Bruce Flatt
Analyst · TD Securities. Please go ahead
Thanks, Brian, and good morning everyone. As Brian noted assets under management and fees associated with them continue to grow at a rapid pace. Most of our operations performed well and we continue to find ways to invest capital, despite a competitive environment. We put that down to largely our three main competitive strengths which are size, global presence, and our operating platforms. Fund raising in both private and public markets for real assets remain strong as institutional funds continue to allocate greater amounts of capital to our sectors and with interest rates still very low this should continue for the foreseeable future. As a number of you know, we held our 13th Annual Investor Day in New York this quarter. For those not able to attend the presentation materials and transcripts are on our website. We believe they provide a good summary of our business plan. So we encourage to read them to understand where we're going with the business. We covered overall Brookfield and each of the four partnerships that trade on the stock market. And our short story is that we are now benefiting from the work over the last 20 years of building up our institutional relationships. These investors that we built the relationships with are allocating more capital now to real assets because of a few factors the first one being low volatility, the second being strong returns compared to alternatives, and the third being yield and upside from the assets that we purchase for them. We expect the percentages of overall capital pools to continue to increase substantially from today's level and the size of capital institutional funds is growing and the compounding effect of both will be significant on allocations to real assets. As a result of that if we achieve our plans over the next five years we should double the size of our business by most metrics which should result in significant growth and intrinsic value of a BAM share. The keys to doing this are successfully looking after all of our fund investors performing for them and growing each of our listed partnerships both in size and in returns. And in our presentations we laid out the goals for each of these businesses and I'll just mention a couple of things on each. In our property partnership, Brookfield Property Partners were focused on bringing to completion, several major development projects, investing our opportunistic capital that we have available, and capitalizing on the retail property changes occurring in the United States. In Brookfield infrastructure we're building out each of our businesses that we've built over the last 10 years and we see -- what we see today significant opportunity in the global telecom tower build out and growth in India coming from both population growth more broadly, but more specifically from an under financed corporate sector. In renewable partners, we're one of the few well-financed renewable companies amid what we see as once in a generation shift over the next 25 years of the energy stack in most countries to renewables. Lastly, our business partners' launch has been successful and we're positioned now to make long-term focused decisions because of our permanent capital and the ability to make long-term commitment to both partners and counterparties. These days the most asked question to us as a management group by investors is how do we put the capital to work and why are we able to acquire certain assets in an otherwise competitive environment? I will highlight our TerraForm investment as it is a great example of why we earn the returns we earn and what differentiates some of the things that we do. Bottom-line it's quite a simplistic story; it's just a lot of hard work. In this situation, we followed SunEdison and its affiliates for many years, as we've participated in the same markets in many cases competed for the same assets. In 2015, SunEdison encountered serious financial issues. We assess the situation and considered participating in the organization by buying debt and eventually converting it to equity, but based on our knowledge of the asset values and the trading values of the debt, we didn't think it was prudent at that time. We continue to follow the bankruptcy and eventually when SunEdison filed TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global are their two Yieldco's traded down substantially and we knew they had great assets and after the filing of SunEdison, the shares came into a range where we finally saw value. At that point, we decided to buy common shares, eventually making proposals to the boards of both companies and their creditors and ultimately we were chosen to sponsor a recapitalization. All of this led us to recently conclude the purchase of 51% of TerraForm Power and we will act as its new sponsor and we expect to shortly close the acquisition of 100% of TerraForm Global, which in aggregate the two transactions will expand our renewable operations by 3,600 megawatts with an investment on our part of about $1.4 billion. In summary, why did this happen? First, we had $1.4 billion to invest, not too many have that amount of capital in a concentrated investment. Second, we understood the business very well as we owned the same type of assets that they owned, not many others have that. Third, we have flexible capital to lock-up toehold positions; many don't have the flexibility in their fund or their capital to do that. Fourth, we could be flexible as to buying a 100% of a company or 50% that was very important here and maybe was one of the most important things in the transaction, most can't do that. Fifth, we have the people to run the business from an operations perspective, few have that. And last, we negotiated for two years with counterparty to complete this transaction, not too many can afford that patience. Bottom-line our strength in competing for transactions is usually one or all of scale, capital, time, scope, patience, or operating skills. In this case, it was virtually all six of them. So with that, operator I conclude my remarks and I'll turn it over to you and we'll take questions if there are any.