Erik Hirsch
Analyst · JPMorgan. Your line is open
Thank you, Mario and good morning. Moving on to Slide 5. Here we highlight our fee-earning AUM. As a reminder, fee-earning AUM is the combination of our customized separate accounts and our specialized funds with basis point driven management fees. We will continue to emphasize that this is the most significant driver of our business as it makes up over 80% of our management and advisory fees. Relative to the prior year period total fee-earning AUM grew $4.2 billion or 12%, stemming from positive fund flows across both our specialized funds and our customized separate accounts. Taken separately, nearly $1.8 billion of net fee-earning AUM came from our customized separate accounts and over the same time period, $2.4 billion came from our specialized funds. Growth in these two segments continue to be driven by four key components that we have highlighted in the past: one, re-ups from our existing clients; two, winning and adding new clients; three, growing our existing fund platforms; and four, raising new specialized funds. What you also see here is that our fee rates have remained steady. Moving to Slide 6. Fee-earning AUM from our customized separate accounts stood at $24.3 billion, growing approximately 8% over the past 12 months. We continue to see the growth coming from a variety of avenues that include type, size and geographic location of the clients. What you also see here is that over the last 12 months more than 80% of the gross inflows into customized separate accounts came from existing clients. You've heard us say in the past that re-ups from our existing client base remains a key component of the growth we've achieved in this segment of fee-earning AUM. In addition to re-ups, we continue to expand our client base by winning and adding brand-new relationships, which in turn provide a growing base for future re-up opportunities. Worth noting, in this quarter we once again closed separate account business from both existing as well as brand-new relationships. Moving to our specialized funds. Growth here continues to be strong. We are executing well across our product suite and demand remains robust coming like the rest of our business from a diversified set of investors around the globe. Over the past 12 months, we achieved positive inflows of nearly $2.4 billion, resulting in a nearly 20% increase in fee-earning AUM. Much of this growth over the last 12 months is attributed to our current secondary fund still in market. We continue to be pleased with the results we've achieved thus far. During this recent quarter we held additional closes that totaled $486 million of LP commitments and now bring the total dollars raised for this product to approximately $2.2 billion. At this level we have surpassed the size of our previous secondary fund, which was approximately $1.9 billion and it is already the single largest comingled fund we've ever raised. And as we noted before, we have until October this year to complete the fundraising of this current fund and we remain optimistic on our ability to continue to add capital. We find the current environment serving up some interesting opportunities for secondary deployment. Last point here. Given that the fees on this fund started in the prior quarter, this closing did generate retro fees of $3.8 million in the quarter. The next largest drivers of AUM inflows were the continued fundraising by our credit fund along with continued success across our various white label initiatives, as well as positive net inflows for our semi-liquid Evergreen product. I will end here by highlighting an announcement that you may have seen reported in the press that being the closing of a brand-new fund offering, the Hamilton Lane impact Fund. This fund targets investments that have a positive, social and/or environmental impact. And while the total amount of capital raised was modest at just over $95 million, we think more importantly, it speaks to our ability to recognize what the market wants to quickly respond to that and to use the power of our platform to deliver positive results for clients. We believe interest in this space will grow over time. And we think by establishing a presence early on we are well positioned. Before I turn the call over to Atul to cover the financials, I want to quickly highlight the impact on movement in unrealized valuations and to provide an important reminder. First the reminder. We report our unrealized carried interest and our investments made alongside our clients on a one quarter lag basis and so the results for this quarter reflect valuations as of March 31st. Further, for most of the industry, the valuations follow a point-in-time methodology. It is the best estimate of what the asset would be worth were it to be sold that day. Given this we view these driving valuations and the related drops in unrealized carried interest to be temporary and not reflecting the ultimate value of the assets. Additionally, several of our large pools of capital are quite young. You will also note that due to our significant diversity across our asset base and underlying company positions our volatility in marks was less than many of the other traditional fund managers. With that, I will turn over to Atul to cover the specifics and the rest of the financial update.