Blue Owl Capital Inc. (OWL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here. I'm Ben Budish. I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges here at Barclays. With us for this first session to kick off the afternoon, we've got Doug Ostrover, Co-CEO and Chairman of Blue Owl. Doug, thanks so much for being here.

It's great to be here. I apologize everyone for being a couple of minutes late. I was saying to Alan on the way here, I felt like I was running to catch a plane. I couldn't get the elevator to come...

I know, I apologize.

But great to be here.

Great. Well, let's just start off with your traditional direct lending business. It's where you guys get the most attention from investors. Can you give us a bit of color on the current macro backdrop? How are you thinking about deployment activity in the back half of the year into '26? How does credit quality look? Where are you worried? Where is the market too worried?

Well, why don't I -- there was a lot in there. So why don't I start with the -- is the market too worried? So there's been a lot of press about direct lending and is it a bubble and where is it heading? So let me just describe our portfolio for a minute because I think that will address that question. $120 billion of capital, 450 to 500 names. loan-to-value is about 39%. Loan losses have been about 12 basis points per annum over a 10-year period. Last quarter, market, Last quarter, the revenue growth was 8.5% and EBITDA growth was 10%. We're not in deep cyclicals. We're not in retail. Long-winded way of saying the portfolio today is in really good shape, really good shape. We -- I think we maybe have 5 workouts out of that 450, 470 of companies. So roughly maybe 1%, we've had others. The recoveries have been good. So when I look at our direct lending business today, I look at a portfolio that's well positioned. And I think most of you know, companies when they start to have a downturn, it's not like -- unless there's fraud or something, it's not a cliff. So I can look at the portfolio and tell you, over the next 12, 18, maybe 24 months, performance should be relatively strong. So what are the negatives? The negatives are like in any market, I'd say if I went back to '22, when rates started skyrocketing public markets close, we had an imbalance between the demand for capital and the supply of capital. That's changed. Public markets are strong. There's a bunch of dry powder in direct lending, lots of dry powder in private equity, but probably not enough M&A. So we've seen spreads compress a little bit. But remember for us with spreads, when we compress, it's really a function of where the syndicated market is trading. On average, a good direct lender should to get roughly 150 basis points or more over the public markets. And that's about what we're getting today. But compared to where spreads were 2, 3 years ago, they've come in quite a bit, but I would tell you the market to me seems very rational. Pricing is reasonable, covenants are reasonable. So I'm still cautiously optimistic.

You kind of addressed some of this next question. I was going to ask you, what are the sort of implications if too much capital is chasing too few deals. It's kind of the worry that investors have had over the past year if we've seen more and more private credit fundraising, not as much deal activity. Is this a risk if we don't get a big pickup in M&A soon? Are we at risk of more spread compression if that continues? Could that weigh on investor appetite for private credit?

Yes. Listen, we -- I can't speak to every firm, but I can tell you, firms like ours who've done it a long time and have big portfolios, we're seeing an adequate amount of deal flow. So I'm very obsessed with having -- and Alan can tell you when we launched the firm, I wanted to have the biggest funnel of any of our peers, have less capital, have more deals per dollar of investable capital than any of our peers. And I think we largely achieved that. Today, the deal flow is decent. It's not where it was. But the advantage we have is we have incumbency with so many companies. These companies don't stop growing. The capital needs don't automatic stop. So we're seeing a decent amount of deal flow. I'd like to see more. Remember there are literally trillions of dollars of dry powder right now that needs to get deployed. So you've got all this dry powder over here. And on the other side, you have the PE firms that are desperate to have monetizations. It's just we haven't reached that equilibrium where there's a lot of deals. It's coming. I think if rates come down a little bit, we'll see more. But right now, with the administration, tariffs, whatever it might be, people just still remain a bit cautious. And -- but I would tell you, we believe we're going to see a pickup in deal flow.

What about on the topic of competition? I mean, bank retrenchment has sort of been a key theme that's allowed direct lending to step function forward during COVID, during the regional banking crisis. What's sort of the latest there in terms of bank competition? We've seen some recent announcements, deals originally financed in the private markets getting refinanced in the leveraged loan markets. Is that sort of a worrisome trend? And kind of generally, how would you describe the state of competition there?

So in terms of competition, I think it's -- nothing has changed. And if you'll indulge me just for 2 minutes, just to give you an idea and some of you who I know, have heard me talk about this. But if I took you back to when I was at Credit Suisse running leveraged finance, I think it was 2000, so 25 years ago, I had a $5 billion line of credit to go make loans. And I would go, let's say, to a KKR, make a $5 billion loan. I would turn around and sell that loan as quickly as I could and make 3 points. That's $150 million. Oftentimes, I would sell those loans before they even fund it. That's an infinite return on capital. So when you have a lot of capital markets activity, if you were to sit down with Goldman or JPMorgan or BofA and ask in fixed income, what's your most lucrative business? It's usually leveraged finance because of that velocity of capital. That is not changing. They love that business, and it makes a lot of money for all those firms in the right environment. So to answer your question, why do we see this movement from private markets to public markets. We view that as like the natural evolution of a company's life cycle. So I'll just give you an example. I don't know how many of you have gone and bought a home, especially an older home. And somebody comes in and does an inspection. And then you go in and start doing work and you're like, this is much worse than I thought. The roof is in worse shape. We found asbestos, just -- there's all these problems we weren't anticipating. Think about buying a company today. I mentioned trillions of dry powder and there's massive competition for good companies. The processes are shorter, the diligence is less, and you're prone just like in buying that new house to find more problems. So if you're a PE firm and you're buying that business, you have a choice. I could go do a syndicated deal through Goldman Sachs. Not really sure what I'm getting once I get in there. And if there is a problem, I could have 100 to 300 investors I have to deal with on the other side or you could come work with somebody like us, and if there's a problem, you can call me, you call one of my partners within 48 hours, our goal would be to try to reach a reasonable deal. And so view us as a relatively cheap insurance policy. That's why direct lending is so popular. No roadshow, no rating agencies, and there's usually 1, maybe 2, maximum 3 parties you have to deal with. So maybe you're making a lot of acquisitions. You're integrating businesses. There's a chance for a problem, but once that business becomes a little bit more mature, hits equilibrium, you're thinking of owning it for another few years, very easy then to say, "You know what, I'm paying Doug in the Blue Owl team a little bit too much, maybe what I'll do is, I'll call Goldman or Morgan Stanley, go do a syndicated deal, walk in a low rate and re-covenants. So I -- that shouldn't scare you. When you see names leaving. And just to give you an idea -- our average loans in our credit book are about 5-year maturity. Some are a little bit longer, but on average 5 years. The average duration is under 3. So either it's M&A or a refinancing in the public markets, something occurs and we get refinanced out.

Got it. Sticking with direct lending a little bit. So on the wealth side, you've got one of the largest BDCs in the market, and you've been at this for quite some time. A similar question, how would you describe the state and evolution of competition in the wealth channel? A lot of your publicly traded competitors who -- just a couple of years ago didn't have BDCs and a few of them have quite large nontraded BDCs now. What's the current state of competition like? Can you talk about some of the challenges? We talked about this a little bit earlier of raising wealth capital, which earns fees immediately versus the backdrop of lower transacting activity. It sounded like from your prior answer that it's less of an issue, but maybe you could just please speak about...

Yes, sure...

That environment.

Look, when I launched the business, I was at Blackstone. I left Blackstone and I thought there was a big opportunity in direct lending. And I also thought there was a massive opportunity in the wealth channel. From when I looked at the world, nobody was doing it correctly. Everyone was outsourcing distribution and managing the money. And I just thought there was too great a conflict there. While I was on my garden leap, Blackstone shifted, sold Franklin Square to KKR and brought everything in-house and their business took off. We started day 1 with everything in-house. And I'll just bore you with a quick story. We had our investment team. We had primarily institutional money at the time. We were ramping in retail, the wealth channel, and we must have had 50, 60 people, and we had no inflows. My partners, our CFO, Alan, is here, everybody is like, Doug, this seems like a big mistake. We're spending tens of millions of dollars a year, not getting any traction. It takes a while. It takes a long while because you think about it, you're going into people's offices. You might be making a sale. It could be $50,000, and you have to go get the next adviser and the next adviser. So we are -- I would -- I believe we are #2 in the wealth channel today. Blackstone is ahead of us in BDCs, but we're #2. And believe it or not, in real estate, in net dollars raised, we're #1 because they're still having some redemptions. So I like how we're positioned. I think you know we're launching something in the asset-backed space, an interval fund. We raised about $1 billion there just to get it going. You'll see that in the market over the next few months. And I'm sure you're going to want to talk about this. We're going to do something in data centers. And look, we'll see where it goes, but we are seeing a tremendous amount of excitement in that. So while the world has become more competitive, we've been there for 10 years. We have one of the biggest teams. We're global. And we went in and said, "We're going to do x and we delivered on that. And so we have a lot of credibility at all the wirehouses, the smaller broker-dealers, the RIAs. I'm not saying it's easy. To your point, competition has picked up. But it's limited competition. The biggest firms have decided Ares, Apollo, a few -- TPG, Carlyle, KKR, I realized they were missing out and are trying to make up for the years they weren't involved, but it's limited competition. We never thought we were going to have 50% market share with Blackstone. But I think we've shown over a long period of time, we've been able to get more than our fair share. I'll just give you just -- I just want to give you a quick example on this. We have a non-traded REIT. We launched that in the depths of like the worst real estate market. Today, it's the #1 selling REIT in the market. Why is that? Well, one, we have the resources to support it. And secondly, it's had incredible performance. And it's continuing to accelerate. And so when I look at these other products, both on the asset-backed side and on the digital infrastructure side, I think we're going to have a comparable experience to real estate, at least that's the feedback we're getting from our partners who are going to help us distribute it. So I'm cautiously optimistic. I think the key is -- if you were to go today and say, "Hey, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, UBS, a few others, we're going to bring a new credit BDC to your platform. There -- to your point, they're all saying, we haven't not. But if you could find something that's a little differentiated, a little bit different that will allow them these firms to scale their assets, attract more assets from their clients, you can get access. And if you deliver for the firm, when you come with the next idea, it gets that much easier.

Great. Switching gears a little bit. Just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the 401(k) side. You mentioned asset-backed finance, but for you guys, it's more than just investment-grade credit that could sort of take on a lot of different flavors. So you recently announced a partnership with Voya. Maybe talk about the genesis of that. Was it a competitive RFP process? Why was Blue Owl selected? And then I think something investors are quite curious about is how do we think about the P&L opportunities, allocations to Owl products, fee rates, that sort of thing.

Yes. So -- look, we got a nice amount of press on that. To answer your question, yes, it was incredibly competitive. It wasn't an RFP. The CEO and her #2 went around to a handful of firms trying to figure out who would the right partner be. Their criteria were a great track record, but in assets that at least early on, had high current income and could protect -- be downside protected. They were less interested in private equity and venture, more of the kind of things that we bring to market. And there are other firms who play in comparable products. Look, we're really proud to be chosen. I think it's going to be a great partnership. But you -- one of the things you asked is when are we going to generate a lot of revenue, not just from this partnership, we will have other partnerships with providers who touch the 401(k) market. It's going to be years. It's going to take time. And it's a, let's call it, a $12 trillion to $15 trillion opportunity set. Again, not all those assets will go into alts, but we'll see money flow in. The way we're viewing it is this. 10 years ago, we decided that the individual investor was going to be an important component to our business. And we've executed on that, not only by selling into wires and other broker-dealers, but just think about all the pensions we touch. We touch almost every major pension in the United States. It's millions of individuals. For some odd reason, there was this little group of people who were carved out in the 401(k) market. I would tell you that the teachers at CalSTRS think their pension plans are just as important as the 401(k)s that Voya is touching. But that's -- that was a political issue. We didn't want to get involved in it. But when it started to open up, we said, let's get positioned. And so we are really well positioned because I believe strongly in the beginning, the products that are going to be offered are things like credit, things like data centers, things like triple net lease, high current income, protect the principal. I said in one of our meetings earlier today, we joke where there's get-rich products and stay-rich products. Blue Owl is in the stay-rich business, and we think that is what resonated with Voya and their client base. And I think it's fair to say we'll announce other partnerships as well.

Great. I definitely want to dig more into the data centers. But maybe sticking kind of in this similar topic. On the credit side, and thinking about insurance more broadly, can you talk a little bit about Blue Owl's capability set in investment-grade credit? How much of what you originated is IG versus sub-IG or non-rated? And can you maybe unpack a little bit what you've seen from Kuvare Asset Management since you've owned that asset? I think it's been a year or 2. What are the inflows look like? Any color there would be helpful.

Sure. So look, I think prior to acquiring Kuvare, basically 100% of what we did was below investment grade. And that was by design, that was our capital pool. We had the ability in a lot of our structures to create IG product, but we chose not to focus on it because we didn't have capital that was looking for a spread versus, let's say, the Barclays Ag or something like that. So with Kuvare, we brought in some expertise, but we realized we needed more in IG. And so we went down the path of let's probably just go build this organically. And I know there's a lot of focus on our acquisition strategy. But I just want to give you an idea in the asset-backed space, we are interested in every part of the capital stack, the IG piece and the junior piece. And so as we were looking at it, we knew it could take us 5, 7, 10 years to become truly proficient in this space. At the same time, you have firms like Apollo making a very big push in the asset-backed market, but only really focused on IG. And so we got approached by a firm called Atalaya, 20-year track record, fundraises were $2 billion to $3 billion at a clip. They woke up one day and they said, wow, this market is going to get a lot more competitive. We have a firm -- Athene Insurance is 100x bigger than us. We probably need to partner with somebody. So they came to us. As I mentioned, we were building it organically. But as we thought about providing services to insurance companies, having a team that had been creating product over a 20-year period that would come in, come in at a reasonable price, make it accretive and most importantly, fit in really well with the culture. That's the hardest part with any acquisition. We can do the math on, will it be accretive? Can we grow it? But they're coming in not just to run their business, but to pump a lot of product out, in equipment finance, in rail, in aero, in consumer, billions of dollars, which I can't remember if we mentioned on last -- on the last quarter, but we created just last quarter billions of dollars of opportunities for our insurance clients. So I'll leave you with this thought. Kuvare is just the beginning for us. We have really enhanced our capabilities in developing and originating product for insurance companies. And I think that leg of the stool will be a piece that over the next 3 to 5 years, I think people should expect really substantial growth.

Great. Maybe coming back to the data center a bit. You've obviously been quite bullish very publicly here. Your digital infra business recently wrapped up third flagship fund, but clearly, there's a lot more to do. I don't think the sort of investment thesis needs necessarily rehash, but maybe give us a sense of -- or if you'd like to, that's I can't help very fine and good. It's clearly a very important theme and a very large one. I'm curious, give us a sense of how this evolves over the next few years, where and how will you be raising? What does the cadence of deployment look like? There's a wealth product in the works. Can you touch on all those bits?

Yes, sure. I won't rehash the whole thing, but when I'm sitting down with Marc Lipschultz Glipschultz and the rest of the team, and we're looking at a potential acquisition, we're thinking to ourselves, is this a niche strategy that we can scale? Can we be a market leader? And can we get outsized returns? So we were looking at -- I'm going to come to data center in a second, but you'll understand where I'm going with this. So we started out in the triple net lease space a number of years ago. None of our clients had really focused on it. I think Angelo Gordon had a $1 billion, $1.5 billion fund. I think Fortress had a $1 billion fund. Nobody had been able to scale it. We found a team that had a great track record. They were definitely the market leader. And we thought, wow, this is a very significant opportunity. What are we doing? We're going to investment-grade companies. Think of somebody maybe Whirlpool, Walgreens, firms like that. We're buying assets from them, primarily real estate, and they're leasing it back from us. It's a sale-leaseback model. Again, I won't go into too much detail on it. When I looked at that business, I thought IG partners, so very little credit risk, never had a loss over a long period of time and has been able to every single year, generate in excess of a 20% return on IG risk. And I just thought this is too good to be true. We did our work. We came to an agreement, we brought it on. And for all those of you who have invested with us, we've had four, five, sixfold growth in that business. So I started learning about the data center business a number of years ago and getting equally excited because it's nothing more than a sale leaseback, but instead of having Walgreens as my tenant or Cracker Barrel or Whirlpool, I've got Apple, I've got Google, I got Meta, I got Microsoft, a weak credit, $800 billion market cap is Oracle. So the best credit quality in the world, long-dated leases coming at the same cap rates with same structure with 3% escalators. I will tell you, I've sat down with CIOs of funds, one who's going to come in -- our last fund was $7 billion. They came in at -- the fund was wrapping up as we made the acquisition. They'll give us a big order. They come in for $500 million, $700 million, which is a big ticket. But my pitch to that CIO was, if I can get you a bunch of Microsoft and Google and Amazon effectively credit risk on an unlevered basis at 7.5%, why are you not doing $5 billion? And it kind of chuckled, but I was serious because if we will look back on this 5 years, 7 years from now. And by the way, these things oftentimes start at 7.5% cap rate and grow at 25 basis points per year. You can wake up in a number of years and have a Microsoft piece of paper that yields 9%. And I really am saying to every CIO, you're going to wake up one day and say, why didn't I do more? And this goes back all the way back to where we started when you're asking me about supply/demand and credit. Here, we have such an imbalance between the demand for data centers, land that's entitled in power and the supply. And so we're able to get these incredible cap rates, great structures. I'll give you an amazing stat, and this is why I think it's resonating. We haven't launched a wealth product, but it's resonating. If I take our typical deal, and we apply leverage to it, we can get, let's call it, 12%, 14% type net returns. I can show an investor, let's say, it's a 15-year lease that with leverage and the escalator, if the land and the building that they're investing in is worth 0 at the end of 15 years, they still make a high single-digit return. So then I can boil it down to saying, is Microsoft or Amazon or Google or Meta going to default. And I think we would all agree that's highly improbable. So anyways, very excited about the opportunity. We are about 60% done investing in our latest fund. We'll be back in the market with that fund next year. We've gotten really good feedback on the wealth product. We'll be in the market with that next -- early next year. And I expect both of those to hopefully exceed expectations of what investors are looking for.

And maybe can you share any thoughts, expectations on this wealth product? A couple of questions, like how quickly can it sort of be distributed across your existing base of partners? And we've heard you and your peers talk about sort of like institutional awareness of things like asset-backed finance. On the retail side, the adviser network seems to be -- I guess, BDCs have been available for some time. REITs have been available for some time. Is there awareness here, a lot of education needed? Or do you think it's an easy enough pitch for the adviser putting this in their clients' account?

Well, I don't want to get too excited about it, but I'll go back to what I was saying about triple net lease. When we bought that triple net lease business, their last fund, institutional fund was $2.5 billion, and there was no wealth product. 4 years later, I think it's 4 years, we're $7 billion in wealth and growing very quickly. It's really accelerating. So it takes a little bit of time. You have what I would call the super users at the wirehouses. They put their clients into lots of alts, and I think they will be first movers and put a lot of money into it. But then the real growth comes from getting beyond the top 2% to 3% advisers and further permeating the systems, which is education, walking them through, making sure they understand it, lots of conference calls. But the feedback to date has been exceptional. And again, I think we -- I think this has a chance to be by far in the wealth channel, our fastest-growing product.

What about on the asset-backed side? So I think you mentioned $1 billion of capital, and you'll start seeing more ongoing fundraising in the coming months. I mean how do advisers think about it different from your sort of non-traded or traded BDCs? Is there enough differentiation that it's of interest? Like how do people kind of think about prioritizing that versus some of your other products?

Yes. So that one is -- in terms of differentiation, there is 0 overlap, 0. That's going to require education because it's not as intuitive buying a pool of consumer loans from SoFi, or going and making a loan on 15 jets that are leased to Emirates. So that is going to be a little bit more complicated. The nice thing for us is it's a lot less competitive in terms of deals. I would tell you the pricing is more attractive than direct lending today. And I think we're taking less risk in many cases. So I'm cautiously optimistic there as well. And there, as you think about what a BDC is, a BDC is nothing more than a wrapper around a fund. And so we are launching in a structure that's called an interval fund. Many people have failed at this. There's been 1 or 2 firms successful. The beauty of it is it trades under a CUSIP. And so in the RIA space, they really like it. So the training, the regulatory environment around it is much better. And that's how we're going after it in the asset-backed space. And look, we -- the $1 billion -- just under $1 billion we raised is probably top 5 first fund raise in the interval space. All of our peers have raised materially less, and I think it's going to resonate.

Okay. Great. A little bit of time left. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about your GP stakes business. The update we got on the last earnings call, it sounds like it's taking a little bit longer than expected for your latest flagship to close. I'm curious, just given the performance here has been very strong, there's a heavy cash component of the return. And there is a general expectation from LPs that there are a few exits in this strategy. Why do you think things are moving slower than anticipated? And what's -- we'll start with that.

Yes. Listen, this is a hard fund raise. We're asking people to invest with us. We're taking a stake in a large PE real estate venture firm, and I mean large, and there's no liquidity. Now we -- because of time, I'm not going to go into detail. We just distributed back to investors almost $4 billion. You mentioned this. The returns have been exceptional. When I sit down with investors, I often say, have you ever looked at the Forbes 400 and look at the number of people at big PE firms or real estate firms who are in that list. And what we're giving you the opportunity is to actually not just go in their fund, but have a seat at the table with them to become a partner. And so the returns in this product have been great. You know, I think we will get there, but where we're raising money falls in the PE bucket. And even though I think this is more attractive than virtually any PE firm that's out there, just allocations are down. And you combine that allocations being down with a lack of liquidity, it just makes it a little bit harder. But I feel pretty good that if you remember the last fund for those who were invested, we were kind of stuck at $8 billion or $9 billion for a long time and then took a little while, but we got there.

Great. Maybe just one last topic while we've got you here. So Blue Owl is engaged in a significant amount of M&A over the past year or 2. How do you think about additional capital priorities from here? Is there more to do? Do you feel you can achieve everything you want with the capabilities you currently have? How are you thinking about build versus buy as you're looking out over the next, say, 5 years?

Yes. A couple of thoughts on that because I get that question all the time. If you look in aggregate what we've spent, it's a very small percentage of our market cap. I can't remember who I was talking to, but I remember when TPG bought Angelo Gordon, TPG stock was depressed. It was over 20% of their value at the time. That's a big acquisition. We're nowhere near that. I mean we're just -- it's a small fraction. So look, we're always looking at the trade-off between organic -- build it organically and buy it. And I would just tell you real quickly, what we're looking for is, I mentioned this, niche product where we can be one of the market leaders and we can scale it. And then most importantly, a team that's going to come in and buy into the broader vision of Blue Owl. And I know it's definitely caused stress for some investors. There's been a lot of focus on it. But I would tell you, everything has been fully integrated. And I think over the next 12 to 24 months, just like with the real estate business, people are going to look at this and say, wow, those were really good acquisitions. I have a quick question for you.

Sure.

So my question is, and Alan, my CFO, Anna is here, Head of Investor Relations. We're down 25% this year. When I look at our business, we're asset-light, we effectively have an annuity stream. We're 100% FRE. Our money doesn't leave. I mentioned to a group before I came in, when I start every year, I look back to the prior year, I know our revenues aren't going down. It's just a question of how much more they go up. And so then I look at Blackstone, I look at Ares, they're effectively flat on the year. I look at others, I can't remember where KKR is, down 8% or 9%. And I just look at us being down 25%. And it just makes no sense to me because we've had really good results. And we laid out for people what we thought we could do over the next 4 to 5 years. And our goal is really simple. It's very easy to get caught up in the noise of the market, this group is doing this, this group is doing that. But what we try to do is we try to lay out a path for ourselves, and we tried to articulate this during Investor Day. How do we double the stock? How do we double the stock and allow investors to make a 5% to 6% along the way? How do we allow investors who stick with us to compound at 20% a year over a long period because that's what we're trying to do. We're the biggest shareholders of the company. So my question is, what am I missing?

Well, what can I say, Doug, I mean, we have a buy on your stock. So that's why I agreed to speak.

I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I just wanted to mention that it just seems to me to be an exceptional entry point when we've lagged so much versus our peers. Anyway, thank you so much.

Thank you, Doug.

Really appreciate it.

No problem. Thanks.