Craig Larson
Analyst · Bank of America. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter 2021 earnings call. I’m joined this morning by Scott Nuttall, our Co-President and Co-COO; and by Rob Lewin, our CFO. We would like to remind everyone that we’ll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our press release, which is available on the Investor Center section at KKR.com. This call will contain forward-looking statements, which do not guarantee future events or performance. Please refer to our press release and our SEC filings for cautionary factors related to these statements. Earlier this morning, we posted our earnings release presentation. You’ll likely have noticed a few changes. First, recognizing this is the first quarter post the closing of The Global Atlantic acquisition, we’re now reporting our results with two segments, our Asset Management segment, in addition to a new Insurance segment, which reflects our approximate 60% interest in GA’s financial results. In addition, given the changes we made to our compensation framework that we introduced last quarter, a number of the line items on our segment income statement have changed. We ran through this on our Q4 call, as well as at Investor Day. Now to help with comparability, we posted a presentation on our website in early April with three years of recast financial information on a quarterly basis. That presentation, of course, is still available on the Investor Center section of our website and it could be helpful for you to refer to that as you consider our results compared to prior periods. And finally, we’ve changed the framework of the earnings release itself to make results easier to digest, while improving our disclosure and transparency at the same time. We trust that you will find the new framework, as well as the additional disclosure to be helpful. Now I expect many of you joined us at our Investor Day only three weeks ago. For those of you that didn’t have the opportunity, we would encourage you to watch a replay of the event and review the accompanying presentation both of which can be found on our website. We really feel that the event helps everyone gain a better understanding of where we are now with the firm. And importantly, all of the opportunities we have to continue to grow and scale from here. And right on the heels of this event, we’re pleased to be reporting an excellent quarter. After-tax distributable earnings came in at $0.75 per share. Fee related earnings are $0.41 per share. Management fees increased 31% year-over-year, driving the 36% increase in our FRE per share compared to the first quarter of 2020. Our assets under management are now $367 billion. This reflects the closing of Global Atlantic, strong investment performance, in addition to continued fundraising momentum. And our book value per share, which is mark-to-market every quarter is now $25.84. This is up over 50% from the $16.52 we reported one year ago and is 12% ahead of the figure we reported just last quarter. The continued growth in our book value was really a testament to the strong investment performance we’re seeing across the firm. And finally, as we announced last quarter, we increased our dividends beginning with this quarter. So our annualized dividend per share is now $0.58. In terms of today’s call, I will kick things off with an overview of investment performance and fundraising before turning it over to Rob to walk through this quarter’s financials, and at the end, Scott will provide a few closing remarks and we’ll head into Q&A. So to begin, we’ve continued to have very strong investment performance. Beginning first with private equity, the portfolios a whole appreciated 19% in the quarter and is up 56% over the last 12 months. And performance in our flagship fund has been even stronger, up 28% for the quarter and up almost 80% over the last 12 months. At our Investor Day, one of the themes we discussed was the importance of winning in tech and the significance of the investments we’ve made in tech. Remember that 38% of our private equity deployment over 2018 to 2020 was in companies with tech and digital theme. And you’re seeing the impact of these investments within our performance figure. AppLovin, our mobile technology investment in North America’s wealth fund went public earlier this quarter and is currently trading at about 15 times our costs. And Darktrace and KnowBe4, two cybersecurity businesses also both went public over the last couple of weeks and are trading well north of costs. These were three of our six portfolio companies that went public in April. And alongside of this IPO activity, we see strong performance at private tech oriented investments like Internet Brands, OneStream Software, Byte Dance, RB Media, Kokusai Electric and Calabrio, a software business that we exited earlier in Q2. We’ve seen continued performance across our real asset strategies. Over the past 12 months our opportunistic real estate funds withstood all the market volatility, appreciating 13%, while in infrastructure, the portfolio appreciated 18%. Turning to credit, our alternative credit composite appreciated 7% in the quarter and 19% over the last 12 months. We’ve seen differentiated investment performance within our dislocation strategy and performance in the quarter and LTV periods were strong within Lending Partners III and Special Sits II. And our leverage credit composite appreciated 2% in the quarter at 25% over the last 12 months. And looking at our performance here over a broader timeframe, both our standalone high yield and bank loan track records continue to rank as top quartile over one year-year, three-year, five-year and seven-year timeframes. And reflecting the strong investment performance across strategies, our balance sheet investment portfolio appreciated 12% in the quarter and is up 52% on a trailing 12-month basis. Now on the heels of strong investment performance, we’re seeing continued momentum in fundraising with $15 billion of new capital raised in Q1 and $51 billion over the trailing 12 months. Notably, in the first quarter, we held the final close on our Asia IV Fund raise at $15 billion. Building on our differentiated investment track record, Asia IV is the largest private equity fund dedicated to investing in the Asia-Pacific region. And Asia IV really continues the momentum across our Asia-Pacific platform, given the final closings held just last quarter for our inaugural Asia infrastructure and real estate funds. Fundraising activity in the quarter also included new capital raised in our healthcare strategic growth strategy, core infrastructure and our opportunistic America’s real estate strategy. We also raised our first SPAC and we’re active in the CLO markets raising new CLOs in the quarter both in the U.S., as well as Europe. And our fundraising was not only strong for the core itself, but also diversified across many strategy. We’ve a lot of conviction in our fundraising momentum going forward as we remain focused on our over 20 strategies that we expected come to market. And with that, let me turn it over Rob.