Greetings, and welcome to the DigitalBridge Group Fourth Quarter and Year-End Earnings Call 2024. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Severin White. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to DigitalBridge's fourth quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Speaking on the call today from the company is Marc Ganzi, our CEO, and Tom Mayrhofer, our CFO. I'll quickly cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our business operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. All information discussed on this call is as of today February 20, 2025, and DigitalBridge does not intend and undertakes no duty to update it for future events or circumstances. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent Form 10-K to be filed with the SEC for the year ending December 31, 2024. With that, let's get started. I'll turn the call over to Marc Ganzi, our CEO. Marc?

Thanks, Severin. Let's start with our business update and put performance in the fourth quarter and over the course of 2024 into proper perspective. There are three core headlines that I want to talk to you about today: fundraising, how we're investing, and how we intend to scale the business. Let's start with fundraising. This is the key first headline. We had record fundraising of $9 billion in 2024. That includes $4.8 billion in the fourth quarter, putting us 28% ahead of our $7 billion annual target and marking a very strong finish to the year. Next, we outlined our objectives for 2024. I highlighted we had $15 billion of CapEx we were scheduled to deploy, principally into the data center sector. Here, we actually ended up putting to work around $16 billion in 2024 at the portfolio level. Framing that in proper perspective as an asset manager, our assets under management grew from $80 billion to $96 billion in a period of one year. This is over a 20% growth rate in terms of the assets and really showing proof positive that we're scaling the business. The last piece I want to highlight, which is essential to our investment thesis, and Tom will cover it in greater detail, is our ability to deliver strong financial performance with growing revenues and earnings. And look, I know this was a tough year in terms of our ability to deliver on those numbers in the second and third quarter, but I think in the fourth quarter, we put that to bed. Management fees grew over 20% this year and over 35% in the fourth quarter, while fee-related earnings grew over 30% in both the fourth quarter and over the course of 2024, with margins expanding in a trend that we expect to…

Thanks, Marc, and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, this earnings presentation is available within the Shareholders section of our website. Today, I'll start with our financial highlights for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, followed by our non-GAAP metrics and balance sheet profile, and we'll finish by covering our outlook for 2025. Starting with fee revenues, we recorded $102 million of fee revenue in the fourth quarter, which resulted in full year fees of $330 million, an increase year-over-year of 37% for the fourth quarter and 23% for the full year. This was driven by capital raised in our flagship strategy and, to a lesser extent, a particularly strong year in our liquid funds. The increased revenue generated fee-related earnings of $35 million in the fourth quarter and $107 million for the full year 2024, increases of over 30% for both periods. As of December 31st, our fee earning equity under management stood at $35.5 billion, an increase of 8% compared to the prior year. Additionally, we have $4.5 billion of capital that will begin adding to FEEUM in 2025 as the fees on that capital are activated. We ended the year on a particularly strong note as far as capital formation, raising $4.8 billion of new capital in the fourth quarter, bringing us to $9 billion of capital raised for the year. We continue to maintain substantial liquidity with $140 million of corporate cash and total liquidity of $440 million, including our undrawn corporate revolver. Over the course of the year, we funded $88 million towards our GP commitments, and as discussed in prior quarters, eliminated $78 million senior notes in the first half of the year. Turning to the next page. As mentioned, we had a particularly strong close to the year from a capital raising…

Thanks, Tom. Let's look ahead to our 2025 roadmap now and cover what I like to say the key three things that really matter. This may sound a bit like a broken record, but first, it's fundraising, where we've set out a net target to grow our fee-earning AUM to over $40 billion over the course of the year. Our fee revenue and earnings growth are more closely correlated to our active FEEUM over the period, so it's a better proxy for our financial performance. And look, this year, we're going to make sure that that cadence is in-line with our fundraising that tracks for FRE and that it's predictable and it's easy for you, our investors, to understand and that you can bank on us in terms of being able to predict that earnings potential and that earnings growth throughout the year. Taking FEEUM from $35.5 billion to over $40 billion over the course of the year will involve finishing fundraising for our third flagship and second credit strategies. At the same time, we'll be launching two new investment products and continuing to build on our initial success in tapping the private wealth channel where Andrew Cox has done a great job for us. When it comes to investing, in addition to building out cloud and AI training data centers, we're starting to see customers look ahead and around the corner and prepare for the next phase of AI, inference, where location matters and performance across the entire network matters. I'm going to talk a little bit more about this in a few pages. Finally, as I said earlier today, continue to scale our platform DigitalBridge. Tom just walked you through our guidance and I believe we're in a great position to continue to deliver the double-digit earnings growth…

So, we will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] First question comes from Michael Elias with TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Two from me. First, the color you guys provided on value creation per megawatt and gigawatt was really helpful. And just for what it's worth, I do think it's a bit conservative. But just building on that point, 2024 was a record leasing year for the data center industry. As we look at that your qualified demand pipeline across your data center platform entering 2025, just want to get a sense for how that compares to the pipeline you had this time last year. And then, the second question for you is, Marc, if I ask you to put your prognostication hat on, how do you see hyperscale data center development yields and pricing evolving in 2025? Thanks.

Yeah, sure. Good morning, Michael, and thank you. Those are two really thoughtful questions. Let's first talk about leasing pipelines. And again, Michael, I want to draw your attention not just to data centers. I think people are missing the joke completely. You have to look at towers, you have to look at small cell infrastructure, you have to look at fiber, and you have to look at data centers. So, I'll address your first point, which is just on data center pipelines. Our pipeline is up year-over-year. So, if you look back last year in terms of what was in the queue, in terms of total megawatts, which now we actually translate to gigawatts, we had a leasing pipeline last year across our seven platforms of just a little over 5 gigawatts of total interest in our portfolio. We ultimately translate that today to just over 6.2 gigawatts of new leasing proposals. So, if you contrast this year versus last year, the pipeline, not the actual leasing results are up year-over-year, about 22% in terms of pipeline. But what I find actually really interesting is that across the globe in terms of towers, our pipelines are up materially, and most importantly, the real surprise is fiber. Taking a look at our enterprise fiber businesses, Michael, those pipelines are up over 50% year-over-year, largely fueled by dark fiber transport routes, metro rings, and most importantly, data center connectivity. So, the entire ecosystem is performing. It's not just about data centers. We're going to keep pounding that into people's heads this year because we are the investor that looks at the entire ecosystem. We're not just following a trend. Again, 30 years of experience, 30 years of delivering returns. We're not that fussed about AI or DeepSeek. It's just another generational tectonic shift that we're there and we're building infrastructure for our customers and our partners. So, never get too high on the highs, never get too low on the lows. But our leasing pipeline across the globe is up 22% year-over-year in terms of activity and new customer applications. Your second question, Michael, again, I think was -- go ahead.

Around pricing and development yield, what you expect for the year?

Yeah, look, it's really interesting, in some locations, where we have an advantage, which is we have the power and we have the permits and we have the land and we already have an existing campus where we're bolting on and we can deliver for a customer inside of an 18-month framework, we can kind of set our own price. If it's a de novo greenfield and it's in the middle of Texas somewhere, and there's five different options for the customer for choose -- to choose from, we're probably not the right partner for you. Let me frame that correctly. There's a lot of tourists playing in data center land now, and just because they have land and power, they believe they're in the data center business. We've been building strategic campuses with incredible reliability, redundancy, power, cooling, and connectivity. These are things that take a long time to develop that muscle memory in-house. And again, having started down that path over 10 years ago, we feel incredibly well prepared to work with our customers and deliver the right workloads. In addition to that, some of our companies have a real distinct advantage around not only power, but having the right sources of power, having microgrids to control the flow of that power, and also, more importantly, having the right security. When a customer is looking to develop a private cloud environment where they need 100% reliability, they turn to us and switch. So, having different distinct platforms like DataBank that delivers edge compute in secondary markets where we can be incredibly surgical, our relationship with our customers, Michael, we try to build data centers that create the right investment outcomes. And that's not accidental, it takes time. So, for our portfolio, we have not seen development yields retreat.…

Very helpful color. Thank you very much, Marc.

Thanks, Michael.

Next question, Jade Rahmani with KBW. Please go ahead.

[Technical Difficulty] Funds one and two are 2018 and 2020 vintage. Do you expect most exits and monetizations to take place this year and next?

Hey, good morning, Jade. How are you? So, right now, Jade, we're super focused on delivering DPI on InfraBridge 1 and our first flagship. So, InfraBridge 1 is busy winding down that portfolio. We've got exits that are in flight there. So, we're excited about returning capital back to our InfraBridge platform. And then, of course, in Fund 1, we've also begun the process of creating DPI there and we intend to deliver more DPI across the first fund. I would say our average hold, Jade, tends to be between five and nine years. I think the vintage on Fund 2, even though we exited Vantage Towers quite early because we bought the Deutsche Telekom portfolio, we're still assessing whether we're going to exit anything in Fund 2. There are some rumors in the marketplace about two of our assets in Fund 2 being up for sale. I can't really speak to that. But what I will say, Jade, is we're always an astute seller. When we can achieve an outcome that is somewhere at a 20% to 40% premium to our NAV, that's where we become a very interested seller. I would say the vintage on 2018 is moving into a zone where it would be logical to assume that we'll begin to exit some of those positions. I think you saw a press release around Vantage EMEA, which is our European data center platform. We brought in some new partners there in AusSuper and GIC. We continued to put capital into our European Vantage yieldco, which allows us to sell assets from the devco to the yieldco, creating more DPI for our investors. So, that was one example, Jade, where we did deliver a really great outcome for Fund 1 investors. And we have a couple of other assets in Fund 1 that are currently, in what I would call strategic review, which means it could be held for disposition, it could be sold to a strategic, it could move into a continuation fund. There's a variety of levers that we can pull to create liquidity for our investors. I think one thing I would tell you, Jade, is in '23 and '24, we had eight different DPI outcomes for our investors. We returned over $9 billion of liquidity back to our LPs. I know sometimes in the asset management space, Jade, that's not super popular as we have to give up management fees, but I've always made it incredibly clear, for us to go out and continue to raise the kind of capital we raised last year, $9 billion, $2 billion ahead of what we told you we were going to do, you've got to deliver DPI. And so, this year there'll be more of that. We'll deliver DPI. We absolutely anticipate delivering some carried interest for our shareholders and we do think the environment is quite ripe for DigitalBridge to return capital, create the right returns, and most importantly, return carried interest to our public shareholders.

Looking at DigitalBridge's own capital allocation, can you talk to how much preferred has been repurchased so far this year and what do you expect? Because although the cost of the preferred isn't too bad in terms of a cost of capital, it has a big outsized impact on EPS, around $0.30 a share, therefore, buying back preferred is an accretive use. And do you expect to do much of that this year?

Yeah, thanks, Jade. No, we did not purchase any of the preferreds last year as they traded back up into par. We didn't really see a total return or an absolute return that was comparable to some of the things that we were doing on the balance sheet. I mean, from my perspective, if you take a look at our third fund and we look at where the returns are in the third fund, they're about 300 basis points to 400 basis points wide of Fund 1 and Fund 2. And when you're getting sort of high teens types returns in your funds and you look at the buybacks on the prefs being kind of a 7%, 8% trade, I view that as actually not the highest and best use of our balance sheet today. We have been very opportunistic in the past, buying back our preferreds. As you know, Jade, interest rates moved away from us, where the prefs do seem like a reasonably low cost of capital, but as interest rates are now coming down and we're seeing the securitization marketplace return, again, using the Zayo Fiber transaction as a proxy, Jade, which went all the way down to single B, you could really see that total instrument priced just around 6%. So, we're looking at that very carefully. Tom and I are spending a lot of time looking at our existing securitization stack. I would say we'll be active in that marketplace this year. We've gone on to raise a lot more capital. We have a much bigger FEEUM base for the agencies to take a look at. And so, if there's the opportunity to go raise debt capital, sub 7%, which we think we can do, there's a great opportunity to continue to take down the prefs over time. I agree with your proposition that $0.30 is a significant leakage, but if interest rates can reign in and we can see a path to raising capital back in that 5% zone, I think you're going to see us be very opportunistic. I don't know, Tom, if you want to add anything to that, but I think you and I are talking a lot about it.

Yeah, no, I agree with everything Marc said. I think the preferreds on their face are relatively attractive securities for us. They have little in the way of covenants or no covenants, no maturity, we are sensitive to the absolute magnitude of them. So that's the only thing I'd add is, we are sensitive to the absolute magnitude of the preferreds outstanding, but on an individual basis, I think the structure is relatively favorable for us.

Thanks, Jade. Any other questions, Jade?

Yeah, if I could ask one more because I get a lot of questions on this, which is the fund performance slide. Are those returns in-line with your targets, or do you expect any improvement with realizations?

Yeah. So, we've had two quarters where the absolute IRR, Jade, has gone down a little bit. We actually, since Tom has taken over, we've put in a new framework for how we do our quarterly valuations, which I'm really proud of. A lot of transparency, a lot of independence in those marks, and a new framework that's consistent with what the SEC expects of us. So that did drag our returns back a little bit over the summer, which impacted the Q3. We had a little more of that come through in Q4. But I think what I would tell you is, we get paid on MOIC. Jade, it's really important to understand that we don't get paid on IRR. And actually, in this quarter, our MOIC multiple went up across the funds and so that means carried interest is increasing over time. And I think you're going to see that impact this year more pronounced as many of our portfolio companies had a great year. We now are getting to see the full impact of those financials. And as I said before, the performance at the portfolio company level in '24 was outstanding. So, we had record leasing in towers. We had record leasing in fiber. I think I said that to Michael earlier. The fiber business has really come back. You're going to see, I think, a real uptick in some of those businesses in our marks in Q1. And then, of course, the data center businesses are all performing at a really, really high level. Businesses like Scala and Switch and DataBank were real standouts for us in 2024. So, I do anticipate that the portfolio will continue to perform really well. It is in-line with where the fund models are predicted they would be. And…

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jade.

Next question, Ric Prentiss with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning, everybody.

Good morning, Ric.

Hey, couple questions for you. I want to start on fundraising, Marc, that was, of your three bullets, fundraising, invest, and scale, always the number one there. When we think about the DPI, you've talked about it a couple times how important it is. You mentioned just the previous question $9 billion returned over '23, '24 combined. How much is baked into the '25-ending FEEUM as far as DPI? Is it a similar level to the $4.5 billion that we saw in '24, or is it an acceleration, given what you said on Flagship 1 and InfraBridge 2 or InfraBridge 1? How much DPI are we thinking is baked into the '25 ballpark?

So, thanks, Ric. It's a really good question, and you're very astute. So, the way we think about it is just in terms of total FEEUM. What we did in 2024 was about $36 billion. We're guiding the Street to $40 billion-plus for 2025. And that assumes a little bit of what I call chutes and ladders, right? Everyone has played that game before. So, the ladder up is fundraising and the chute is DPI. And so, we are telegraphing to the Street that obviously we want to go grow our revenue base and I think we're going to do a good job of doing that. But we're also telegraphing to you as Jade pointed out very carefully, there's a couple of assets that are in play and we are anticipating, Ric, returning more DPI through the course of 2025. It's the natural progression of what we do. And also what that does is it frees up capital for investors who bring that capital back into, Ric, our new products. And we're super, super focused on that. So ultimately, we think we can form low side of the guide, kind of $5 billion to $6 billion of new capital, $1 billion to $2 billion in DPI, and that gets you sort of to a $4 billion net FEEUM number. That's our guidance. That's what we're putting out there. And obviously, given the lessons of last year, we're going to be pretty thoughtful, I guess is the word I want to use around guidance, and we want to make sure that we can deliver a quarter like this quarter where we beat your estimates, Ric. And that's kind of the cadence that Tom is trying to instill in this company and the discipline around the numbers and the discipline around the guidance. I don't know, Tom, if you want to add anything to that, but I think that's pretty straightforward.

Yeah, no, that's exactly it.

Under promise, over deliver is something we want to be able to count on. When you think of the longer-term guidance on that Slide 21, the Investor Day target for 2028 of $60 billion to $70 billion FEEUM, that implies an acceleration. Is that a thought that gross fundraising gets higher, DPI is less? How's the mix? And what leads to that kind of acceleration that if we do end FEEUM at $40 billion in '25, we could add another $20 billion to $30 billion over three years?

Yeah. Again, you're thinking about it the right way. We haven't spent a ton of time talking about new product launches, Ric. But look, this is something that our investors need to start really getting their minds wrapped around. We are a multi-strategy firm now. We are not a one-trick pony. Our credit business is performing exceptionally well. It took me four to five years with Dean and Mike and Josh Parrish and Chris Moon, and Horace, and the entire team to get that mechanism going. You're going to see a massive acceleration in our credit platform this year. We're seeing opportunities that are fantastic. Our returns and credit are actually better than our flagship funds, which is kind of a bit perverse in my mind. I never thought our credit business would outperform our flagship funds, but our credit product, Ric, is one of the best-performing credit products in the world. And our team is scaling, writing significant loans, generating massive SMAs and co-investments. You're going to be hearing a lot about credit in Q1 and Q2. We're in the right place. So, that took us a little while to get there. Our liquid portfolio led by one strategy by Bill Hughes and Alan Bezoza, that business is now incredibly profitable. They're raising money. Alan's creating great returns and that's going to generate more capital. Every quarter that team keeps bringing in more capital. Number three, our private wealth channel, led by Andrew Cox, we're really honored and privileged to get Andrew on our team. He was a top player, kind of fell into our lap, had moved to South Florida, was at KKR for many years, where he built the private wealth platform. I told you, Andrew, in his first year, outperformed almost 2x his budget. He's got…

That's very helpful. And I think you're right, I think the industry needs to kind of focus on your power bank, your megawatt, what your gigawatts, so maybe we can move that ball forward and trying to get people understanding exactly what's the valuable asset, what turns into monetization. The second question I've got, and I appreciate the time here, is you've mentioned obviously several times, we'll have to go do the count in the transcript, carried interest, carried interest, carried interest, we're going to see some of that in '25. Talked about moving from episodic to more steady. How do you do that? Is it just the longevity of the funds? Is it the interest? But I don't think any of the carried interest benefit is really in the stock price today. How do you move it from episodic to steady and then get it into the stock price?

Well, look, you said it correctly, we don't get credit for it. I mean, if you look at the sum of the parts of what DigitalBridge is today, just based on our run rate FRE for this quarter at [140] (ph), the implied multiple on our business is actually trading at a discount to our peer set. We actually think DigitalBridge is a better platform than other GPEs because we don't have funds that have a two-, three- or five-year duration, Ric. We have long-term perpetual capital vehicles. We have continuation funds. And our average infrastructure fund, Ric, as you know, is 11 to 13 years. So, the steadiness of our FRE and our cash flows is certainly a lot more durable than somebody that's just exposed to credit or private equity, which are shorter-term products. We've got to do a better job. Severin, myself, and Tom explaining to investors this year the durability of our cash flows and the duration of it. And so, that's really important, casting our firm as a steadier long-term set of cash flows. The balance sheet is really powerful. We're going to take that case to investors as well. What we did at DataBank this year was incredible. What we've been able to do at Vantage is incredible. The performance of our funds is strong. And so, we've used the balance sheet in an intelligent way. We don't get credit for our balance sheet, which is between $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion minimum based on last year's marks. So, as DataBank and Vantage and other assets begin to scale, the balance sheet grows. The last component of the sort of one, two, three on DigitalBridge is carried interest. And again, we don't get credit for it until we start taking the episodic nature out…

I think it's all a matter of the vintage and the kind of seasoning. We're -- I think as Marc mentioned a few minutes ago, Fund 1 is really now entering kind of prime vintage period for starting to exit. Fund 2 sort of had some -- we're kind of getting there, but in general, it's a matter of time and seasoning as we get over the next year or two to a point where we're regularly selling maybe not as many new companies as we're buying, but we're regularly selling a couple of assets a year.

That'd be great. And I'll echo Michael's comments. Slide 31 is great. So, thanks, guys. Appreciate all the color.

Thanks, Ric.

Next question, Richard Choe with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, I wanted to follow up on the sales and fundraising infrastructure. Can we get an update there?

I'm sorry, Richard, the what, sorry?

The fundraising and sales infrastructure that you outlined at Analyst Day?

Yeah, no, thank you. So, the global sales team today, Richard, is 38 in total. We've continued to invest in our salesforce, led by Kevin Smithen and his number two, Leslie Golden, both really great professionals with a lot of track record. We did add Andrew Cox in the private wealth channel. We anticipate adding at least two, if not four full-time employees to support Andrew as we scale our private wealth fundraising mechanism. But we run that platform just, Richard, on a global basis. We've got a team based in London. We've got a team that is based here in the US, in Boca, and in New York, and then we have a team, of course, in Asia, headquartered out of Singapore. So, we highlighted on Analyst Day, it was 28 full-time employees in 2024. Today, we're at 35 full-time employees in our fundraising team. We've continued to scale. We've added specialists in credit. Chris Falzon has been amazing in terms of raising capital for our credit team, Andrew Cox on Private Wealth. And I think what you see is, we look at it, Richard, in sort of two axes: one, geography; two, product set. But really having salespeople in market, in geographies where we can really go out and bring those products to the market. I would highlight our Asia team just by example. We've got a great team in Asia. We saw pronounced -- really, really pronounced performance in Asia this year in fundraising. We've got also a fantastic team in the Gulf and the GCC led by Sylvio Tabet. He's been fantastic. He's supported by two full-time people that do fundraising there in the Gulf out of Abu Dhabi. And really the Gulf and Asia were really standouts for us in terms of fundraising. But then, again, North America is our home market. We've got fantastic commitments out of our flagship front from US Pensions. We partnered up with CDPQ on Yondr, a huge co-investment from them. And these are great situations, great client relationships that are paying us fee and carry. And by having a bigger team with more geographic reach, Richard, we can really bring our multi-strat approach to the market, sit with LPs, really treat them as clients, and bring them those very tailored approaches that we talked about in our earnings call today. So, the team has gotten bigger, the performance has increased, our product set has increased, and our ability to have product specialists in the geographies that we think are the hot opportunities for fundraising has really proven out this year, and you're going to see that, Richard, on display in '25. We're expecting even better results from our team.

That makes a lot of sense. I guess, going back to an earlier comment, you're saying that, a lot of the data center growth from AI is actually captured mostly in data centers, but you're starting to see that a lot in fiber now. Can you talk a little bit -- we're obviously seeing it in fiber, but how that plays out over this year, maybe next year for small cells and towers and other edge infrastructure? Just because I think a lot of people are waiting for it and they just haven't seen it.

Yeah. Well, I think, look, across fiber, small cells, and towers, as I said, we saw pronounced pickups in the fourth quarter. And just looking at the data from January, Richard, particularly on towers, we actually had our best January of leasing in the domestic US market in the history of Alex Gellman and I being together for 31 years in towers, this was the best January he and I have ever seen. And I can't put my finger on it, but what I would say is, as generative AI moves to the mobile device, you're going to see a massive pickup in mobile data traffic. Some people, Richard, as you know, estimate a 10 times pickup in mobile data traffic. I don't entirely subscribe to that view. I think sort of three to five times feels more directionally correct. But as you know, with a finite amount of spectrum, Richard, you've got to engage in what's called frequency reuse. And the only way to do that is cell splitting and putting more macros online and eventually densifying between the gaps of that splitting with small cell infrastructure. So, we've seen a big pickup in macro leasing. We think that continues and that investment by the carriers was announced last week in the earnings of T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon, but it's not just there. We've seen pronounced CapEx expenditures in Europe at GD Towers in some of our European tower platforms. EdgePoint had a great year of leasing in Southeast Asia. ATP down in the Andean region had a record year, 18% organic growth there. And in Brazil, in Highline we also had double-digit organic growth. So, we run a global tower business. Obviously, Vertical Bridge is our flagship property. GD Towers in Europe is our flagship property. Both of…

Great. Thank you.

Next question, Randy Binner with B. Riley. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning. I'm mostly covered. It's been a great call so far. Just a couple. Marc, on the fundraising for 2025, are you laying out a dollar billion expectation as you did in '24, or is it just the FEEUM at this point?

Yeah, I think we're just going to stick to FEEUM. I think it's the metric that you judge Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo on. So, we think that that's the right metric is FEEUM and FRE. And then, obviously, if we do our job, it leads to DE, right. And we want to grow DE this year. I think the FEEUM metric and the FRE metrics are important to Tom and I because it's just sort of the adult nature of our business. We don't need to sit around and point to an artificial fundraising number. What we need to do is deliver steady FEEUM and FRE growth for you guys and for our public investors. So, that's kind of when I talked about the sort of maturation of our financials and the maturation of the finance team that Tom has built, that's what we're doing is really bringing adult financials to the Street. And, I think the other thing that we don't talk about is just margin. We had a 200 basis point increase in margin. Tom and I are very focused on cost. Again, we're digging deep into where we can deliver more cost synergies across the business. We think we can continue to grow at that double-digit organic growth rate, but at the same time, Tom and I are very focused on picking up another 200 basis points of margin. We're doing that through, what I would call, simple business decisions that are just common sense, elimination of G&A, elimination of redundant positions and just trying to be more efficient. And Tom brings that discipline from his two decades of doing that at Carlisle. And I think both he and I have a lot of conviction around cost savings and building margins.

Yeah. And actually, to that, the admin expense line in the model, like circa $37 million was higher than we modeled for the quarter. And I apologize if I missed it, but was there a call out of anything kind of unusual in that in the fourth quarter?

There was a little bit of noise in the fourth quarter. We had a little bit more expense related to some of our fundraising initiatives, given the amount of capital that we raised and a few other, sort of, small things. I think that kind of where we've been quarterly in the past, somewhere between there and the fourth quarter is probably a good number, but the fourth quarter was a bit anomalously high.

Like, on an absolute basis, though, going forward with the growth in the franchise, would like for the full year, that's going to be over $100 million going forward. Is that fair?

Are you -- you're looking at the GAAP numbers or the FRE numbers?

Just for administrative expenses.

Yeah, I think we sort of -- I sort of tend to focus more on the cash flow part and the numbers that go into FRE. And so, we were running around $17 million, $18 million, maybe $19 million, and we were at like $21 million for the fourth quarter. So, that was kind of a bit a couple of million-dollar overage. I think that we'll sort of be within that range on a quarterly basis next year.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you.

Go ahead. Anthony, your line is live.

Sorry, guys. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking my question. Hey, Marc, just curious right, from talking to your LPs, do you think there's a preference for co-investment over the flagship fund, given that the current investment focus is on data center development over acquisition and other digital infrastructure?

It's a great question. I think just judging by our third fund, people were really excited actually about JTower, that was the one investment product that people got really excited about from a co-investment perspective. First tower company in Japan, flagship investment. We kind of timed the exchange dollar against yen in a really good spot. So, it's turned out to be a really great platform for us and so people gravitated to that. Yondr turned out to be great because we have this great relationship with CDPQ. They're our partner in VerticalBridge. But take for example, a client like CDPQ is not in our flagship fund, but continues to be an incredible partner across all of our platforms and that's just how that client likes to work. There were more subscriptions to the flagship fund than there was to co-investment. So, if there's any sort of notion that investors prefer co-invest over the flagship, that's just not true. We took more subscriptions into the fund than we did into co-invest vehicles. That being said, the quantum of co-invest sometimes episodic and quite large, can sort of stick out a little bit like a sore thumb like in Yondr. In Yondr, we'll end up having probably eight to 12 co-investors in that deal. Same thing with JTower, we'll probably have a dozen to 14 co-investors. But the flagship product works harmoniously with co-investment. So, a lot of our clients will say, hey, I'm putting X amount of dollars into flagship fund 3. I'm allocating X amount of dollars for co-investment. You, Marc, you and your team go figure out where you're going to put my co-investment dollars to work. So I really like that. That for me is our favorite product where we take a commitment from the fund and…

Makes sense. And can you remind me, what's the carry infrastructure for the co-investment fund again?

So, every co-investment vehicle is different. So, it's not like the fund where it's a 1.6 and 20%. Every vehicle's a little bit different. I would say across all of the co-investment vehicles, if you were sort of to aggregate it and sort of land on a spot of where you think it might be, I would say, by and large, we're getting kind of blended basis, the management fees on co-invest are anywhere from as low as 30 basis points to as high as 60 basis points, depending if it's a continuation vehicle. And then on carried interest, it's kind of, I'd say somewhere between 10% and 15% is kind of the norm. So, not quite the same carried interest we get on flagship, but very competitive. And I would say if I had to prefer something, I would take, I would take carried interest in co-investment vehicles over management fees just because our co-investment vehicles historically over the last 11 years have performed really well. I don't know if that helps you, but I can't give more precision because we do have a lot of co-investment vehicles.

No, that's really helpful. Really appreciate it. And one last question from me. Can you tell us little bit more about the digital energy and stabilize data center strategy product?

Yeah, I'd be glad to. The first is really focused on energy. And it's not an energy transition fund per se, it's really about building power and dealing with the bottlenecks that exist in Europe and United States around transmission and distribution, we think that continues to be the problem. So, we're super-focussed on building infrastructure adjacent to our data centers that enables all forms of energy to flow through our data centers. And with also a sharp focus on battery storage, micro-grids and it can be renewable power, it certainly can be LNG, but the key to this is making sure that our data centers have consistent power flow to them and that we are providing value to our customers. Those are kind of the two key tenets to what we are doing. So, we have a backlog of about a dozen projects we're working on today. We've got an operating partner working with us on it, and we've got a big team here at DigitalBridge working on it and working on it for two years. We've already had some episodic forays into some of these ideas at Scala and at Switch where we've demonstrated we can be a 100% renewable power and continue to grow at double-digit CAGR growth. And so, that's really the applied learnings of what we have had in our portfolio companies and then taking those applied learnings and putting them into a fund structure. So, more to come when we launch, but we've got a deep pipeline, we've got a great team, investors are really excited about this, we've kind of had no names whisper tour on this where we've talked about it to investors and we think there's billions of dollars of capital parked on the sidelines for this idea. Again, it's an…

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. I would like to turn the floor over to Marc Ganzi for closing remarks.

Well, look, thank you, everyone. We really, really appreciate everyone's time and attention. This was really -- from our perspective, a good quarter. Disappointing second and third quarter, but really in the fourth quarter, we promised you that we would go out and work hard and deliver the results, and I think we did that. We delivered record fundraising for the year, $9 billion. FRE delivery in the upper end of the revised guidance, double-digit earnings growth, so the business is performing well. And most importantly, our portfolio companies are performing not just in data centers, towers, fiber, associated small cell infrastructure, and wi-fi and IoT networks, all of these things are lighting up at the same time. And I think it's important to understand that our story is about the ecosystem. It's not a data center story, it's not an AI trade. What DigitalBridge is, is the leading alternative asset manager focused on products for the digital economy and investing in the digital economy for the long-term, not the short-term. Our multi-strat approach has now been on display. You saw it manifest itself in the fourth quarter with strong performance from all of our products, not just the flagship product. And as we introduce new products and scale and deliver margin improvement, we think this is the stock you want to watch and own in 2025. We're really excited about what we're doing. We were certainly disappointed in our results last year, particularly in the third quarter. We think we got a lot of that cleaned up. That's on me. I take ownership of that. And going forward, Tom and I are working together to, as Ric Prentiss says, we want to go out and be the group that under-promises and over-delivers. We have a very sensible business plan for 2025. We believe we have all the ingredients to go out and beat those expectations. We're going to work hard for you and we're going to work hard for our customers. Again, we want to thank you for your support, your interest, and your faith in our stock and our story. We're going to go out there and work hard for you, and we look forward to engaging with all of you. Should you want to have access to us and the team, as we always say, you're always welcome to come down to Boca Raton. Tom and I will be delighted to host you. We should have a series of Investor Days with different analysts coming through here in the next six months. I encourage all of you to come down visit DigitalBridge, spend time with us, and I think you'll be pleased with what we're going to do in 2025. Again, thank you. Have a great day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.