ONEX Corporation

Welcome to ONIX's fourth quarter and full year 2021 conference call and webcast. During the presentation, all participants will be in listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question and answer session with pre-qualified analysts. At that time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If any time during the conference you need to reach the operator, please press star, then zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Jill Hamanuk, Managing Director, Shareholder Relations and Communications at Onyx. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. We're broadcasting this call on our website. Hosting the call today are Jerry Schwartz, our founder and CEO, Paul Blanc, Onyx's President and Head of Onyx Partners, and Chris Govan, our Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we issued our fourth quarter and full year 2021 press release, MD&A, and consolidated financial statements, which are available on the shareholder section of our website and have also been filed on CDAR. Our supplemental information package is also available on our website. As a reminder, all references to dollar amounts on this call are in U.S., unless otherwise stated. I must also point everyone to our webcast presentation for our usual disclaimer and cautionary factors relating to any forward-looking statements contained in today's presentation and remarks. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Jerry.

Thanks, Jill. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. Next month marks 35 years, hard to believe, since our IPO on the Toronto Stock Exchange. When I look back on it, what a time it was. At that point in time, nobody knew what private equity... There was not even a phrase, private equity. And nobody knew what the letters LBO stood for. So most of the roadshow was spent just explaining to people what an LBO was and what kinds of things we'd do. It was really interesting because the... underwriters had initially thought they would raise $75 million of pure common stock for us. In the end, they closed on $246 million, which I think was the largest equity offering at that point in time. Anyhow, that's 35 years ago. In our prospectus for that document, for that offering, we described ourselves as an entrepreneurial investment company with a well-defined acquisition philosophy, seeking value creation opportunities, and always keeping a strong focus on alignment and relationships. And I'm really proud of the company we've built and our ability to stay true to our core values. Today, quite differently, we offer multiple investing strategies to a global base of investors including institutional and high net worth clients. So I look back on this particular past year, 2021, and I see it was a good year for Onyx. We invested wisely, we continued to strengthen our team, and we grew our fee generating assets. This momentum helped deliver solid financial performance. Bobby and Chris will provide more detail shortly about that financial performance, but I'd like to touch on some of the highlights of the year. Our investing capital per share, sometimes referred to as net asset value per share, increased by 24%, which is the highest annual increase in our history. In private equity, it was an active year for both realizations at around $3.25 billion and deployments at around $3 billion. Our portfolio companies grew organically and through our value creation levers. At Onyx Credit, we continued to strengthen that platform. Last year, we integrated Onyx Falcon, which we've owned for a little over a year now, and happily so, and also merged our credit and Gluskin Chef investment teams. We now offer investors a pretty full spectrum of private credit public credit, and public equity investing opportunities. Within our wealth management platform, strong client interest for our private strategies persists. At year end, our wealth management clients had more than $1.3 billion allocated to these private strategies. Earlier this year, we announced our new head of Glasgow Chef, I'm very happy to tell you, Dave Kelly, who came to us from a long career at the Toronto Dominion Bank, who brings valuable operational expertise to this business. Looking ahead, we're excited by the opportunities to grow and expand. We've laid out our strategic plan at Investor Day, and we think we're well-positioned to achieve our long-term goals. We have a strong foundation and a terrific bench of talent at Onyx. Our One Onyx culture is driving collaboration across our organization as we leverage our expertise and relationships. As always, we remain focused on continuing to generate good returns for all our stakeholders. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Bobby for more on the quarter. Bobby?