Brookfield Corporation

Hello, and welcome to the Brookfield Corporation first quarter 2024 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. I would now like to hand the conference call over to our first speaker, Ms. Angela Yulo, vice president. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning. Welcome to Brookfield Corporation's first quarter 2024 conference call. On the call today are Bruce Flatt, our Chief Executive Officer, Nick Goodman, President of Brookfield Corporation, and Sachin Shah, Chief Executive Officer of our Wealth Solutions business. Bruce will start off by giving a business update, followed by Nick, who will discuss our financial and operating results for the quarter. And finally, Sachin will provide an update and the outlook for our Wealth Solutions business. After our formal comments, we'll turn the call over to the operator and take analyst questions. In order to accommodate all those who want to ask questions, we ask that you refrain from asking more than two questions. I'd like to remind you that in today's comments, including in responding to questions and in discussing new initiatives in our financial and operating performance, we may make forward-looking statements, including forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities law. These statements reflect predictions of future events and trends and do not relate to historic events. They are subject to known and unknown risks and future events and results may differ materially from such statements. For further information on these risks and their potential impacts on our company, please see our filings with the securities regulators in Canada and the US, and the information available on our website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce.

Thank you, Angela, and welcome to everyone on the call. We generated strong financial results in the first quarter with distributable earnings before realizations of $1 billion for the quarter and $4.3 billion for the last 12 months. This represented an increase compared to last year of 10%. The outlook remains strong with each of our underlying businesses continuing to execute their respective business plans, driving organic earnings growth supplemented by strategic acquisitions. Of note, our wealth solutions business reached a significant milestone through its recent acquisition of American Equity Life, or AEL. Our asset management business announced an important investment in Castle Lake, further enhancing our asset-backed lending capabilities. And our operating businesses continued to deliver resilient earnings backed by strong demand for their high-quality assets. Sachin Shah, the CEO of our Wealth Solutions business, is with us today and will spend more time on the AEL transaction in his remarks. Since the start of the year, we repurchased over $700 million of our shares at excellent prices, and we continue to allocate capital to share repurchases, enhancing the value of each of your remaining shares. Shifting briefly to the markets, The macro environment continues to normalize with interest rates expected to have peaked and inflation beginning to cool. Liquidity has returned to capital markets. Most major economies in the world are performing better than anticipated and risk appetite has come back to most markets. With conditions less restrictive, it appears that we are in a more stable and constructive market than in the past couple of years. With this backdrop, transaction volume is picking up, in particular for high quality businesses and assets of the type that we own. This enabled us to advance a number of monetization initiatives, which Nick will touch on in his remarks. At the same time, though, we anticipate seeing investment opportunities from companies with balance sheets and capital structures that cannot withstand this more normalized rate environment. With a record $150 billion of capital to deploy, this should be an excellent period for us also to invest. Turning to the performance of our business today, our advantage of scale, our global platform, and our operating capabilities combined with the synergies across our Brookfield ecosystem make our franchise stronger and more resilient than it has ever been. The compounding of all of these factors enables us to achieve strong and stable financial returns throughout market changes, and we've always found that this is the safest way for long-term wealth. In terms of generating and earning returns, we offer a few comments on the many ways to make a good return for stakeholders. As we own and build the backbone of the global economy, There generally are three main drivers of performance for private investors like us. The first is margin expansion and growing a business. In other words, earning more by running a business well. The second is multiple expansion. For instance, convincing someone of the long-term benefits and having built the business, getting a higher multiple than you paid for an income stream. And lastly, adding more financial leverage, which amplifies returns by having the excess return earned on a smaller amount of equity. Most of the returns on our investments come from managing our businesses well and growing the underlying cash flows. In addition, we have found that the safest way to earn good returns is through finding businesses that can continuously deploy capital in a more productive way, grow their operations, and also operate in a cost-disciplined fashion, therefore expanding margins. As the era of free money diminishes, running businesses better through operating capabilities is becoming increasingly relevant to differentiating reasonable returns from excellent returns. This drives our approach to continuously growing our operating teams and assisting our underlying businesses to be better and improve. In summary, we continue to execute on our business plans and growth initiatives, differentiating ourselves through our significant amount of deployable capital, global scale, and the deep operating expertise I just mentioned. As always, we remain focused on generating strong returns and compounding wealth over the long term for shareholders. Thank you as always for your continued support and interest in Brookfield. And with those comments, I'll turn the call over to Nick.