FY 2024 Full-Year Financial Results Briefing

Good morning everyone. I'm Grace Chan, head of Investor Relations. It's good to see all of you here. I know well well into February, but every year during this event it always feels like the real start to the year. I hope 2025 has been great for all of you. It certainly has been for us and we will share more later. And to our viewers online, thank you for tuning in. We will be discussing our CLLI's 2024 financial results. Many of you join our investor day last November. We talked about our growth strategy. Now today is all about numbers. As always we will have our group seats.

She couldn't Andrew and Paul to take us through where we are today and what we expect for the year ahead. And without further ado, let's dive in Andrew. Let me invite Andrew to the stage. Thanks Grace. Good morning everyone. Thank you again lovely to see everybody. I'll take about 10-15 minutes to walk you through just a high level sense from the senior management team about our performance last year. I do really want to focus about our commitment to grow the business before I pass it to Paul to take you through the actual numbers.

Okay, so for 2024, I think we produced a pretty decent set of numbers. You probably have seen most of them by now. I hope you agree. Overall Pat me was up. We delivered a good set of profit. I'm pretty proud of the way we were able to grow all four of our primary fee income earning businesses. They're all up and on balance. We're up about high single digits, which is what we said we were going to do. And we were able to deliver that in a challenging year. We said last year we were going to focus on recycling.

Perhaps at the expense of portfolio gain. So not committing to selling at the highest possible price, but to commit to bring capital down and redeploy that capital and build up dry powder for what we think is coming and ability to redeploy that capital. And I think we are delivered on that. We we divested in the access of five billion and deliver a decent portfolio gain. Not maximum portfolio gain decent portfolio gain prioritizing capital recycling over profit. For the strategic reasons that I hope you understand and will agree with us. We're important to do. We've talked about the shareholders with dividends and shared by backs supporting the stock when we felt it was undervalued and with access capital.

So all of these three things. I think our testimony to listening to our investors listening to stakeholders and making sure we execute and delivering on what we said we're going to do. So the business today I think is in good shape operating cash flow in excess of a billion. That's again recurring income that will see us through the undoubted uncertainty that is coming. Every day, every week there's a surprise existential in nature. So we have to keep being ready to pivot being agile, taking nothing for granted and having reoccurring operating cash flow allows you to do that. Balance sheet is much better shaped than it was a year ago.

Gearing is down and as you'll see later with Paul, dry powder is up importantly because this is to our mind strategic advantage for us in what lies ahead and the ability to deploy capital to take advantage of interesting opportunities. So that's where we are coming out of 2024. I hope you agree with us. Please ask questions later on. You all know about the 200 billion target. I think we made decent progress both organically and in organically. Organically we grew a few m5 by five billion both through our listed funds as well as understood product. And then equally in significant last year something that many of you have been waiting a long time for.

We've been able to deliver two strategic acquisitions one in Australia and one in Japan growing M&A. Sorry, going FUM (Funds Under Management) by 100% basis of 13 billion taking us to 117 closer substantially to our 200 billion target by 2028. Another commitment that we made to you. Okay, let's talk about organic growth. Last year we raised 3.3 billion both from the listed and private side. On the private side we brought into the CLI fold 19 new capital LPs which to us again represents a significant step forward in growing our private equity franchise.

So these are new investors who have taken a leap of faith with CLI in the early days of our journey and are agreeing with us in terms of the investment strategies that we are putting out and the products that we are manufacturing. We were able to deploy 5.2 billion in gross value both again listed and private. And these were principally along the three themes that hopefully you by now are familiar with what we want to pursue disruption demographics and digitalization. And here you see a list of the products both the public and the private side that we are putting to work in supporting these long run secular investment themes in Asia principally that we believe will survive and persist through whatever uncertainty the next four to five years will bring to us.

And that's incredibly important to be able to stand with confidence in front of your LPs and tell them doesn't matter what happens in the next two to three years invest in the long term because we have the thought leadership and the execution capability and the teams on the ground to deliver target returns whether it's core whether it's reads whether it's value add whether it's the magic whether it's special sits whether it's credit. And we want to talk a little bit about that was the organic site right this is the inorganic site and let's spend a minute on M&A now something we hear quite often is why are you guys taking so long why are you guys taking so long. So I want to give you a hopefully an analogy that will resonate.

And those of us who are no people who are getting married are marrying ourselves or have children who want to get married when they come to you and they say oh I've met someone and I want to get married what's the first question you asked them. Okay how much money is maybe the first question how second question second question is how well do you know the person because this thing usually is forever. And spend a lot of speed and expert you know expert diet and execute the heck out of it but at the end of the day when you are getting married as I like an M&A to you got to spend time to get to know the person you're going to get into partnership with otherwise all of the effort all of the capital you deploy is not going to add up too much in fact you will destroy value.

I know that most M&A doesn't work out. So both SC and win get were products of a very long journey that lasted more than a year. I've lost count of a number of times she couldn't flew to Australia to me with Pharaoh and wherever we chat was we made efforts to go and see him. Genuine and Paul are basically Australian citizens now because they spent better part of last year in Melbourne making sure that we could work with new partners. And while it takes time I think that is absolutely fundamental because if this thing doesn't work out we owe this to our shareholders and our stakeholders and you guys. So I speak on behalf of the team and I say we would rather take longer and make sure we get it right rather than rush into the M&A for the sake of a headline because we said we're going to buy some stuff.