Foresight Group Holdings Limited (9LR.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Foresight Group's Half Year Results to 30th of September 2022. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Foresight Group, Bernard Fairman, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

Hello. I'm Bernard Fairman, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Foresight Group, and I'm delighted to welcome you to Foresight's half year results for the 6 months ended 30 September 2022. I'm joined today by Gary Fraser, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Foresight. Today, we'll take you through our financial and operational highlights, our business review and our financial results for the period before closing with current trading and outlook. We then welcome your questions. Since our IPO at the beginning of last year, Foresight has successfully built on foundations across the business, built over our 38-year history to deliver a consistently strong performance. I'm pleased to report that the last 6 months have continued this trend, delivering a financial performance well ahead of our expectations as a result of both organic growth and acquisitions. I wanted to start by reminding you of Foresight's excellent track record of profitable growth. Over the last 5 years, we've recorded AUM growth of 37% compound. And over the last 3 years, the period in which we reported under IFRS, core EBITDA pre-share based payment growth was 40% per annum. This has accelerated over the last year, where we've delivered AUM growth of 54% and core EBITDA pre-share based payment growth of 41%. And this is high-quality growth, with our margin having consistently improved and now sitting above 42% for the period. Turning now to a brief reminder of our business model. Foresight is a sustainability-led investment manager with a robust and diversified business model, both geographically and by business activity. We have a diversified investor base, split 2/3 institutional, 1/3 retail, which was tipped towards institutional in the period due to the success of our M&A strategy, which I will come on to later. In the first half, around 10% of our income was from Europe and Australian-denominated funds. Following the consolidation of Infrastructure Capital, this has increased to over 20% in the month of October. Substantially increasing the contribution from overseas currencies is a key objective and a further diversification target for the business. We invest through 3 investment divisions: Infrastructure, Private Equity and Foresight Capital Management. Through these, we aim to leverage long-term structural demand that will create multiyear opportunities in our attractive key markets and generate long-term sustainable investment returns. The success of our business model and strategy can be seen in our delivery of 37% AUM compound annual growth rate over 5 years and in a 40% compound annual growth rate in EBITDA over 3 years. It's also evident in consistent recurring revenues of 85% to 90% and in a dividend payout ratio of 60%, which based on the current share price represents a 50% increase on the yield since IPO. First half of financial year 2023 has been another highly successful period for Foresight and demonstrates how our unique business model has enabled us to make significant progress against our strategic growth targets. We delivered strong AUM growth of 41% to GBP 12.5 billion and this was driven by both significant acquisition activity, which added GBP 3.3 billion additional AUM and organic growth. This is well ahead of our target annual AUM growth range of 20% to 25% per annum. Funds under management, which represents our fee-earning assets increased by 38% to GBP 9.2 billion during the period. Our high-quality recurring revenue of 89% is comfortably within our target range of 85% to 90% and demonstrates both the quality and predictability of our revenue generation. The core EBITDA margin was 42%, up from 34.6% only 18 months ago. As we've increased our investment size and added operational leverage to the business whilst maintaining our cost discipline. We remain on track to meet our target 43% margin over the medium term. In line with our policy to pay a total dividend of 60% of profit after tax, we are declaring an interim dividend of 4.6p per share, which will be paid in January 2023. We also continue to make significant progress against our sustainability targets, including a new partnership with Eden Project. I'll now pass you to Gary to take you through the financials.

Thanks, Bernard. I'm pleased to report another standout period with significant growth delivered across our key metrics. And I'm going to start my section by going into a little more detail on AUM growth. Turning to Slide 8, where we highlight the significant and consistent progression of group and divisional AUM growth. Firstly, if we look at the group as a whole, we achieved an impressive 4.9x growth in the period between 31 March 2018 and 30 September 2022. Then breaking this down on a divisional basis and looking firstly, Infrastructure, a division which we began to build in the mid-2000s and remains our largest division by AUM today. We grew AUM from GBP 2.2 billion in FY '18 through to GBP 9.7 billion. This represents a 4.5x increase, and we believe we are now one of the fastest-growing European and Australian real asset investors. This division continues to benefit from very significant long-term structural growth trends, which have been amplified recently by tailwinds created by elevated power prices and a renewed focus on energy security. The potential impacts of the U.K. electricity generation levy have already been reflected on a group AUM and will have little overall impact on Foresight Group's revenues as we move forward. Then looking at our PE division. This is a higher margin but smaller division that still grew at 3x during the period to 30 September 2022, with an acceleration evident in the first half of the current year driven by success in fundraising and M&A. We were able to deliver this growth by successfully implementing a focused strategy based on regional investment which provides us with a real point of differentiation from our peers and a competitive and deal pricing advantage for our investors. Finally, looking at FCM, our Capital Markets division. Since 31 March 2019, this division has delivered a very impressive growth of 12x. This division has significant capacity to continue to build scale without materially increasing its cost base, and we are very much focused on improving our distribution capabilities to expand internationally. Now moving on to Slide 9. Our AUM bridge, which clearly shows a step-change in AUM in the period, with the acquisition of Infrastructure Capital delivering 2/3 of this growth. Combining this strategic activity with a significant organic growth we achieved last year and the continued organic flows and valuation uplifts delivered in the period, we have now grown our AUM since IPO in 2021 by 74%. With larger but less frequent M&A and institutional fundraises being a key contributor to our growth, today, we are evolving our existing 20% to 25% per annum AUM target to a more market standard average growth rate over a rolling 3-year period. Now moving on to Slide 10, which goes into more detail on the breakdown of our GBP 12.5 billion AUM. Looking firstly at the chart on the left-hand side, you can see our AUM split across 3 distinct business divisions, with our largest division Infrastructure contributing 78% of AUM. This division provides significant diversification for the group through its broad geographic footprint, which expanded materially in the period with almost 50% of AUM now held outside of the U.K. across both Europe and Australia. Secondly, moving to the central chart. You can see that we also create diversification to our client mix, attracting investment from both institutional and retail clients. We like the split that we have here with retail funds offering very attractive revenue margins and a steady source of fundraising, while institutional can deliver significant growth within a short time frame. Finally, the chart on the right-hand side shows our AUM by fund type and clearly highlights the high percentage of AUM that we have within our LP and evergreen vehicles at 66%. These are sticky funds. And for context, the weighted average investor commitment in our LPs is an impressive and valuable 12 years. These characteristics all combined to deliver a high-quality and diversified platform that supports long-term and predictable revenue generation. Turning now to Slide 11, revenue growth. We've delivered 28% year-on-year growth to GBP 50.7 million, driven by higher FUM through increased deployment and valuation uplifts, new fund launches and the previously mentioned acquisitions. Our recurring revenue remains within our target range at 89% and is expected to remain in range for FY '23, showing the quality and reliability of our revenue generation. Within our recurring revenue, circa 80% is generated from funds that can continue to raise into the future, including listed infrastructure as well as OEICs and evergreen funds. We are also diversifying our revenue generation geographically. In the period, we delivered 10% in non-GBP currencies, but with the inclusion of a full 6 months of the expanded Australian asset base, we anticipate this to expand to over 15% for FY '23 and to increase even further in FY '24. So looking briefly at our revenue breakdown on Slide 12. As you can see, all 3 business divisions have continued to deliver revenue growth year-on-year, driven by 2 key factors: increased FUM and maintenance of fee margins. We continue to experience no significant pressure on the latter. This, combined with balanced divisional contribution we deliver provides us with revenue resilience and gives us confidence in our continued ability to deliver revenue growth through economic cycles. The contribution from Infrastructure in the second half of the year will increase to reflect the full 6 months of revenues from Infrastructure Capital. Turning to Slide 13 and costs. We expect underlying FY '23 admin expenses to be broadly in line with the 12% guidance we provided at our full year results in July, excluding certain expenses arising from acquisitions that are included here but will only recur for a limited time frame. The accounting treatment for the acquisition of Infrastructure Capital under IFRS 3 will impact our statutory reporting going forward, which we cover in detail within the appendices and in Note 21 of the financial statements in our half year report. There'll be no impact on our key reporting metrics. Run rate admin expenses for Infrastructure Capital and Downing for the second half of the year are anticipated to be an additional circa GBP 1 million per month. We continue to have a laser focus on active cost control while investing in our future growth by continuing to develop and grow our talent pool in key areas. At the period end, almost 50% of our FTE were investment professionals. And turning to my final slide, 14. This demonstrates significant EBITDA progression over the last 12 months with a 41% increase in core EBITDA, pre-SBP to GBP 21.5 million, which is approximately 8% ahead of consensus. This growth has been delivered with an associated margin improvement of 4.1 percentage points to 42.4%. There are some one-offs in that number where we expect margin for FY '23 to remain at 40% above, which is positive progression from FY 2022 when we achieved 37%. I'll now hand you back to Bernard for the business review and outlook. Thank you.

Turning now to a review of each of our 3 divisions. Following the acquisition of Infrastructure Capital Australia, our Infrastructure division is now one of Europe's and Australia's fastest-growing real asset investors. The acquisition of Infrastructure Capital was the primary driver of the exceptional 54% increase in AUM to GBP 9.7 billion, whilst FUM increased by 56% to GBP 6.4 billion. We continue to build scale in this division, and the rate of capital deployment increased substantially. We completed 24 transactions, the total potential investment of GBP 948 million in the period, with an average deal size twice that of the FY '22 average. Investments we made during this time have deepened exposure in our core asset class but at the same time, also expanded into adjacent asset classes, such as green hydrogen. An investment we made into HH2E, a green hydrogen developer, is a good example of how we can leverage the investment capabilities across our businesses to create opportunities. The structure of this investment and the presence of our management team got similarities with our private equity investment approach will be backed management teams to develop a business. This isn't the only example of how we're working across the business to capitalize on new opportunities. Our investment in fiber broadband also brings together the expertise of our Infrastructure and Private Equity teams. Going forward, our business model means we are uniquely placed to benefit from opportunities just like these. We also benefit from being active in multiple markets. Our broadening geographic footprint means we're able to target the most attractive markets at any one time. For example, 70% by value of our transactions in the period were international, with the percentage increasing when looking at future deployment rights. It's always been our approach to be country-agnostic, looking for the best opportunities across the world. And our investments in the period provide clear evidence of this approach. In the future, our strategic priorities are focusing on growing the business, which we'll achieve through fundraising for both new and existing funds and marketing leads to both new investors and to our now significantly expanded pool of existing investors. The ongoing effort to reach Net Zero continues with many trillions of dollars needed to drive expansion in our end markets, providing a strong multiyear foundation for significant ongoing growth. Against the current macroeconomic background, we believe that investment into sustainable infrastructure will contribute to global energy security, to economic growth and to job creation. And this will create high-quality, short-, medium- and long-term investment opportunities that will continue to drive successful growth for this division. Infrastructure Capital acquisition means that Australia now accounts for around 33% and of our Infrastructure division AUM. This represents a very significant expansion of our geographic footprint, which creates a further stranded diversification within our business model. In the past few months, we've made excellent progress with the integration of our Australian business and a significant number of Foresight's existing team have been out to our new Australian office, including myself. Our main Australian Renewables Fund, ARIF, already stands at AUD 1.7 billion and is currently fundraising with a target raise of further AUD 1 billion. We look forward to discussing the success of that with you at our full year results in July. Turning now to our Private Equity division. We delivered exceptional performance in the period with AUM up 39% to GBP 1.3 billion through a combination of organic and inorganic growth. Organic growth was driven by reaching first close of 3 new private equity funds, adding GBP 70 million in AUM and significantly increasing our regional footprint. In July, we completed the acquisition of the technology ventures division of Downing, a U.K.-based investment asset manager, which added GBP 275 million to our AUM and will meaningfully expand our retail private client offering to provide enhanced growth opportunities. Our portfolio remains balanced with exposure to both well-established and earlier stage companies across a range of sectors. The team delivered another period of strong activity deploying GBP 46.3 million of capital across 31 transactions and a further GBP 39.8 million committed to portfolio companies that provide specialist lending to third parties. The team continued to deliver investment outperformance with the completion of a number of successful realizations, including the sale of Codeplay software, which resulted in an impressive return of 16x, turning an investment of around GBP 3 million into GBP 49 million of sales proceeds, a truly exceptional performance. Looking forward, we believe that the GBP 1 million to GBP 5 million investment segment remains the most attractive in the U.K. market for value creation, and we're one of the 2 leaders in this space. Rising inflation as a result of supply chain issues and the war in Ukraine will only widen the SME funding gap, increasing the number of attractive opportunities available to us. Into GBP 1 million to GBP 5 million market segment, that is not a key part of the investment process. And so this has not created the challenge for us that many others are facing in the larger key investment sizes. Our team of 46 professionals has a great depth of experience across multiple economic cycles and is working with our existing portfolio of companies to facilitate their continued success under challenging conditions. Our strategic priorities for private equity are focused on effectively managing our current portfolio and driving growth through an expanded deal flow, giving us access to new opportunities and fundraising for new and existing funds. Moving to our third business division, FCM, where we leverage our deep knowledge of private markets to provide opportunities in listing markets. During the period, there were inflows of GBP 26 million in contrast to the wider U.K. open-ended market, which saw substantial net outflows. However, the significant volatility seen in financial markets during the period led to a performance drawdown of GBP 163 million resulting in a decrease in AUM of 8.5% to GBP 1.5 billion. Although by way of contrast, the FTSE 250 was down approximately 20% over the same 6-month period. Looking forward, in an environment of rising inflation, the ability of FCM's strategies to invest in assets and sectors that provide exposure to companies with inflation-linked returns and significant income generation will be increasingly beneficial for our investors. We're now focused on broadening our distribution to channels including private banks and family offices globally as well as establishing a greater presence in direct-to-consumer sales as the Foresight brand becomes increasingly recognized. And finally, we're also making good progress in the international sub-advisory market and hope to secure a mandate with the U.S. partner before the end of the financial year. Turning now to the long-term outlook for the group, following our highly successful first 6 months in FY '23. As a prominent investor in both European and Australian sustainable infrastructure as well as regional private equity, the long-term structural trends in our markets mean that the opportunities for Foresight in multiple different markets are increasing. The decarbonization of energy generation and the shift to a more sustainable society is accelerating, but these changes cannot happen instantly and they present a multiyear opportunity for us. We're therefore confident that the outlook for Foresight in the coming year and beyond is very positive. This is supported by our robust and differentiated business model, which offers us ongoing opportunities to deliver and create value for our diverse investor base of more than 200 institutional or over 40,000 private investors. Our stated M&A strategy, including the recent acquisitions, will also contribute to the group's growth profile and delivery of our targets. The opportunity for international expansion outside of the U.K. will be one of our strategic priorities next year as we seek to further diversify our revenue generation. It's just a combination of factors that enables the ongoing successful execution of our sustainable investment strategy to deliver consistent, profitable growth and therefore, increase our dividends to our shareholders. Finally, I'd like to leave you all with a reminder of the excellent track record of profitable growth that Foresight's delivered to our investors: 37% 5-year AUM compound annual growth rate, 40% 3-year EBITDA compound annual growth rate and a big improvement to our margin post-IPO from 34% to 42%. Thank you all for listening. I'd now like to pass back to the operator to open the lines for questions.

[Operator Instructions] And we will take our first question from Tom Mills from Jefferies.

I had a couple, please. Firstly, I think, Bernard, you mentioned the ARIF fundraising targeting. USD 1 billion -- AUD 1 billion, sorry. Could you perhaps give us a bit of a steer as to where else you could see fundraising coming through as we move into FY '24? And then on the distribution side, could you perhaps talk a bit more about the initiatives to expand on the retail distribution? And how do you see Infrastructure Capital opening up expanded opportunities in the institutional channel for you?

Tom, thanks for that. I'll deal with the 2 ICG questions and -- or the ICG question and the funds question, and Gary will talk about extra retail distribution. In terms of our pipeline of fund, we have a pipeline of institutional funds following ARIF. Foresight Energy Infrastructure Partners, FEIP, raised GBP 850 million last year, it's pretty close to pretty much on 70% committed will raise a successor larger, lightly larger fund next year. To remind everybody, Foresight Energy Infrastructure Partners has invest in the energy transition and has a worldwide mandate. It's quite Western European-orientated, but increasingly, we're doing deals in Australia and the U.S. So that's the next one. And that's likely to get a flying start from existing investors re-upping, also obviously true with ARIF. They're both existing mandates, if you will. Couple of new funds, new mandates, Foresight core European renewables fund. This is the fund we're raising now likely to be between EUR 500 million and EUR 750 million, and it's investing throughout largely Southern Europe in wind and -- so existing wind and solar. We've got a long track record of buying assets, aggregating and/or improving performance before selling on. That's raising money now. One interesting point, going around talking to potential investors, we get lots of feedback on our sustainability, our actual sustainability as opposed to what people talk about. People can see through the -- increasingly can see through the [ flimflam ] and they can see that we're actually delivering sustainability across our whole business. I mean people will have heard me speak a little while ago about the Eden project partnership, for example, that has quite significant implications. So that's that one. And another one, again, we're in the process of beginning to raise now a hydrogen fund. We are one of the few infra investors that I think is actually made in the hydrogen investment suite. I talked about one a little earlier on in Germany. We've got close relationships with Fortescue through our Williams Advanced engineering joint venture. Fortescue is one of the biggest hydrogen investors in the world based obviously in Australia, who I think will become a hydrogen powerhouse, very important going forward. So I think in terms of new funds, that gives you some idea on pipeline. I think in terms of distribution, we will use the Australian hub as a place to distribute products that currently we wouldn't have been able to access the Australian supermarket with. Australian supers are notoriously difficult to penetrate. We do have about 30 of them as investors in ICG funds and will be -- and are offering on the full range of product that we're producing in the U.K. and elsewhere. Also, I think Southeast Asia is a -- and Japan is an opportunity that we will be accessing either by tying -- enter into a relationship with a bigger -- a much bigger group or by entering it through placement agents. But clearly, we've got a big footprint in that part of the world. Gary, do you want to talk about the retail distribution?

Yes, sure. So in terms of the retail distribution, in the U.K., we've obviously got our own team, about 45 people. We're always looking at ways that we can improve that to develop that further and to raise further funds. Internationally, we're looking at it in terms of 3 geographies almost. So the U.S., Europe and the Far East and Asia to really maximize retail distribution. We're looking at joining with third parties to do that in each of those different areas. The furthest advanced of those is the U.S., where we're going through SEC approval at the moment, and we'd expect to launch that very early in the new year. And that's the lowest cost way for us to do that. So -- and we would look at replicating that type of scenario both in Europe and the Far East and Asia in terms of retail distribution. So we expect to be able to announce something, especially with regards to the U.S. in the not-too-distant future.

Thank you. There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand over to Elizabeth Scorer to read out the recent questions. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I can also confirm that at this point, there are no written questions. So I will simply hand back to Bernard for some closing remarks.

Good. Well, thank you for that. In conclusion, clearly, these results are well ahead of estimates and demonstrate strong growth. I mean, by any account, these are very good results, organic growth and operational leverage coming into play here. Our EBITDA margin fall is excellent relative to our target. There is, I think, some chance that we actually expect to -- that there's a high likelihood of our basing on existent forecast. We plan on doing that for the rest of this year. And we'll continue to grow funds at the top line whilst others in today's market aren't. It's a strongly differentiated story. We're not quite a large business. We intend to get materially larger. We are very impactful in the markets in which we operate. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening. The share price is beginning to get the story, but our business that's growing at 40% or 50% in the last few years, trading on a -- of PE of around 10% or 11% seems like a strange combination. And hopefully, the message will become better as result of today's presentation. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you for listening and we look forward to speaking to you next time.