Ares Management Corporation (ARES) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our next session on our second day here at our financials conference. I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges, and I'm really delighted to have Mike Arougheti, CEO of Ares. Mike, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Maybe just to kick it off, talk about how you currently see the macro backdrop. What are you seeing in terms of credit quality, deployment opportunities? How do you feel about activities in the back half of the year and into '26?

Yes, maybe macroeconomic first. I think the good news about our platform, we have a lot of data points that come in from our global real assets and credit book. We have investments in probably over 3,000 middle-market companies. 500 million-plus square feet of industrial logistics, real estate. We got to see the global supply chain moving around. I think despite some of the recent anxiety about softening the labor market, everything that we're seeing in our portfolio would say that the economy is on stable footing and resilient. We're seeing high occupancy rates in our real estate book, NOI growth in our credit portfolios, nonaccruals remain well below historical averages. We're seeing 12% to 13% year-over-year EBITDA growth, increases in interest coverage. So not to say that we don't share some of the concern just about the forward trajectory for the economy, given what we're seeing in the labor market. But as we sit here today, we're feeling really good. In terms of deployment on our second quarter earnings call, we articulated a view that we expected deal activity to pick up meaningfully in the back half of the year, and that was already beginning to show itself in the pipelines that we were seeing across the platform. That momentum has continued. So deployment trends are strong, and we think likely to strengthen, particularly if we get a rate cut in the back half.

Great. Maybe digging into direct lending. We've had several years of rapid growth. How would you characterize the state of that market today, touch on maybe the competitive dynamics with the leveraged loan and high-yield markets. Do you think there's more room for private credit in general to take share? How do you think about medium to longer-term growth for that industry and for Ares specifically?

Direct lending, not private credit, just direct lending specifically?

Yes.

I think there's a misconception that direct lending is mature and kind of that its best days are behind it. I don't share that view. I think if you look at the growth of direct lending, just numerically, over the last 10 years, the direct lending market has grown about 14.4%. Private equity market has grown about 12.8%. If you take out the last couple of years, where you've seen a moderation in private equity growth private credits just actually grown in line with private equity market, which is what you would expect. If you look at frequent numbers looking forward over the next 5 or 6 years, what it will show is that there's an expectation that private equity will actually outpace private credit by 200 or 300 basis points as well secondaries. And I think that's a reflection of an opening up of the liquidity in the regular way private equity business. That said, we have not seen a meaningful change in the competitive landscape. Part of that, I think, is the fact that we're one of the market leaders. We have a number of scale advantages that allow us to originate even when deal volumes are down. So you've seen, for example, over the last 2 years, which have been some of the slowest M&A years that we've seen in a long time, our FP AUM was up 30% year-on-year, 2 years in a row. So direct lending, while it's "matured," it's also broadened in terms of the scale of the market that it's able to participate and the innovation and flexibility of the solutions that we can bring into the market, and it's also consolidated. And so if you look at both capital raising and capital deployment, the larger are getting larger, and we just haven't really seen any meaningful new entrants into the market in 10 to 15 years. Based on our deployment that we're seeing this year, we're still on trend for that meaningful growth that we've enjoyed. So I think there's a little bit of a misplaced anxiety about competitive dynamics. The other thing that we've tried to do, and we've talked about this before, is make sure that we're covering the broad waterfront of the direct lending market around the globe, U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific, which means deploying large teams in multiple markets and protecting what I would call the lower and core part of the market. So I think some of the misperception is driven by the fact that some of our peers are focusing on larger transactions and are competing head to head with the broadly syndicated loan in high-yield market. And so there's this push and pull, give and take between those markets. When those markets are active, if you're exclusively focused on large sponsor-led transactions in direct lending, you may see more volatility in deployment, but that's not really where we're putting our primary focus.

Got it. Maybe just in terms of deployment, it sounds pretty optimistic for the back half of the year. Where have you been more active, investing themes...

It's been -- this is -- it's -- for a number of years, we've been saying this and it's -- so I guess it's not so novel anymore. But normally, when we're going through market transitions, either rate transitions or rolling recoveries and recessions, you see different parts of the portfolio disproportionately deployed. For the last number of years, our deployment has been led primarily by U.S. and European direct lending. But over the last couple of years, we've seen a meaningful increase in places like secondaries, opportunistic credit, real assets credit, asset-based finance. And so while U.S. and European direct lending, just given the size of those markets and the size of those businesses for us, we'll continue to be leading the way. We've just seen a very broad-based increase in deployment. The only place where you haven't really seen it reflecting some of the liquidity challenges in the market is in the regular way private equity business. So I think our secondaries business and our opportunistic credit businesses have been meaningful beneficiaries of the slowdown in private equity.

Another kind of competitive question, you sort of alluded to this a little bit earlier, but just maybe thinking more about the market, as more and more of your competitors are trying to stand up direct lending businesses, what does that mean for returns, especially with deal activity generally being more muted? Is competition starting to eat away at spreads? And are there any implications for investor appetite? I would expect the answer to that second question is no, just based on your recent results, but how do you think about that?

Well, I have a long-standing view that credit spreads respond first and foremost to credit risk, real credit risk. And so a lot of people are expecting credit spreads to be in a different place, but the reality is, I think, most direct lending portfolios are quite clean. And so seeing spreads tighten over the last 18 to 24 months should not surprise people. I think that's more a reflection of just credit quality as opposed to competition. If you look historically at the direct lending product relative to broadly syndicated loan comparables, there's typically 150 to 300 basis points of excess return in the direct lending instrument, and it fluctuates. Right now, if you look at the public data versus the private data, that excess return is about 225 basis points of excess spread still available in the direct lending market. So the reason we have not seen a decline in private credit appetite, at least at Ares is, people are buying the excess return, they're not buying the absolute return. And so as long as you're preserving that excess spread, you're going to see investor demand shifting away from traditional fixed income into private credit. Private credit also gives you the ability to deploy into the incumbent book more consistently than the public market. So it's less new deal dependent. And so I think for folks who are focused on not just the excess return, but the consistency of putting capital to work, private credit is a pretty good place to be. Yes, so I -- we don't see anything that would change that. The other thing to keep in mind, too, which is why I think the asset class is attractive investor demand, the way that it has is, spread is only one component of the total return, right? You have your base rate, your spread, fees, call protection and kind of all things in between over the life cycle of a loan. And so it's not -- it's -- unlike the public markets weren't coming in and out of it with a view that spreads are here, I like it. Spreads tightened 50 basis points or widened because they're floating rate short-term instruments. And so you're generally targeting the same type of return expectation through a different combination of underlying spread plus fee.

Okay. Maybe sticking under this direct lending, private credit umbrella. Thinking about your wealth channel, one of the questions we get a lot is, how do you manage this sort of inherent conflict between retail, which earns fees immediately and institutions, the drawdown funds, which earn fees on deployment. How does this play out between, say, like ARCC and ASIF versus your drawdown in direct lending funds?

Yes, there's a couple of things in there. One, there's no real conflict, right? So the conflict would be if you were somehow I guess, what you're implying, you're allocating to one fund in favor of another because of a different fee construct. The way that we handle that is we just basically allocate transactions according to available capital. And I think people probably know the SEC has given exemptive relief for ARCC to actually co-invest with other funds within the Ares family. So there's no actual conflict, but there's a huge opportunity if you get a balance of funds in retail and institutional. It's interesting. We started our direct lending business in 2004 at Ares solely being in the public market through ARCC, and we're maybe "late" to the wealth channel. The second thing we did was raise very large institutional commingled funds, and then we finally got around to putting product in the wealth channel with a lot of success. And the reason we did it that way is we think it's critically important that you have the right balance of dry powder to investable market. And the only way that you can actually keep that tension and navigate a cycle is with drawdown funds. So the thing you like about the wealth channel is, you have perpetual offer funds, but they're procyclical. So when the market is overheating, you see a lot of capital inflows at a time when maybe you should be reducing the rate of investment. And then when capital markets start to weaken, you see outflows or slowed inflows and you don't have enough dry powder to capture that market opportunity. So we've always believed that you have to have a broad diverse set of distribution channels that give you that dry powder to play in the market and support your origination engine and to support the volatility of those retail flows. So we're pretty balanced in the way that we think about it. So I don't really view it as a conflict. I think that they're symbiotic.

Great. Another higher level private credit question, another sort of risk that we hear about, see in the media, is the risk -- whether it's the riskiness of the loans themselves or the risk to the broader financial system. It sounds like from your prior comments, pretty confident in Ares private credit, in particular. But how do you think about that sort of broader structural risk that is often mentioned? And maybe talk about some of the high-level KPIs people may be worried about PIK utilization, LTVs.

Yes, I -- this -- I try to -- I'm pinching my thigh when you're asking me that question. I just -- I've been in this business for 30 years. And from day 1, there's always this overarching narrative that private credit risk is the canary in the coal mine or private -- and that just shows a complete misunderstanding of what private credit is and the role that it plays in the real economy. If someone is worried about real losses in the private credit market, you burn through trillions of dollars of exposure in the private equity market, which probably also means that the public equity markets are hemorrhaging as are the liquid fixed income markets. There's a total misperception that the companies that borrow in the private credit markets are riskier than companies that borrow in the bank market or elsewhere, and that's just fundamentally not true. And so all we can do is keep performing through cycles and demonstrate that. I think our bank partners understand that because they're obviously meaningful lenders to our portfolios. But the KPIs, just to your point, if you look at Ares' corporate credit book, right now, the U.S. loan book sits at about 43% loan-to-value. So that means that there's cash equity below our exposure of 57%. Our European credit book sits at roughly 49% loan to value. So there's roughly 51% equity cushion below us. As you can appreciate, if you're a private equity firm and you have 57% of a capital structure in cash equity below a senior secured loan, even if there's deterioration in company performance, there's a long way to go before that 43% is impaired, and you're going to do a lot of things to defend that equity position to prevent the 43% lender from owning your company. That is probably the single biggest risk mitigant in the asset class and probably the one thing that people don't really have a handle on is just how much equity subordination exists in the private credit market today. Another way to look at that, which is important because it also is driving what we're seeing in the secondary market, the opportunistic credit market and the buyout market. If you look at private equity today, there's about $3.2 trillion of equity invested in current portfolios relative to about $1.2 trillion uninvested. So if you think about the financial incentives of a private equity owner, that 57% index across the entire market represents 3x the capital opportunity that you have as an asset manager within private equity. So you're incentivized not just to maximize value, but you have a disproportionate amount of your capital tied up in these capital structures, which are pretty over-equitized. Other things to look at would be interest coverage, which is just a measure of EBITDA to interest expense. That's 2x right now and growing, so in a very healthy place. As I mentioned earlier, at least in our portfolios, we're seeing EBITDA growth of about 12% to 13% period-over-period year-on-year. Leverage, just to understand that 50% loan-to-value, leverage is about 5.6x debt-to-EBITDA in the U.S. book, which may seem like a lot, but that basically means that the company is trading at 12x EBITDA and you're roughly half the capital stack. Nonaccruals, as I mentioned, are hovering near all-time lows. And PIK, again, I think, it's something that is often talked about that's pay-in-kind interest. Not all PIK is the same and not all PIK is bad. So there are a number of ways that PIK finds its way into a direct lending portfolio. The first is at underwriting of a new loan, particularly when interest rates are elevated, the highest quality borrowers that theoretically could attract the highest amount of borrowing may ask you as a lender to have a PIK component to reduce their debt service requirement so that they can have enough cash flow to invest in growth. For the right companies, we view that as a healthy phenomenon because the idea of putting leverage on a company isn't to constrain growth, it's to help them grow. The second place that it shows up is in structures called PIK toggles, which have become pretty commonplace in the broadly syndicated loan market and have found their way into the private markets. Again, for high-quality borrowers, that's kind of an accommodation to allow a leverage company to navigate its business plan. Generally speaking, if structured the right way with the right companies, it's a win-win because when you pick toggle, the lender makes more money and the borrower gets more flexibility. So we have a high willingness to do that for the right companies and the right sponsors because we make more rate of return for the same credit exposure. And then the third place where it shows up, which is probably the lowest percentage of PIK in the market, but the one that I think is drawing attention is, when you have a company that is underperforming. And by dint of the fact that it's underperforming, not that rates are high, it can't meet its cash interest requirements, and that's when you get into a discussion between the lender and the borrower about ability to pay. And similar to PIK toggle, when you put in an amendment in a situation like that, the interest rate goes up. So you may be in an 8% loan, all cash. The rate of interest could go up to 11% or 12%, but the cash will come down to 5% or 6%. So that's going to show a huge increase in PIK. But what's not being talked about is the incremental 200, 300, 400 basis points of return that you're getting at the top half of the capital structure to allow this company to grow in a high rate environment. That third part is a very small portion of the PIK in our portfolios, and I mentioned it's probably the smallest component of PIK in the market. But even when you're doing it there because of that loan-to-value that we keep anchoring on, if you're adding PIK exposure at 43% loan-to-value, even in a modestly underperforming company, you're effectively just eating away at equity return. So I don't want to say it's completely overblown, but it's largely overblown. And I just think it's getting a disproportionate amount of attention relative to what it actually means in terms of the rate environment and navigating higher rates.

Maybe switching gears a little bit, thinking a little bit about go-to-market and private creation. We've seen a number of your competitors going to market with partners, offering public-private partnership strategies. What are your thoughts here? Is this something Ares is considering working on? And if no, why not?

Well, our whole company is built on partnerships, internal partnerships, partnerships with banks, insurance companies. We sub-advise a number of portfolios for other wealth managers and liquid fixed income portfolios. So the idea of partnership to us is not novel. So again, I think the market is talking a lot about these things under this idea that liquid and illiquid markets are converging or that investor demand is pulling the market in that way. And I'm totally open-minded to that, which is to say if marrying an Ares product with a non-Ares product, in a way that is good for the customer. Either because they get a better client experience or they get a differentiated investment outcome or a lower fee, which we don't love, but that's part of it, then I could see that having a lot of merit. If the idea is take a great Ares product, marry it with a commoditized liquid product and somehow that enhances our distribution, we don't have a ton of interest in that. And the reason being, we have a big core business already in the wealth channel. We're seeing 150% year-over-year growth with the products that we have. Retail and institutional investors now have multiple access points to invest in Ares products. So we're not feeling distribution starved in that respect. So I think our primary focus continues to be on driving the core business. Because of the success that we're having in wealth and because of the product diversity that we have there, if the market continues to ask for partnerships, then we'll be there with those partnerships to deliver the product to the client in the way that they want it. But I have yet to see that being a primary demand driver. So I'm taking it slow.

Let's switch gears again and talk about ABF. This is one of the newer themes in the private credit world, but Ares has been doing this for quite some time. So maybe just to start, to level set, talk about your current business here. What exactly is Ares doing in the ABF space? And maybe just remind us what are the key components of the medium-term targets laid out at your Investor Day last year?

Sure. So ABF, asset-based finance, we've been in that business for over 20 years. The business itself has gone through probably 2 or 3 moments of transformation, and we're in one of them now. I think the first big shift was post-GFC, which is when we really started to innovate around how to scale capital and capability in this market. Post-GFC, you saw effectively a dismantling of the securitization, commercial paper and specialty finance apparatus on the street, and it got distributed deeper into smaller specialty finance companies in the private markets. We began to accumulate capital to invest into that market and had one epiphany, I think, earlier than most, which was at that point in time, the institutional investor community that wanted to access asset-based finance was doing it through very small managers in very small funds in single asset classes. So someone is doing premium finance, someone's doing container leasing, someone's doing cell towers. But if you're an institutional investor, it was very hard for you to put capital to work at any scale and with any consistency because the challenge of investing in these markets, they're fairly cyclical in some cases and sometimes they're really attractive, sometimes they're not. Sometimes you want to be a lender to a portfolio of these assets, sometimes you want to be an owner. And the institutional investor did not have the ability to navigate. So we conceived an idea under what we now call our Pathfinder funds to go to the market with a broad-based multi-industry, multi-asset class approach to asset-based finance. And it took a while to educate the market on what that would deliver in terms of outcomes. And mind you, at the time, people were still reeling from the GFC. And so when you were talking about things like securitization and structure, you had a lot of CIOs and investment committees who just didn't want to pay attention to it. Once we got through that missionary work and demonstrated that if you were to just look at the cash flows, they all look the same. And so having the ability to move between different markets and navigate the cycle was hugely valuable, and that has now become a very large business for us. Our business today is approaching $50 billion of AUM, about $47 billion. It's been growing very, very quickly. About half of that is in this non-rated part of the market, where I think we are the market leader in terms of people and capital and capability. We have about 85 investment teams that cover the broad waterfront of ABF. And then about half of our business is rated liquid or semi-liquid ABS. And the business has largely been growing 50-50 for quite some time. It's been growing at a roughly 40% compound annual growth rate for the last 5 years. At our Investor Day, since you asked, we put forward a target that we would get to $70 billion in that business by 2028, which if you went backwards, is roughly a 17% CAGR from where we are today. So roughly half the growth that we've been enjoying. So we've put the guidance out there, but if we continue to grow at the rate that we've grown accustomed to, then I think we can do better than that. The last thing, the second wave of transformation, which I think is why it's getting so much attention now is as insurance has begun to converge with alternative asset management, what used to be a largely non-rated sub-investment-grade business, which is where we got our start, is now giving way to a large opportunity in high-grade fixed income. And so all of the rated note tranches that support the private securitization market are now open to invest in through alternative managers and through insurance companies, and that's a big TAM, which is where I think a lot of the enthusiasm is coming from.

And where would you say LPs are currently in terms of ABF? There's a lot of education required? Do they think about it as private credit, but maybe there's a need for more nuanced understanding? Or do you feel like you're kind of...

I think we're still in the early innings. I think the more sophisticated investors have now understood it because they can see folks like us who have raised large funds and deployed them well and been through different rate and economic cycles and now understand it. There's still a fairly healthy level of skepticism candidly just because it looks complicated. There's a lot of complexity in the structure, but it's good old-fashioned private credit exposure. Insurance companies obviously have a very strong bid for high-grade ABF exposure. And I think that's a big driver of the business. We're trying to stay balanced in the way that we think about it in terms of the high-grade versus non-rated tranche because I think there's real value to being able to originate at every level of the capital structure. And if you over-index to one, you may lose the opportunity in the others and maybe telling people what they know. In the non-rated tranches, that is good old-fashioned 2 in 20 high alpha generative capital. And so $25 billion, $30 billion of non-rated in open-ended vehicles is significantly more profitable and valuable than $200 billion in high grade. And so we're trying to find the right balance in terms of driving the margin of the company.

Maybe segueing into GCP, your latest acquisition. And this expands your presence in Asia, gets you deeper in infrastructure. On the last earnings call, you talked about significant future FRE contributions, particularly as you scale the data center business. So can you talk about that path forward? Clearly, it's a very large opportunity, but where are you sourcing flows? Where are you finding opportunities to deploy? How does the integration look with the rest of Ares?

Yes. I mean, it's -- we're still within the first year, but the integration is going extremely well. Jarrod talked about this on our earnings call. Pace of integration is in line with the underwriting, if not better. I think we've been positively, I don't want to say surprised, but the fundraising front has been a bright spot in terms of the pace with which we're raising capital in both the data center business and the regular way industrial development business. What came with GCP, which was quite unique, was a global data center pipeline and a team of roughly 70 professionals that were exclusively focused on data center development around the world. In that pipeline, we have meaningful projects that are totaling about, gosh, 1.5 gigawatts in Tokyo, Osaka, London, Sao Paulo. And those are all in various phases of leasing and development. I think the positive news that we put into the market was in our first data center fund in Japan, which came shortly after closing, we raised about $2.4 billion of new capital onto the platform for roughly 240 megs of data center development. So if you just look at the total pipeline and you say that it was 240 megs against 1.4 gig, that would imply that we have $6 billion or $7 billion of capital available to raise in fund format just on the projects that are deep in development that we acquired. And so we're quite optimistic about that. And obviously, Ares has a very meaningful business in renewable power, energy transition and are one of the longest-standing owners and operators of large-format nat gas-fired power plants. We're a big owner of a nuclear SMR business called X-energy. So there's a lot that's happening at Ares around the peripheries of the data center business as well, not just core data center development, but all the things that you need to have in order to really get these done at scale.

Okay. One of the other newer opportunities that comes with GCP, and I think you alluded to this, but it's the sort of leasing development and property management fees. Can you unpack a little bit what does GCP do that's different from Ares? And what does that sort of opportunity look like to maybe do more of that?

Yes. So the GCP is -- well, I'd say, Ares has been transforming its real assets business over the last 7 or 8 years to be what we would describe as fully vertically integrated. And what we mean by that is we want to develop, own and operate our own assets as opposed to most institutional real asset investors that are partnering with other development and operating partners to buy assets either in development or as they transition to core. And we want to do that for 2 main reasons: One, asset scarcity is ultimately the challenge in these markets. And so as we continue to open up new channels of distribution to raise capital, the binding constraint to growth and market share gain is, can you originate assets. And so in real estate and infra, if you can build large vertically integrated platforms, you can actually create your own assets, which is a huge competitive advantage. And we're already seeing that in terms of the share gains that we get through development versus acquisition only. And then to your question about fees, when you start to do that, you begin to introduce a number of fees that are accretive to your core FRE or your core management fee EBITDA. And those include development fees, which get paid throughout the entire construction life cycle of these projects, whether they're warehouses or data centers, property management fees, which come once those projects are stabilized and operating and then leasing fees. And each of those are pretty meaningful. If you weren't as broad-based as we were, I think they would show up in the P&L lumpier than people are used to. But I think given the consistency of the development pipeline that we have, I think over time, particularly as we integrate the GCP logistics and data center business, you'll see a much more consistent exposure to those types of fees coming into the P&L.

Great. Maybe switching gears again, talk about insurance and retirement. Maybe just to start, we've talked about a couple of hot topics. Another one is the opening up of the 401(k) market. How do you see Ares positioned here? How significant might this be? And just for -- to level set investor expectations, when -- hard to say when, but when could we start seeing flows here?

Yes. Look, I think there's a lot of enthusiasm about the opportunity for further democratized access to alts, whether that's through wealth, which we already talked about or through the defined contribution market. There are a number of hurdles that still exist to see that market open up fully. I think there's excitement now because we've had an executive order that has come out in support of increased private market exposures in 401(k)s, but we have not really seen regulatory or legislative action that would further open those markets up. And the reason that, that's so important, the challenges in the past have been that plan sponsors have a very narrow view of their fiduciary duty to their client, largely around fees, not returns net of fees. So if you look at that market, it is a very fee-sensitive market, largely focused on passive investing. And when plan sponsors have pushed to take a little bit more risk and pay more fee to get access to higher risk and higher return product, there have been pretty significant lawsuits. And so you kind of have a plan sponsor community that has been trained to be risk averse because of the threat of litigation. And so I think it is critically important that we get some kind of regulatory and legislative relief if we really want to see that market open. And I think that is going to ultimately dictate the timing. Two is even if we get all of that, you're going to have to get to a place where the market is in balance where we can deliver what is typically high rate, high fee product into a lower return, low fee product and have that equation makes sense for the investor. And if you look at the entire target date market and you said we're going to take 10% of that and put it into private markets, there's going to be a fee that will clear. And I think folks like Ares and others are going to have to look at that fee and the size of that distribution opportunity and evaluate whether the math makes sense. And nobody really knows yet because we don't know what the behavior is going to be. But more importantly, you're going to have to go back and amend all of the existing product if you actually wanted to put it into the existing product. So as you're seeing with people who are starting to dip their toe in the water, ourselves included, most is focused on new product introduction because the administrative burden of going back and renegotiating all of your existing fee agreements with all of your existing sponsors is pretty cumbersome relative to what the opportunity likely will be. So I think you'll begin to see people like us putting product that's tailored for this market into the market with large plan sponsors and small. You'll see tie-ups like we saw with T. Rowe and Goldman to try to explore investor appetite. But I think that the real gating item is going to be this regulatory legislative relief piece. And then not to go on too much about this, but I think it's important is, it is also possible, if not likely, that the way that this market actually develops because it's the way that the entire retirement services business really works is rather than having exclusive tie-ups within this channel between large traditional managers and alt managers and exclusive relationships that it moves to an open architecture world where you have private markets exposures, in-model portfolios and off-the-shelf options on some of the large platforms. And if that's the way the world develops, then these exclusive tie-ups that everyone is anxious about become less important, in some cases, less relevant and in certain cases, maybe even restrictive, right, because you're not giving your clients the broadest possible access in a world where they're looking for that balance of return and fee. So there's a lot to work out. We're really excited about it, but we're also pretty measured in our enthusiasm because this is not going to happen overnight and a lot needs to get clarified before these markets open up in earnest.

Great. Maybe with just the last little bit of time here, would love to touch on secondaries. That business at Ares has grown rapidly over the last several years since you acquired Landmark. What would you say has gone well here? And as you think about the product lineup, where to see the opportunities for more meaningful scaling up of that business?

Yes. Look, we're really proud of what we've done with Landmark. We bought the business in, gosh, 4.5 years ago. It had about $20 billion of AUM. Last reported AUM was $34 billion, $35 billion. We've roughly doubled our profit contribution from that business, and we've transformed the product set. Maybe just to step back because I think it's important as we think about how we identify acquisitions. We had a view because we were seeing it both as a GP and an investor into these markets, a transformational inflection point in secondaries. And this is probably 6 or 7 years ago, and it was along the lines of GP-led secondaries. We're taking market share from LP-led secondaries. Primary market in non-private equity, i.e., real estate, infra and credit was growing and deepening to a level where secondaries would have to become more relevant. And third, product adoption was globalizing whereas it used to be the purview of kind of large U.S. state plans. We're beginning to see just much broader adoption around the globe. So we actually went out and looked for a scaled secondaries platform to buy and identified Landmark, bought it well at a good price with a lot of technology, a lot of capability and track record. Since the time that we bought it, we started a de novo credit secondaries business, and I think have gone from a world where that market didn't exist to now leading that market, and that is an accelerating part of the business. We have meaningfully scaled our real estate and infrastructure platforms, and you're seeing that reflected in the fundraising in those 2 parts of the business. We've retooled the product set within our private equity business to focus more heavily on the GP-led opportunity in the market, which is now capturing a significant portion of the flows and deployment. And we launched a wealth product about 6 months after the acquisition in a product called APMF, which is growing consistently and is a big differentiated product. So we've done a lot. The investment thesis has borne out in spades. And we also caught a little bit of a break in terms of the growth in that business because the illiquidity right now in the private equity market is just accelerating deployment there. But with all that growth, the market is still capital constrained. So if you look at annual deployment in the secondaries market, people will tell you we'll do roughly $200 billion of market activity and dry powder broadly in that market is about $250 billion to $270 billion. So for all of the growth and opportunity, there's still only 1 year's worth of capital available against the current market opportunity, and we're seeing that market opportunity grow. So I think we're -- we've seen very, very significant transformation in that business, but I think that we're still in the very early days.

Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time. We'll have to leave it there. Mike, always a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much.

You too. Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.