the team will then be available to take your questions. And with that, I'd now like to pass the call over to Anuj.

Thanks Alan and good morning everybody. Thank you for joining us on the call today. We had a good quarter and we're pleased with the progress that we're making across our business. Our financial results this quarter were very strong with adjusted EBITDA increasing to $844 million. This includes a significant value of credits that Clarios is entitled to receive under the Inflation Reduction Act, which is focused on enhancing domestic supply chain and promoting critical manufacturing in the United States. This gives us the ability to create an even stronger business in the U.S. and look for additional growth opportunities for the company. We've also been busy setting the stage for the continued growth of our business. We closed our acquisition of Network International, which we plan to combine with our existing operation, Magnati, to create the market-leading digital payments business in the region. Adrian will speak more about this shortly. Meanwhile, on the capital recycling front, we generated more than $350 million of proceeds from distributions and monetizations, including the recently announced sale of a significant portion of Altera. We are also very encouraged by the progress we are making on our monetization plans at Clarios and should be able to provide a further update soon. Stepping back, since launching BBU, we've invested about $9 billion alongside Brookfield's private equity business to acquire high-quality, mission-critical, and market-leading businesses. Most of these are great compounders of value in their own right and we're making them even better as we execute our improvement plans, leveraging our private equity playbook, which has been developed and honed over the past 25 years. By selling at the right time, we can realize strong returns and reinvest the capital to continue compounding value. We've had great success doing this as a public company, realizing over $6 billion of proceeds from the sale of 20 businesses, delivering a three times multiple of our capital and generating an IRR of approximately 30%. This is an exceptional composite track record, and we're only just getting started. Half of the businesses we own today were acquired over just the last three years, which means there's still a lot of runway to go as we execute our improvement plans. Most of these operations are larger scale and higher quality than the businesses we've sold, which means that the distributions should be larger and the proceeds that will come back to us in the future when we sell these businesses will be even greater. While our trading price has increased nearly 70% since this time last year, our shares are still trading at a wide discount to intrinsic value. As rates continue to come down, our cash flows will grow, transaction activity will return, and investors should resume valuing our units on a fundamental basis. All of this is good for our business and should set the stage for further improvement in our trading performance as we continue to focus on compounding value for our shareholders. Before I pass the call over to Adrienne, I wanted to thank all of you who were able to join us in September at our annual Investor Day. It was great to see so many familiar faces in the room, and for anyone who was not able to join us, the webcast materials are available on our website. And with that, I will now turn the call over to Adrienne.