Pacific Current Group Limited (PAC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Pacific Current Group 2021 Full Year Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Paul Greenwood, CEO and CIO of Pacific Current Group. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you. And thank you all for joining us on the Pacific Current's FY '21 results call. We appreciate your interest in PAC and look forward to taking you through FY '21 as well as sharing some thoughts about the future. In general, we feel really good about the year. As we walk through, I think you'll see why. Of course, our reported results look a little more modest because of the currency impact when translating results into Australian dollars. But given that more than 90% of our revenues are in U.S. dollars, looking at the results in U.S. dollars seems to provide a more accurate understanding of what is fundamentally going on in our business. For those unfamiliar with PAC, our business model is pretty simple. We invest in high-quality asset management firms on a global basis. If we do our job well, those firms will produce strong performance, which helps increase the revenues and attract additional clients and funds under management. The amount of funds under management and to a lesser degree, the performance the managers generate, produce revenues and profits at each investment manager. PAC's revenues are composed of its share of the profits or revenues of our portfolio companies. On Page 3 of our presentation, we provide some high-level observation regarding performance, growth and earnings. In terms of performance, results were quite good for our private capital strategies, with many of them are rebounding very well from last year. Our long-only strategies didn't fare as well, but on the -- they gave back some of the stellar results from last year, though, their intermediate and longer-term results remain excellent. In terms of growth, FUM growth was exceptional during the year, growing 52%. And as everyone is probably aware, a lot of that growth reflects its dramatic growth at GQG Partners whose firm -- whose FUM actually grew 90% in U.S. dollars to $84.7 billion. However, even excluding GQG, we still saw aggregate FUM growth of 11% across the portfolio, most notably at ROC and EAM. In terms of headline financial results, the most noteworthy items, I think, are that underlying net profit before tax grew 13% in U.S. dollar terms and 17% growth in underlying NPAT in U.S. dollar terms. Those numbers are more modest when you look at it in Australian dollars, they're 2% and 5%, respectively. A final dividend of $0.26 was declared, bringing the full year dividend to $0.36 a share compared to $0.35 last year. And the profitability of our business just based on our management fee-related revenues grew really nicely during the year because of our -- the growth in management fee revenues that we received and as well as the reduction in costs during the year. We'll elaborate on all of these a little bit more as we go through this. Page 4 of the presentation summarizes the underlying results in more detail. We, I think, for the first time, put the results in Australian dollars and U.S. dollars side-by-side. And I think that paints a more comprehensive picture of the actual fundamental results of the company. And as you look at the slide, you really get a sense of the impact that currency had on results. As a good example of this, if you look at revenues in Australian dollars, they declined 4%, but in reality, they actually grew 7% in local currency. Another good example is that PAC's management fee-related revenues grew 10% when translated into Australian dollars, but in reality, grew 23% in U.S. dollars. Performance fees and commissions declined notably during the year due to lower performance fees from Carlisle, SCI and VPC, though ROC had a meaningful increase in performance fees. And commission revenues declined in FY '21 as commissions from GQG ran off. Going forward, we expect lumpier commissions, but it's worth noting that the commission revenues for the private capital strategies that we are attempting to raise capital for, those tend to be higher than they are for long-only managers. So while we expect commission revenues to be more volatile going forward, they still may be very meaningful. Page 5 highlights something we call management fee profitability. This is a metric that we introduced at the midyear, and it just tries to give a picture of how profitable our business is, if you just look at the management fee revenues and disregard performance fees and disregard commission revenues and strip out -- and put all of our costs against it, except the commission expenses. So it's sort of -- I think it was sort of the organic profitability of the business. And you'll see that, that grew very nicely during the year. And to us, we like to see that a higher proportion of our profits is comprised of more repeatable revenue streams. And that's, I think, the takeaway of that page. Page 6 of the presentation highlights the growing portion of our revenues come from investments where we share in revenues rather than profits. And this is a very intentional feature of our strategy. But we go out of our way to blend our investments by making some where we're participating in the revenue of companies and some in which we're participating in the profits of those companies. The revenue share arrangements provide more consistency and downside protection, while profit shares provide more optionality. And this flexibility in structuring investments, one of the things -- one of the other sort of virtues of it is it gives us more shots on goal when competing for new investments because many of our competitors don't exhibit that same degree of flexibility, and we find that we can win deals based on our willingness to invest with a broader array of structures. And then for those wondering, as you see, this growing portion of our revenues coming from revenue shares, Page 9 shows which investments are revenue share arrangements and which ones are profit share arrangements. And I think, hopefully, we've laid that out in a way that's clearer than we have in the past. Page 8 is merely a reminder of our investment approach and philosophy as we go to seek new investments and new investment managers to partner with. Page 9, that lists the portfolio and which one of those are Tier 1 and Tier 2 and give some general information around them. But I think most notably, what sort of -- what's the nature of our economic involvement. And then moving to Page 10. That page highlights some sort of more significant portfolio developments during the year. They're relatively self-explanatory, but I'll elaborate on a couple of them. Obviously, GQG remains an incredible story. Their growth has been phenomenal, growing 90% off a base of more than USD 40 billion is an incredible achievement. They continue to be one of, if not the fastest-growing, investment manager in the history of the investment management industry. So obviously, we're [indiscernible] that and incredibly grateful for that partnership. The other one I wanted to highlight was Victory Park. As noted -- as we've mentioned in the last midyear call, they have been an active participant in the U.S. SPAC market as they have participated in launching 4 SPACs. And I won't get into a long discussion on what SPACs are because they can get complex. But people should understand that these SPACs that they've launched do not -- or they've sponsored don't -- aren't funds that don't represent funds under management for Victory Park, but they do represent a way that they can enhance the value of their clients' portfolios through improving returns. And that impacts PAC via potentially enhanced performance fees and incentive fees, which we would expect to see as a result of the success they've had on that front. Moving on to Page 11. As I mentioned, performance has generally been strong. Our long-only managers, as I mentioned, they had such good years the prior year, they gave back some of that. I generally expect that after a very strong year of performance. On the private capital side, we are very pleased with the performance of most of our managers. When the pandemic first hit some of our portfolio of companies, sort of systematically wrote down the values of their portfolios just to be -- because in the sort of the fog of uncertainty, they wanted to be conservative. Nearly all those write-downs have been reversed and not only have asset prices recovered nicely, but those -- our portfolio that are selling assets are generally realizing very attractive prices and valuations for what they're selling. And the recovery in real asset prices, which had been in sort of a decade-long bear market that has -- but have perked up more recently. That's been a particular help to both Aether and Proterra. Page 12 just details the FUM growth over the last 3 years for our portfolio. And Obviously, GQG sort of breaks the scale on this. But I think the point we're trying to make here is that if you look across the portfolio, you see broad growth. And there's a couple of these that we didn't own for that entire 3-year period. But in general, we have. And last year, Roc and EAM were the biggest growers in the portfolio aside from GQG. And I think it's one of the things that's really important to note about or remember about our portfolios, because we have a lot of these alternative strategies that raise capital via a series of serial funds as opposed to through open-end fund structures like a long-only manager. They tend to grow a little more deliberately and -- but have more resilient -- but have more resilient revenues. And so private equity firms don't grow 100% a year, they grow in a more measured way. And we've intentionally tried to blend once again that sort of consistency that they can offer with the higher optionality with higher risk of long-only type strategies. And these private capital strategies, I think, over the next year or 2, we're going to see some broad and significant growth across many of them. Moving on to Page 14 just provide some statistics on our pipeline and potential investments. So I think what the real takeaway there is the market is very robust right now. We're seeing lots of deals. We're seeing more competition in our space in general. And some situations, we've seen deals get done at levels -- or valuation levels we think are excessive. The good news is we've been doing this long enough and our network is -- generates enough proprietary opportunities that we don't feel any real constraint by the valuations that we -- some of these higher valuations that we've seen some deals get done at. So we are very comfortable that we can continue to find new investments at valuations that are reasonable. And then last page, Page 15, before we get to some questions, and there's obviously a lengthy Appendix, but we wanted to offer some more prospective thoughts on the business. And I guess I'd start with that our portfolio of companies are starting to have better visibility into their future fundraising. I think this stems from increased allocator activity. When the pandemic started, all these allocators just sat on their hands, but now they're becoming more active. People are also becoming more accustomed to allocating money during the pandemic and processes have evolved to make that happen. And then we're also seeing an increase in the level of sales activity. And I can't say that we're traveling as much as we have. We've only done a few small trips, our sales team, to sell products, but you are seeing more sales-related activity. And in this presentation, we also call out that we are expecting at least $3 billion to $8 billion of new allocations in the next 18 to 24 months for our non-GQG managers. We exclude GQG because they've grown so fast, it's hard to predict, but we would expect them to grow nicely as well, of course. And -- but that $3 billion to $8 billion is not rampant -- or it's not just idle speculation that, hey, these firms are raising money. For the most part, this is -- that estimate is a reflection of our knowledge of specific client interest in specific products. So we really feel pretty good about the outlook for this, and we expect it to be sort of broad across the portfolio. And in fact, what is hopefully a proof point on this just in August, so last month, actually, I guess, it's this month in the U.S. still. But Victory Park secured its first Australian account, which is a multi 9-figure account and hopefully, the first of many to come. And I think we'll be seeing some more -- like I said, more data points like that throughout the year and actually, I think, accelerating as we get into the next calendar year. And then we also expect to deploy more capital. Nothing is imminent, but we are working on putting in place a significant new debt facility that we hope to have in place in the short term, that will, along with the cash we have on hand, provide us with ample firepower and dry powder to pursue some of the more interesting deals that we're looking at. So after a challenging 18 months, we know the world is not out of the woods yet, but we're very optimistic about the future and where we sit. And while, of course, there's no guarantees and there are many things outside of our control, I mean in the last 18 months, probably taught us all that, we expect additional growth in FY '22 and in FY '23. And we think that will come from organic growth. We think that will come from contributions from new investments, probably greater performance fees as well, although those by their nature, are harder to predict. So we can't guarantee that. And I think only -- any increases in costs should be modest increases at all, if any. And then the last thing is, as people are aware, we have had a fairly significant skewing in our dividend in recent years towards the second half of the year. And I think we'll still see some of that skewing, but we are going to try to make that a little less skewed towards the second half than the first half as we go forward just to make it a less bumpy ride. So with that, we are happy to answer any questions. And we'll ask the operator to queue them up.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll now take a question from Nick Burgess with Ord Minnett.

A couple of questions. Just around the outlook and that fund flow statement that you gave. Can you give us a little bit more color around those flows, perhaps which boutiques you're most confident in over the next couple of years?

Sure. I -- what I'd say is I'm broadly comfortable that -- well, I'm comfortable that this will not be 1 manager driving it. I expect, like I said, broad success. So I would be surprised if we don't see Pennybacker, Carlisle, EAM, Victory Park, Proterra and I'm probably missing Astarte. I'd be surprised if we don't see all of them have some decent success on the fundraising side here in the near future. And I should mention -- I'm sorry, Nic, but one thing I'd say is part of that is because these private capital strategies have fundraising cycles, right, where they go to market every so often to raise the next one of their funds. And so I'll give an example that we expect in next calendar year, Pennybacker to be market raising the next fund. And given their exceptional performance, we expect them to be successful in raising that. So it's -- like I said, it's not just idle speculation. It's a function of knowledge of when they're going to be raising money, what the status of their current fundraising environments are. And in many cases, what specific prospects they're talking to on.

Yes. Okay. And that makes sense. I guess the range though is still pretty broad, $3 billion to $8 billion. So perhaps what are the sort of risk factors or things that would bring it towards the bottom end versus the top end?

I think that is a good question. I think -- I guess it's -- the reality is institutional accounts are big and lumpy. And so as we look at the -- as evidenced by that account I alluded to with Victory Park, and so whenever you're talking about clients that might average $100 million, if things don't go your way, you could -- it just takes 2 or 3 things working against you and you have a disappointing outcome. But that said, I think that, that $3 billion mark, I hope, proves to be very conservative.

Yes. Okay. That's helpful. Just a couple of other questions. So I think you quickly alluded to this on the call, but I guess, given your positivity around the pipeline and increasing levels of activity, we should expect that the underlying corporate costs to increase a little bit over the next 12 months?

Yes. I would say very modestly. So the only -- it's -- the big variable, frankly, is travel and entertainment. We -- internally, we budgeted half of last -- or half of a full years' of travel, assuming that we get down the road half time this year. It looks like that's not going to happen. So I would say we are -- I'd be -- we're just -- there's not only modest raises across the company. There's no other planned cost that would be noteworthy aside from if the world frees up, we'll send out our sales team more aggressively.

Okay. And just lastly, in terms of potential deal flow opportunities, Slide 14, there's some detail there around the opportunities that you've seen. Just wondering if you could refine that a little bit in terms of where your interest mostly lies across that spectrum of opportunities.

Sure. Well, we tried to be open-minded to everything. And -- but that said, I'd say the -- where we tend to -- where we're engaged in more interesting conversations these days are some more private real estate firms and a couple of, I'd say, call it, interesting private equity firms. But all strategies, as you can tell by that pie chart, all strategies are -- we're looking at all strategies. But right now, it happens to be a little bit more in the private real estate world. We've been looking at a lot of private credit firms. They are -- some of them are getting bid up to valuations that -- where we don't feel comfortable playing. But we are really intrigued by what we're looking at in the real estate segment right now.

We'll now take our next question from Brian Shortt with [ Shortt Family Superfund ].

Paul, I'd just like to compliment you on the results presentation. I think that's serving well to make the accounts less complex and a bit easier to understand. My specific question is on repatriation of earnings from boutiques. It looks like the revenue sharing boutiques, it seems reasonably straightforward. But with the repatriation for the profitable performance boutiques seems a bit less straightforward. Do you have arrangements for our annual distributions? Or is it at the discretion of the individual boutique Boards? Is that the case?

Yes. No, good question. Obviously, revenues are very easy to determine, and it's easy to sort of get those on a quarterly basis. What I'd say is on those profit share deals, they -- we don't -- we still get those earnings as regularly with the exception that most performance fees are received -- are either crystallized at the end of the year or on a totally idiosyncratic basis. And so performance fees are the ones where you can't look at one period and really extrapolate to the next. And -- but the bottom line participation of those deals of the profit share, we are getting those. We don't leave it to the discretion of management. We have -- when we make these arrangements, we put in something a definition of what we call distributable cash, which means any cash above these levels needs to be distributed to shareholders.