CapMan Oyj (CAPMAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to CapMan's Q3 Results Presentation. My name is Joakim Frimodig, and I'm the CEO of the company. Despite challenging market conditions, we have continued to perform strongly. And today, we are reporting record results. During the first 9 months of this year, we have continued to grow strongly. All of our segments have significantly improved their profitability and we have exceeded all of our financial targets. CapMan is today operationally and financially stronger than ever before. As mentioned, strong growth continued. During the past 5 years, we have doubled the size of CapMan. We have doubled our turnover and this strong development now continues this year. So turnover growth in the first 9 months, plus 26%, and this is driven by growth in management fees, growth in service fee income and also increasing carried interest income. I'm also happy to see that our fee-based profitability continues its strong growth. It has been growing steadily and strongly since 2017. And now in the first 9 months of this year, plus 35%. And when you look at EBIT and EPS, growth is around 40%. This is a combination of a fast-growing turnover, controlled growth in the cost base and very strong fair value developments. And as I said, CapMan is financially stronger than ever before. And this is not only about percentages, but if we look at absolute numbers, we are reporting a number of record levels. So our assets under management at record level of just below EUR 5 billion at EUR 4.9 billion. Our revenue stands at EUR 48 million, our EBIT at EUR 46 million. And I could add that also our fee-based profit at around EUR 15 million is at a record level. Also, if you look at our balance sheet, it is very strong. Equity ratio above 50%, and we have close to EUR 60 million liquid assets. We are also committed to our policy of annually growing dividends. We have been doing so now for 9 consecutive years. Here, you can see in graphical format, the development of turnover and profitability by quarter during the last 3 years. And you can see after 9 months this year, the turnover stands at EUR 48 million, almost equal to the full year turnover of last year. And EBIT stands at EUR 45.6 million, actually exceeding the full year EBIT of last year of EUR 44.6 million and growth rates turnover, as said, plus 26% and EBIT up by 41%. We have been growing our EBIT, if you look at the LTM figures, the latest 12-month EBIT now for 9 consecutive quarters. And now we are at the record level here, LTM EBIT stands at EUR 58 million and that's a combination of 3 main things. It's a combination of continued growth in fee profit, it's a combination of growing carried interest income and also very strong development of our own investments, i.e., all of our main profit streams are contributing to this positive development. As I said in the beginning of this year, we have financially exceeded all of our targets. You might recall that we updated our financial targets in September so that we raised our growth target from 10% to 15%. We maintained our return on equity target at above 20% and we changed our equity ratio target to above 50%. And you can see here that on average, during the last 5 years, growth has been around 17% and now in the beginning of this year, close to 20%, so exceeding the target level. Return on equity during the last 5 years almost at the target level, but not quite. But if you look at '21 and the first 9 months of '22, we have clearly exceeded this target. And equity ratio has been very much in line with the strategic target. Our objective when it comes to dividends is to have an annually increasing dividend distribution to our shareholders and distribution has now been growing for 9 consecutive years. Let's then dig a bit deeper, look at the development on a segment level and as you might recall, we are reporting 3 segments: the Management Company segment, the Service segment and then the Investment Business segment. And if you think about our earnings stream, there are also 3 main components to that. So the Management Company and Service business are contributing fee-based income, fee-based profitability. From the Management Company business, in addition to this, we receive carried interest income. And then on our own balance sheet investments, we, of course, get returns on investments, and we make fair value changes every quarter. And if we based on this breakdown, the EBIT of the first 9 months, the EUR 46 million, into the different components, you can see what I mentioned in the beginning that all of our segments have improved their performance. So the Management Company EBIT, EUR 14.7 million. That's up by 48% or close to EUR 5 million from last year's figures. The Service business driven by CaPS and JAY Solutions, also making very strong progress, so up by over 60% or approximately EUR 2 million plus, now at EUR 5 million EBIT. And then very strong performance in the Investment business, improving by close to 40% from the record levels of last year. So the change, plus EUR 9 million. If you look at our Other and Elimination segments, our group cost segment, there you can see an increase in costs of just below EUR 1 million or some 24% excluding the impact of the onetime vesting of our performance share plan earlier this year. And this adds up to the reported EBIT of some EUR 4.6 million. Happy to see contributions from all the segments positively. And if we then look closer at the fee profit. So now we are looking at the Management Company business and the Service business combined, you can see that overall, top line growth has been 16% on average per year since 2017, and if you look at the fee-based growth, excluding carried interest income, that's been very much in line, growing at an average of 17% per year. And if we then look at the profitability of these segments, we look at the total profits, then the average annual growth has been 28%. And excluding carried interest and focusing on the fee-based profit, that has been growing by close to 50% per annum over this time period. And we expect the growth in fee-based profit to continue strong over the next years. We have a solid cost base. We have maintained good cost control, while at the same time, adding some key resources to our organization to support future growth. If you look at total operating costs and their development in the first 9 months compared to the same period last year, you can see that we, in total, have increased about EUR 3 million costs or 10%, again excluding the impact of the onetime PSP early vesting costs. Of that EUR 3 million increase, approximately EUR 2 million comes from personnel expenses and EUR 1 million from other operating costs. The big picture here is that we have continued to scale our business. This is one way to look at it. Here, we are looking at fixed costs in relation to recurring revenue from 2017 to the third quarter of this year. And you can see that at the outset, fixed costs were more or less in line with recurring revenues. But today, their share is less than 70%. So we have made an improvement of over 30 percentage points over this period as an example of the scalability of our business, and this trend we see continuing also in the years to come. If we then for a while, leave the fee-based business aside and look at our balance sheet, we can conclude that the balance sheet is solid. We have book equity of close to EUR 140 million and an equity ratio in excess of 50%. This gives us very good financial stability in all market situations. We also have strong liquidity. Cash at hand was close to EUR 60 million, and we, in addition, have a EUR 20 million undrawn credit limit, so we can support the fee-based business, its growth and also support the already made commitments to new investments. Here, we can see a breakdown of our assets under management and CapMan's own balance sheet investments. And maybe one thing to highlight when it comes to assets under management, they're now close to EUR 5 billion figure, approximately 30% of that total figure is still uninvested. We have a lot of dry powder, and we see attractive investment opportunities in the forthcoming quarters and years. If we look at CapMan's own investments into the private markets, they were approximately EUR 170 million at the end of September, most of that in the private equity and credit space. And with these current allocations, we are looking on average return on our own fund investments of 10% to 15% per year. We clearly exceeded that number in 2021. And now in the first 3 quarters of this year, we are also clearly in excess of that with plus 30% returns on an annualized basis. If we look at our total own investments, including the cash position, we had EUR 224 million invested at the end of September. That's an increase of approximately EUR 28 million from the corresponding period last year. That change is a combination of 3 things. It's the fair value changes and the returns on investment and then also new investments into funds and also cash returned from these investments. But these are at high levels and the private market investments in total are approximately EUR 170 million at the end of September. And you can see fairly good diversification between different investment strategies. And behind these strategies, there are a number of funds. And behind these funds, there are a number of companies and assets. So the diversification is really good. We all know that the market has been weak in recent quarters and the valuation levels have been decreasing. We are, of course, accounting for that every quarter as we are marking our investments to market. But we have had positive development in many of the companies and also very successful exits which has, on a net basis, contributed to a positive fair value development for the first 9 months and for the last quarter as well. Happy to see this positive development continuing even in this challenging market environment. Here also a time series of how our own balance sheet has developed. I think the main point here is that the diversification has increased when it comes to strategies and also when it comes to the underlying assets. And this current diversification provides us good stability in this environment. The rise in inflation and interest rates has not to date significantly impacted CapMan's business. And if we look at the different earnings components, we can conclude that when it comes to management fees, they are not greatly impacted. They are based on long-term contracts and the same goes for our service fees where the share of recurring fees is significant. As interest rates rise, we see denominator effects and we see general uncertainty in the market. This might have a slowdown impact on our fundraising, i.e., the growth of our management company business and management fees over time with rising inflation and rising interest rates. When it comes to the fair value changes, of course, inflation and interest rates have an impact on the underlying assets. There's a great variability in the impact on these different assets. And of course, they also have an impact on the valuation levels upon which we value this. And as I just mentioned, we are every quarter taking into account the change in valuation levels and this has, of course, been a negative impact now in the recent quarters, but that's been accounted for in these figures. And also the diversified balance sheet is coming into play here. We are invested into many asset classes with very defensive characteristics. When it comes to carried interest income, here again, we might see impact on valuation levels and on timing of these exits. However, we have flexibility when it comes to the timing of the sale of our portfolio holdings. And on the expense side, employee expenses make up the majority of our costs. We do not have any direct inflation adjustment mechanisms in place, but with a continued prolonged inflation, we might see some upward pressures in these expenses. To date, we have not yet experienced this. Interest on debt is another factor where you might see impact in the term that future financing might become higher, but we have outstanding bonds with long-term fixed interest rates. So we are in a good position from this perspective as well. Let me then turn to our strategy, our strategic direction and in September, we launched our new 5-year strategy. We see very attractive long-term growth opportunities in the market. We feel that we are in an excellent position to take advantage of these opportunities, and we are looking to double the size of our business in the next 5 years. We have 6 main cornerstones upon which this strategy is built. Number one is to deliver top performance in all of our strategies through active value creation. This is fundamental. This is core. We have set ourselves a target that over 2/3 of our funds should be in the first quarter when we do international performance comparisons by the end of 2026. The second cornerstone is to scale up our existing strategies and products. We have launched a number of new teams, strategies and products in recent years, and we're in a good position now to scale up these products. And we are looking to double our assets under management from the approximately EUR 5 billion to EUR 10 billion in the next years. ESG is very much at the core of everything that we do. And what we want going forward is to integrate it even more as a core theme in all of our business activities. We want, for example, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. We want to improve gender diversity, and we want to integrate ESG into all of our remuneration programs. CapMan is nothing without its people. It's important that we are able to attract and develop the best talent in the industry, and we are closely monitoring employee satisfaction, and we have set ourselves a target that the Net Promoter Score should exceed 50 points. We want to drive shareholder value through a combination of growth and improving earnings quality. We are especially looking to grow our fee-based profitability, and I have set ourselves a target of fee profit margin in excess of 40%. After the first 9 months of this year, the corresponding figure was 34%, so some work still remains there. We also look to have multiple funds in carry at all times. In addition to the organic growth, we also need to explore new products and M&A to achieve this ambitious target of doubling the size of our business, and we are proactively working on this as well. So with these 6 components, we aim to take the company to the next level in the next 5 years. Assets under management growth is a key foundation for our growth and you can see the historic development here, so steadily growing, almost doubling the assets under management in the last 5 years, currently at EUR 4.9 billion. We have been growing that every year. And if you look at the latest 12 months, we have raised some EUR 890 million in new assets. That's a gross figure. The corresponding net figure which we are showing in the graph also is EUR 590 million. The delta, in this case, EUR 300 million comes from capital that we have been returning to our fund investors after successful exits. Correspondingly, if you look at the first 9 months development, gross intake EUR 530 million, and on a net basis EUR 360 million. If we then look at the outlook for private markets, the overall message is that growth is expected to slow down somewhat, but still remain on a very attractive level. What we are showing here is some very recent data by Preqin where we look at the growth rate of global assets under management under different time periods. To the most right-hand side of the graph, you can see the total alternative assets market, you can see that the historic growth 2010 to '15 was some 8.5%; in 2015 to '21, close to 15%; and now the forecast for '21 to '27, corresponding also to our strategic period, lies at around 12%. So even though going down still remaining at a very attractive level. You can correspondingly see the figures for all the different key subsegments of the alternative assets market. When it comes to the more short term, we are seeing some slowdown in the fundraising market this year and probably early next year and expecting a pickup in the market, again, in 2024, that is the growth rate pick up in '24. And if we look at CapMan's business, we see similar trends here. But we see very confidently on the underlying fundamentals of the market and the growth drivers over the long term, which remains strong and intact. So if we then go back to our plan, we think about where is the assets under management growth coming in the next few years, we can look at it through 3 different perspectives. If we look at this from a product perspective, we can see that approximately half of the growth is coming from open-ended structures, 30% from existing closed-end strategies and some 20% from new products and M&A. And correspondingly, on the bottom row, if you look at where capital was raised from during this year, you can see that the mix looks fairly well aligned with our strategic target. When it comes to the geographic dimension, we are looking for approximately 3/4 of growth from international investors. And in the first 9 months, 64% of capital came from investors outside the Nordic space. And finally, if we look at it in terms of strategy, we can see that real estate and infrastructure are estimated to bring in the largest part of growth, and that was also the case during the first 9 months of this year. Here, you can see our current ongoing fundraising projects we are developing largely as planned. We are ahead in some of our projects like the residential fund. We are slightly behind schedule in some of the projects like the social real estate fund. But overall, we are to date progressing as planned. We particularly see continued good investor interest towards strategies such as infrastructure and special situations. We have completed some very good transactions in recent months. These transactions have driven our fair value development and cash flow to a large extent. If I pick some good examples from the third quarter, I would mention the exits from Fortaco in our Buyout business, the exit from Norled in our Infra business and also the exit from Avidly in our Growth business as examples of that. But also when it comes to transaction activity, there are signs of some slowdown in the activity over the short term, but still maintaining a fairly good level. If we then look at carried interest income, we currently have 2 funds in carry: Growth Equity 1 and Nordic Real Estate Funds 1 turn into equity -- turn into carried earlier this year. There are several assets remaining in both of these funds. As these exits take place, we record carried interest income at the CapMan level. Also, we expect further funds to move into carry over the next 12 months. And as you recall, our strategic objective is to have constantly several funds in carried interest so that this income stream grows and becomes more steady than it has historically been for us. CapMan's renewed vision is to be the most responsible Nordic private asset company. We are hence putting ESG at the very core of all of our activities. We have put a lot of resources and efforts into developing these functions and our know-how within this area. And hence, it is also positive to see when external parties are assessing our progress that we are moving in the right direction. On this slide, you can see some examples of recent scorings. The PRI scores for 2021, 4 stars for Strategy & Governance, Private Equity and Real Estate and full 5 stars for Infrastructure. Correspondingly for GRESB, for 2022, our Infra 1 fund, 4 stars out of 5, and CapMan Residential being now evaluated for the first time receiving 3 stars out of 5, a very good achievement for a first-time fund being evaluated. So we are moving in the right directions. But of course, we aim for the full 5 stars on all fronts. Our objective is to distribute an annually growing dividend to our shareholders and in fact, our distribution has now increased for 9 consecutive years and from the 2021 result during this year, we have distributed EUR 0.15 per share. The corresponding EPS for 2021 was EUR 0.21. And now if we look at the development this year, it looks very strong in terms of EPS. So for the first 9 months, that number was already at EUR 0.22. So we are in a good position to continue on this trend and support our policy going forward. I already mentioned that we updated our long-term financial objectives in September. You can see them here and growth over 15%. And as I said before, here we are performing well. Return on equity unchanged at over 20%. Here also performance in '21 and '22 exceeding the target. And equity ratio previously over 60%, it's now over 50%. And here, historic figures and most recent figures are well aligned with this. Our outlook estimate for 2022 remains unchanged. And I would like to conclude by saying that I'm really pleased with how our business has developed during the first 9 months of this year. I truly believe that CapMan is operationally and financially stronger than ever before. I'm also excited about our new strategy, which we are now actively executing. We are on track to double the size of our business in the next 5 years. In the short term, I can see some weakening, some slowdown in the markets of fundraising and transactions, but I'm confident in the fundamentals of the underlying market and of our ability to create value in this market for our investors and our shareholders. Thank you very much.