Brookfield Business Corporation

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 ask a question, simply press star 1-1 on your touchtone phone. Now I'd 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 Anuj Ranjan, our Chief Executive Officer, who will provide an update on our strategic initiatives. Anuj will then turn the call over to Adrian Letts, Head of our Business Operations Team, to share an update on the global operating environment. Jaspreet Dhal, our Chief Financial Officer, will then discuss our financial results for the quarter. After we finish our prepared remarks, the team will be on and available to take your questions. With that, I'd like to now pass the call over to Anuj.

Thanks, Alan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on the call today. We had a great quarter. Our business continues to compound value, and six months into the year, our overall per unit value is higher. Over the past few months, we realized more than $800 million from asset sales and distributions, and invested $300 million to acquire two market-leading businesses. We continue to buy back under our repurchase program, which has returned nearly $160 million to our owners at the start of the year. We also generated strong financial results with adjusted EBITDA, increasing to $591 million, supported by resilient margins and improved performance of our existing operations. As our business continues to scale, finding new ways to surface value will provide us flexibility to execute our playbook, and the growth of the secondaries market has become one of the options at our disposal. In simple terms, secondaries are the sale or transfer of a private investment from one investor to another, often at a 10% or more discount in that asset value as a way for an existing investor to get liquidity. If you think about BBU, it's really just a large private equity secondary, which is publicly listed and should trade at a much narrower discount than it does. This should prove itself out as we continue to surface value in accretive ways, including the secondary sale of interest in our businesses at values that are accretive to our trading price. To that point last month, we sold a portion of our interest in three of our businesses to seed a new Evergreen fund managed by Brookfield. In exchange, we took back units of the new fund that have an initial redemption value of $690 million, which represents an aggregate .6% discount to the NAV of the interest that we sold. At these values, the transaction is highly accretive to the market value of BBU. As the units are redeemed, the cash will provide us added flexibility to accelerate buybacks, reinvest in growth, and reduce debt, all of which will increase the per unit and share value of our business. We've also been putting capital to work. Earlier this week, we agreed to privatize First National Financial Corporation, a leading Canadian residential and multifamily mortgage lender. First National is an essential service provider to the Canadian housing market, serving a critical role across the mortgage life cycle from underwriting and origination to funding, distribution, servicing, and loan renewal. Its highly resilient earnings and strong cash flows are supported by the fees and income it earns on large and growing base of mortgages at its services. Alongside our partners, we see opportunities to upgrade its systems, streamline operations, and strengthen its service model in a private setting which should enhance its already strong track record of returns and cash flows. BBU's share of the equity investment is expected to be about $145 million. Stepping back, we've made great progress since the start of the year, and the reasons to own BBU have arguably never been clearer. First, we trade at a material discount to the private market value of our assets. Second, those assets are mission critical providers of products and services which generate strong cash flow across economic cycles. And lastly, every dollar that is recycled and redeployed is done so by the same Brookfield team which has generated tremendous returns on capital for decades. With that, I'll now pass the call over to Adrian Letts, our global head of business operations, to provide an update on the operating environment.