Partners Group Holding AG (PGHN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Partners Group Update conference call and live webcast. I am Sandra, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to the Partners Group management. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Welcome to the Partners Group business update and outlook call. I hope you're all well. My name is Dave Layton. I'm the CEO of the firm currently joining from the United States. Also presenting on today's call will be my partner and our CFO, Hans Ploos, who's joining from Switzerland; as well as my partner and the Co-Head of our Global Client Solutions team, Sarah Brewer, who is joining from London. It will be good for you all to get to know her. We'll also have Philip Sauer, the senior member of our business development team in Switzerland. He'll be on for the Q&A portion of the call. I'd like to start the presentation today on Slide 2, and this is really just a quick summary of some of the key messages from the first half of this year. We've been pleased with the strength and stability that the platform has continued to demonstrate this year. We have very good momentum in the business. Our clients entrusted us with $12 billion in new capital commitments in the first half of this year. As an organization, we've created a culture where we put our clients at the center of our business, and we're genuinely motivated, driven and humbled by the trust that they've continued to demonstrate in our organization. Our total assets under management at the end of June showed a step forward to $119 billion. Looking into the second half of 2021 and frankly, well into the future, we continue to believe that there will be a strong market for our investment solutions. We see sustained demand from our investors, with many, many investors today looking to increase their exposure to private markets and we have a unique approach of providing bespoke private market solutions in addition to traditional private equity, private infrastructure, private debt and private real estate investment program. Given the robustness of client demand in the first half of this year, we've increased our guidance for full year fundraising. We currently expect to onboard between $19 billion and $22 billion for the full year 2021. Sarah will elaborate on this a little later in the presentation. Now turning to the investment side. As our H1 figures show, we've successfully converted on the robust investment pipeline that we highlighted to you previously. In this period, we secured a number of investment opportunities that had been advanced during 2020. And it continues to be a competitive market for new investments, but our thematic sourcing strategy has been a strength for us. We secured for our clients $13.1 billion of attractive investment content in the first half of this year. We leverage our entrepreneurial ownership approach to transform portfolio companies into market leaders, and we're getting good feedback from many clients on our relative performance and on our results. Our overarching investment strategies remain unchanged, and I'll speak a little bit more about investments and realizations later in the presentation. And with this introduction, let me now hand over to Hans, who will walk us through our assets under management development. Hans?

Thanks, Dave. Also a warm welcome from my side. As already mentioned by Dave, we had a strong start of the year, confirming that our growth trajectory continues. Let's move to Slide 4. We reached USD 119 billion in assets under management at the end of June versus USD 109 billion at the end of December last year. We continue to deliver strong sustainable growth. Our transformational investing approach to deliver superior returns is based on capitalizing on thematic growth trends and transforming attractive businesses into market leaders. In essence, we invest in the sectors where future growth is and buy and build companies to be the leaders in those sectors combining winning sectors with building winning companies is what it is all about. The growth confirms that our clients are confident in the strength of our thematic investing approach and in our private market platform. Let us go to Slide 5. We received USD 12 billion in new commitments over the first half of 2021. Fundraising across the 4 private markets asset classes was largely in line with assets under management. We saw good sentiment for fundraising that was supported by pent-up demand, strong closing activity of larger flagship funds and sound investment activity. Starting with private equity, which represents 58% of our total inflows or USD 7 billion. Fundraising was supported by a solid deployment base and a strong track record of realizations. On the traditional offerings, private equity clients demand came in from our fourth buyout fund, which is approaching its final close. On the bespoke client solutions, we saw both strong growth of mandates and open-ended funds. For example, our open-ended U.S. flagship fund recorded its highest ever inflows during the 6-month period. Private debt represented 23% of all new commitments or USD 2.8 billion. Our debt business continues to benefit from a low yield environment and was driven by 2 strategies. First, our CLO business. We raised 3 new CLOs in the first half of the year, which contributed USD 1.3 billion in new asset raise. Our CLO business represents 6% of total AUM and is expected to grow strongly in the years to come. The second strategy is our direct lending business. It contributed around USD 1.5 billion in AUM and stemmed mainly from senior loan programs. Private real estate represented 8% of new commitments or USD 1 billion. Real estate grew relatively less than the other asset classes as it is in between fundraising cycles. Real estate is in the early stage of marketing its new flagship fund, which targets global real estate opportunities. We expect this program to contribute to fundraising in the next 12 to 18 months. Private infrastructure represented 10% of new commitments amounting to USD 1.2 billion. Infrastructure is in the midst of fundraising of its next-generation direct offering. We're seeing strong demand and expect a relevant contribution to fundraising from infrastructure over the next 6 months. Fundraising was also broad-based across the different customer offerings. First, we saw strong commitments for traditional closed-end funds accounting for 36% of client demand. Second, we saw increased demand for our bespoke client solutions, which now account for 64% of fundraising. These include open-ended evergreen funds and tailored mandates to meet client needs for diversification in private markets. Evergreen programs were the fastest-growing category and grew 15% over the first half of 2021. This is driven by the strong performance combined with robust inflows. It is becoming clearer and clearer that more and more clients ranging from private individuals to institutional investors appreciate the flexibility of choice we offer with a range of nontraditional private market offerings. We believe our ability to provide tailored access to private markets by creating an actively managed bespoke client solutions remain unique in the industry. With that, I would like to move to Slide 6. Now that we discussed the USD 12 billion gross inflows, let's go through the impact of tail-downs, redemptions, exchange rates and other effects. We have good visibility on tail-downs and redemptions Therefore, we can provide the market with clear guidance on these 2 factors. Starting with tail-downs. They amounted to USD 2.9 billion. The majority of our programs have a long duration yet 1 day mature AUM decline. The reduction in AUM typically follows a predefined mathematical formula, hence, the impact is known. Redemptions are different. We managed USD 33 billion in evergreen programs, which provide some form of liquidity. The redemptions were USD 1 billion in H1 2021. Important to mention that evergreen programs were again a net contributor to growth because the inflows were 3x the level of the redemptions. We do not have visibility on factors such as exchange rates and the other items. And as a result, we do not provide guidance on them. Foreign exchange effects amounted to a negative USD 1.6 billion. This was mainly driven by 3% lower euro against the U.S. dollar at the end of June 2021 compared to the year-end of 2020. Remember, 46% of our AuM come from euro-dominated programs. With regard to the other effect, AuM growth in the first half of the year was helped by continued strong performance across our private market portfolios. This led to a positive contribution of USD 3.3 billion from our portfolio of evergreen products that link the AuM to the net asset value development. Overall, this resulted in a net assets under management growth of USD 9.8 billion during the period or an increase of 9% versus December 2020. Let's move to Slide 7. Here, we provide you with a more detailed overview of the AuM breakdown and fundraising by asset class. As you can see, we saw strong client demand across all asset classes and double-digit growth over the last 5 years. Our largest asset class, private equity, contributed the most in the first half of 2021 in both absolute and relative terms, reaffirming the strong global demand for our unique transformational investment approach and confirms our leading position in the largest segment of private markets. While we expect our growth to continue to be broad-based across all asset classes, we do foresee private equity and private infrastructure to outperform in the near term. Before handing back to Dave, I would like to conclude that we're extremely pleased with our fundraising and our investment efforts. Our investment and client pipeline is robust and gives us the confidence as we enter the second half of the year. Back to you, Dave.

Thank you, Hans. Now let's move to Slide 9. This slide shows a breakdown of the $13 billion of new investments for the first half of the year. As we previously discussed, we started 2021 with a robust pipeline of attractive investment opportunities, which were delayed for a variety of reasons in 2020. We had a strong H1 for new investments, but admittedly, this was at least partially a result of some catch-up effects from a lighter prior period. The private equity market today is a broad and deep market. Our investments represent only about 1% of the global buyout and growth transactions completed during the period. Considering the private equity itself only represents around 10% to 20% of global M&A markets, that tells you how much upside and how much opportunity there is. And we're confident that we can continue to grow our investment activity while remaining selective and providing attractive relative value at the same time. In this first half of 2021 in terms of strategy, we invested the majority of capital, 59% or about $8 billion in direct transactions, while the remaining 41% or about $5 billion went into portfolio assets, such as secondaries, primaries and broadly syndicated loans. For those of you who follow us more closely, you'll note that this is the first time where we're showing broadly syndicated loans as a separate category. These includes assets or raise for collateral loan obligations and net inflows into dedicated liquid loan investment vehicle. This has become a more recurring and substantial part of our private debt business, we've decided to include the inflows, which represents the initial investments made in for those vehicles in our investment figures. We retrospectively adjusted the investment volumes to include liquid loans until 2016. As Hans said, CLOs represent 6% of assets under management, and we've been an active CLO issuer. Over the past 5 years, we've raised 15 CLOs in Europe and the U.S. In terms of geography of new investments, the U.S. was the most active region for Partners Group's investment business during the first half of this year. It accounted for 55% of all investment commitments versus 32% in Europe and 13% in Asia Pacific and the rest of the world. Examples of U.S. investments announced during this period include Axia Women's Health, a leading provider of women's health care services that's well positioned to expand within the growing women's health industry; Idera, a leading provider of software solutions that enable customers to navigate the digital transition; and Dimension Renewable Energy, which is a community solar and battery storage platform that supports the low carbon transition. Our thematic investment strategy is all about identifying long-term structural trends, and we try and find sectors and subsectors that are well positioned for transformative growth and the assets that are best positioned in these markets to be future market leaders. Now let's move to Slide 11. Across asset class and across geography, we've had some great case studies. Maybe let's zoom in on Unity Digital Infrastructure. Unity will build and operate telecommunications towers in the Philippines and their strong demand for these assets, with unit volume of data traffic in the country forecast to grow at 45% per year until 2025. Unity aims to yield secure long-term contract -- contracted cash flows with telecommunications providers, and it will also support the transformative trends around digitization and rising data consumption in the area. The company is expected to benefit from new government-backed initiatives in the country to improve wireless service levels, including the introduction of industry targets to build at least 50,000 new towers. Key value creation initiatives are aimed at building and operating towers, acquiring tower portfolios and increasing tenancy levels. The investment is expected to have a broad positive stakeholder impact. It's going to increase communications and improve poor service quality levels across the country. It's in a structurally attractive space, thematically relevant. I think our team did a great job here of getting in front of it. And it's a great example of the type of investment content that we're generating for our clients right now. Now our portfolio performance has also been strong as we look on the next page. We've continued to see solid value creation generated by our transformational investing approach. We communicated in our prior call that we saw promising potential for calendar year 2021 in terms of exits, and that has been the case thus far. We generated $10.5 billion of underlying portfolio realizations in the first half. We also have good visibility on exits that were materially progressed or signed in the first half of this year that had closing conditions, which pushed them into the second half. These high visibility liquidity events are expected to result in at least another $5 billion in distributions in H2. We've been locking in some solid outcomes for our clients. And needless to say, these strong results have led to particularly upbeat conversations with some clients more recently. Let's now move to Slide 12, and here's a couple of concrete examples of those exits. One strong exit we've announced in the first half of this year and closed in H2 is our sale of U.S. digital engineering services company, GlobalLogic. We sold for an enterprise value of $9.5 billion. Partners Group invested in GlobalLogic in 2018, and this is a space and a target company around which we've spent a considerable amount of time developing our thesis. We've applied our entrepreneurial governance approach to drive several transformational value creation initiatives and to accelerate the company's growth trajectory. Initiatives have included launching dedicated sales strategies to address niche customer segments and expand key accounts. During our ownership, we've increased GlobalLogic's employee base by more than 7,000 additional employees, software engineers, engineers and data experts. We've also completed 4 strategic add-on acquisitions, including 3 in Europe, which further expanded the business. Additionally, we have enhanced the company's focus on environmental, social and governance initiatives, helping the company to establish a dedicated ESG function in a midterm strategy. Our investment in GlobalLogic generated an average gross multiple in excess of 5x for our clients. We've also completed the sale of Cerba HealthCare, which is a leading European player in medical diagnosis. During our ownership, we led Cerba's successful consolidation strategy within France. We also penetrated new international markets, including Italy and Africa, and we launched a strategic initiative to expand Cerba into an adjacent category of veterinary testing services, an area we have a lot of experience in with some of our other portfolio companies. And we had already achieved a leadership position in that segment in France by the time of our agreed exit. Last but not least, we've steered the successful repositioning and expansion of service research business for biotech and pharma companies. During this past year, the company's core processing capacity has been expanded dramatically to keep up with demand for COVID-19 testing, and Cerba is uniquely positioned today as a very attractive asset in this sector. We generated a return in excess of 2.5x for our clients and in our co-investors, another good outcome. Another recently announced exit, which is expected to close in the second half was the sale of a large-scale U.S.-based portfolio of industrial real estate with a combined leasable area of 8.6 million square feet and this investment generated a 2x return for our clients. We built this portfolio of quality assets across attractive industrial markets, gaining exposure to key transformative trends, such as the rise of e-commerce, and the relatively outsized expansion of regional growth cities. We're proud to see the transformational results that our team has driven here. With these and other exits, they've given a strong contribution to the distribution profiles of a number of our investment programs, which are at different stages of their life cycle. They also further strengthened and solidified our performance track record. Now with this, I'll hand over to Sarah Brewer, who's a long tenured leader at Partners Group. She's a member of our executive team and the Co-Head of our Global Client Solutions effort. Sarah?

Thank you, Dave. It's a real pleasure to be on this call with you all today. So I'll be concluding this presentation by providing some more details on our full year 2021 fundraising outlook. So please let us move to the next slide. We expect that the secular growth trajectory of the private markets industry in general and for Partners Group, in particular, will be -- will continue to be driven by 3 key trends. Firstly, the growth of institutional assets under management globally; secondly, the structural trend of rising allocations of institutional investors to private markets. And indeed, a recent study conducted by Preqin indicates that about 90% of investors expect to maintain or actually increase their allocation to private markets over the next 5 years. And that's a trend that we very much observed firsthand here. And thirdly, the outperformance of private markets against public markets, driven by the superior governance and active ownership. To implement these target allocations, institutional investors are seeking private market firms that have proven not only in terms of returns, but in terms of service and governance as well. Many clients that we speak to now demand far closer interaction and deeper relationships with their fund managers as well as the ability to provide bespoke private market solutions that are tailored to the specific and ever-increasing complex requirements. They require increased portfolio transparency, sophistication and reporting and a commitment, clearly, to all ESG topics. It's our belief that Partners Group is well positioned to service all of these aspects given the breadth of the platform we have. In particular, we see ourselves as a market leader in providing investors with tailored access to private market with a 20-year track record of structuring and managing mandates as well as private market's evergreen funds with certain liquidity features. With this, let's move to the next slide, where I'll provide you an update on our fundraising outlook for 2021. As you'll recall, in January, we've provided guidance of $16 billion to $20 billion gross client demand for the full year. Based on robust client demand in the first half, we are adjusting our guidance today to an anticipated bandwidth of $19 billion to $22 billion for the full year. And we use scenarios to derive our guidance. So let me give you a little bit more detail on that. We based this guidance on a bottom-up analysis of our various open offerings as well as indicated client interest. So the lower end of the range assumes more potential market uncertainty and that conditions in transactional markets worsened for the remainder of the year. On the other hand, the upper end of the guidance is based on the assumptions that the situation around COVID-19 continues to further improve and that the benign fundraising and investment market continues. With this guidance provided, there's clearly a skew of our fundraising activities towards the first half of the year. And as Hans mentioned, this is mainly driven by some pent-up demand and a strong closing activity of the larger flagship funds, which we don't expect being repeated in the second half to the same extent. Our bottom-up analysis indicates that fundraising will continue to be diversified across asset classes with private equity the largest overall contributor to inflows. As mentioned, we're in the final innings of fundraising for Partners Group's fourth private equity buyout program, which was a significant contributor to inflows in the first half of the year. And we'll close for some final investors in the second half. We will separately inform our clients and shareholders about the final close when it takes place. Three client trends we observed in the market at the moment are as follows: number one, increased exposure generally. And as mentioned, we see clients globally looking to increase their exposure to all private market asset classes. So our existing clients are looking to increase their allocations, and we also are approached by new clients looking to gain exposure to the private market asset classes. Secondly, clients increasingly want to invest across different asset classes. So historically, clients would often come to us asking for exposure to a specific asset class. And now in the U.K., for instance, we have seen clients ask instead to say a risk return profile to meet their specific needs where we often can put forward a multi-asset class portfolio to solve this. And thirdly, transition into mandate strategies. In Germany, for instance, we have had several examples of clients moving from our more traditional LP structures, interim mandate structure so they can tailor their specific investment requirements, they can invest continuously through cycles, and they're not necessarily reliant on when the next flagship fund is out. These structures also can make the governance of private markets in many cases, simpler. Needless to say, traditional LP structures remain an important part of our fundraising as demonstrated by the H1 results. With that, I'd like to move on to the final slide of today's presentation. And Slide 16 will look familiar to you and highlights the consistency of our private markets platform. After talking about the expectations for new client commitments, let me provide some overview on the negative factors. Our full year estimates for tail-down effects from the more mature close-ended investment programs and redemptions from evergreen programs have not changed from previous guidance. Tail-downs and redemptions are estimated to negatively affect AuM by around $9.5 billion, of which around $7.5 billion are estimated to be tail-downs and our expected base case of redemptions from evergreen's amounts to around $2 billion. As in previous years, we do not provide guidance on other effects such as FX rates. So let me conclude today's presentation by saying that while many variables will drive the actual outcome, we're confident that this will be another solid fundraising year. The structural growth drivers for the private markets in general and for Partners Group, in particular, are very much intact. And conversations that we have with clients continue to be extremely positive. Now I would like to conclude by saying thank you for listening in. We look forward to speaking to you again soon. And on the seventh of September, we will present our H1 2021 financials. We'd now like to open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Bruce Hamilton from Morgan Stanley.

Great numbers. So 3 quick questions. On the -- given the level of exit realization activity, there isn't, I guess, any change at this point to your sort of the performance fee assumptions though, I guess, it would be plausible that you've reached the 30% based on current activity levels, at least for a half year period, I assume. So any comments you can give around that would be helpful. Secondly, in terms of the pickup in high net worth demand mentioned through the sort of semi-liquid structures. I guess, that's clearly positive. I think in the past though you said you would, given the complexity of those products, you would try to sort of manage the growth. I mean, that's now 28% of AuM. Is there a level where you wouldn't want it to push too much higher and say you try and manage the growth? Or how should we think about that? And then finally, just on sort of returns that you're underwriting in new investments given your thematic approach. I assume no major change? Or is it a bit lower? I think you said LPs are now expecting sort of low to mid-teens from funds rather than sort of high teens to 20%. Is that how we should think about it? So that's the third one.

Yes. Hans here, I'll start with the first question. I think the distribution that actually have confirmed that this has the potential to be a good year, which is what we said at the start of the year. We will have our call in September to discuss the financial results, and there we'll give an update what the impact will on performance fees. Dave, if you maybe...

And on -- yes, on the high net worth demand, we do indeed watch the mix of high net worth capital to ensure that it doesn't exceed certain thresholds. One thing of note actually for those evergreen structures is it's actually a pretty material portion -- that is -- in those evergreen vehicles, you can see institutional money. And it's not necessarily the same concern that we have with that institutional money that we have with a high net worth investor that is perceived to be -- have the potential to be a little bit more fruitful during periods of market volatility. But we do indeed limit the overall amount of evergreen capital as it relates to the total percentage of our assets under management. And you can think about 30% is probably being a pretty good level at which we're currently managing that business below in terms of total assets under management. Now in terms of returns for new investments, which was your third question, Bruce. This is a market environment where we do think returns have come under pressure. You have leverage levels that are a little bit higher, but largely consistent with historical. You have higher purchase prices. And we do think that there's been a couple of hundred basis points of pressure on returns overall to our industry versus a couple of years ago. But I think the way that we have navigated that with our platform and with our clients is to really add the operating resources that we need to fundamentally impact companies in a more substantial way. And so oftentimes, the assets that we are investing in today are businesses that we've tracked for years. We've built out an impressive bench of operators and advisers and future Board members, and we go into that investment with a very strong thesis of the impact that we can have. And so while market returns have probably come down, our returns have actually remained pretty consistent. And our underlying underwriting versus the same period in some of our prior years is actually higher today than it was a couple of years ago. But it relates to the impact that we anticipate having on those investments, not necessarily on the market situation overall, if that's helpful, Bruce.

The next question comes from Pascal Boll from Stifel.

Congrats on this stunning results, first of all. Secondly, I have one question. When I look at your invested assets in H1, I see that 41% are invested in portfolio assets and this compares to 33% in full year '20, when you also invested a lower asset amount. Will this have an impact on the fee margin going forward? And what kind of trends do you see going forward? Will you more invest in portfolio assets? Or will this trend see a reversal?

Thanks, Pascal, for the question. It's a good question. So that mix shift relates actually primarily to the inclusion of broadly syndicated loans into the portfolio portion of the equation. And so in the past, we haven't shown broadly syndicated loans because it's a more public style asset class. You can have $1 billion of publicly syndicated loans, for example, publicly syndicated loans, and you can trade in and out 100x and have $100 million of investment volume. And that's obviously not an accurate indicator of the investment volume. And so we've started to add the new inflows into our CLOs and broadly syndicated loan investment vehicles into that side of the equation, and that's a portfolio-style asset. So that explains the vast majority of that mix shift change that you're observing, if that helps.

Maybe I add a couple of comments. So over time, the mix will not change. And also from a management fee stability, you can expect what we always have said and have delivered that we have stability of management fees.

The next question comes from Gurjit Kambo from JPMorgan.

Just a few questions for me. So firstly, when we think about sort of the investing time frame, what we're hearing is that perhaps the time frame or the time for due diligence is becoming tighter. And I guess, therefore, what you need to do, I guess, is more speculative work, which I'm sure Partners does. How much of the competitive advantage is that for Partners, particularly in the kind of mid-market space where I guess some of your peers would be a lot smaller? So that's the first question. Secondly, just on the realizations that you've seen, so some good realizations. Is there any sort of mix of the buyers who've been helping the realizations? And are SPACs more of a kind of benefit in terms of potential acquirers of your assets rather than competing for your assets? So that's the second question. And then just finally, within the U.S., obviously, you've done a lot of investing there. Is there just more opportunities with thematic investing there? Or it's just the diligence you've been sort of looking at over the last few years happened to have been more in the U.S.? So those are the 3 questions.

Thank you. I'm happy to cover those for you. With regard to the tighter time frames, it is certainly the case. It used to be, years ago, if you wanted to buy a company within the private market, you had 4, 5, 6 months to do your due diligence from the time that the sale process was initiated until the time that it was concluded. More recently, those time frames have condensed to more like 4, 5, 6 weeks. And so what that means is that you can't come into a sale process expecting to do your work during that formal sale process. You need to come in with your prework already done, expecting to do confirmatory work not to start from scratch. And so I do think that, that phenomenon has benefited the larger platforms like Partners Group, and it's come at the expense of maybe some of the smaller monoline funds. If you're a large firm like Partners Group, we've got 1,500 people around the world. We've got 20 offices. We can spend the speculative resources on businesses that aren't going to be for sale for 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, and we do, do that. If you're a smaller firm with 5 partners or 10 partners that sit around the table, you need to focus on what's in the market today. And it's tough to compete. You can't do the type of work you need to do to write a $500 million check in 6 weeks, you can't do it. And so I do think that, that is one of the areas that has allowed us to win more than our fair share of transactions over the last couple of years is our ability to get out ahead of those situations, do the thematic work and prepare to transact. That's the first question. The second question with regards to realizations and the mix of buyers, it's actually reasonably balanced. We've had some exits to large public companies. Some of the higher-profile exits that we've announced have been that way. We sold some to private equity. We've had a couple of dividend recaps leveraging the very supportive financing markets. And so it's a real range, no concentration in any one area that's of note. SPACs I think have been overdone, overplayed. We don't see them as active as maybe the media would paint them to be at least not with regards to being genuinely competitive for many of the assets that we're selling. And your third question with regards to the U.S. and why are we finding relative value in the U.S. I don't think there's anything structural there. I think many of the topics that we're focused on identifying really good assets that are well poised to take advantage of structural tailwinds just happened to have been in the U.S. market. There's -- it was less of a relative value decision us saying the U.S. market is more attractive right now and it was much more of a bottom-up outcome where the assets that we found most attractive in the topics that we were focused on happened to be in the U.S. That's the way I think about that mix.

The next question comes from Giblat Arnaud from Exane BNP.

Yes. I've got 3 questions, please. Firstly, if I can start with home run GlobalLogic. When we compute or trying to estimate the performance fees from that deal, it looks like you could be earning a year's worth of performance fees from one deal, but it's an investment advantage in 2018. So I'm just wondering when we should be thinking about the likelihood of these performance fees coming through in terms of fiscal years? Secondly, on your fundraising, I appreciate the update from Sarah and the messaging there. But so the implied fundraising you're guiding for H2, $7 billion to $10 billion in an environment that still feels pretty strong. So I mean, if I come to that $7 billion to $10 billion, which you've achieved previously, it doesn't seem like there's a seasonality in fund raising. So I'm just wondering if the guidance -- if you're being a bit conceptual on the guidance? And finally, I'm just wondering if you could discuss, perhaps, the opportunities, the pipeline there you see in terms of deploying capital in the near distant future?

Do you want to start on and maybe I'll add some color on GlobalLogic?

Yes. So on the performance fees, it is as we expected in March that this is the potential to be a good year, but it's early in the year or so, but it's a potential for a good year. We will, in September, announce our financial results, and we will include an update on the performance fees there. So that we will do in September.

But just in general, some of the thinking errors that people have maybe had in the past on performance fees. Sometimes they'll take kind of the enterprise value and assume that all of that is equity, but we actually have debt on there as well oftentimes. We also have co-investors oftentimes. In addition to that, oftentimes, when we acquire a position, that equity will be spread across dozens and dozens of different investment vehicles. And so it's not -- all of them are in different stages of their life cycle. Some are in carry mode, won't be in carry mode for some time. So there's not a one-to-one direct correlations you can draw between an exit and performance fees in a particular period. We'll give you more guidance on that.

Yes. And I think to add to that quickly, I think what is important, our range, which we always say on the medium to longer term is between the 20% to 30%. We're not also overfocused in any given year. It's important to have a post recovered. We are where we are. But I think that we really take that mid long-term view that our performance fees will be within the 20% to 30%.

Yes. It's not an annualized, it's a long-term guidance. Do you want to take the second one with regards to -- it's not about seasonality of funds losing. It is so about bottom-up analysis. Give some color on that.

Exactly, exactly. So we really derived that guidance, as I said, from bottom-up analysis, and that is around client demand and the open offerings as well. And as mentioned, the first half, there was strong closing of larger flagship funds and pent-up demand. And we don't expect that being kind of repeated to the same extent that we've seen in the first half.

The next question comes from Hubert Lam from Bank of America.

I just got a couple of questions. Firstly, can you talk about how competition has changed in fundraising and investments over the last 9 months? Has it intensified? Has there's been any impact on fee margins and valuations? That would be great. Second question is, can you give us also an update on your relationship with UBS, which you announced last year? If you started to offer products yet to this channel and it's contributing yet to fundraising?

Thanks, Hubert. Maybe with regards to competition. This is a competitive market environment. I think, clearly, we see competition on many fronts. For me, it feels a little bit more intense on the investment side than it does on the fundraising side. I really do think that our bespoke client solutions approach provides a healthy level of differentiation for us versus many of our peers that tend to have one big fund that they raise, but it isn't to the point where we're seeing decompression on our core flagship programs, but it is a competitive market environment. Now on the investment side, it is a dogfight, Hubert. And we are, I think, differentiating ourselves quite well with regards to the amount of free work that we're doing, and we're winning our fair share of transactions. You have to pay a market price in any market environment. And it is clearly a competitive market today, but we're I think we're holding our own in this market despite the level of competition. Sarah, do you want to touch on the UBS? That's an area that you're close to.

Of course. Yes, of course. So for the full year 2021 and more in general, during a ramp-up phase, i.e. kind of like within the first 3 years, we expect inflows to amount between $0.5 billion to $1.5 billion per annum. And thereafter, subject to successful implementation of the initiative between $1 billion and $3 billion per annum. And of course, there's volatility within that range. Any guidance we give on gross assets raised will include the expected new flows from this joint venture.

The next question comes from Jens Ehrenberg from Citi.

Very good numbers, indeed. Just a couple of questions from my side. Firstly, sort of on the fundraising guidance you've provided. So I appreciate you said I think real estate is likely to be stronger in the next 12 to 18 months and then infrastructure likely stronger in the next 6 months. Now just if I look at what you've raised already, clearly, private equity has been particularly strong at roughly $7 billion. In the previous half years, you always had sort of at least, I think, about $3 billion. What's the expectation for the remainder of the year there? Would you expect that -- is that pretty much raised now and you don't expect as much as in previous half years? Or is there still more to come on the private equity side as well? Secondly, I was curious and since Sarah touched on sort of the split between bespoke solutions and the closed-end funds and presumably more in a medium- to longer-term view. Would you think there could be any structural change in the sense that people move a little bit away from the traditional flow spend funds and more into sort of tailored solutions like you've -- I guess, you've seen in Germany already? And just a final question I have this really. When it comes to growth, I mean, clearly, the entire sector benefits from a very strong growth backdrop. I'm just curious, what do you see as real constraint in growth? Is it really that you say, okay, we could do $19 billion to $22 billion based on client demand? Or would you say we could potentially do more, but it's really on the capital deployment side that it wouldn't make sense to get any more money through the door? That's it from my side.

Okay. Maybe I'll cover the first one. So the private equity business has been particularly strong. And we saw a nice uplift in demand and interest. We had a couple of things going on. Number one is there's just real demand coming out of COVID for institutional investors for private equity right now. And as we're on calls with prospects and with existing clients, private equity is a topic and I think people are looking to increase their exposures there. They're looking to increase their exposure to various private equity markets topics in general, but private equity in particular right now is strong. Number two, we've posted some pretty good results. And oftentimes, that will spur interest from clients if you have particularly good outcomes, and they see strong distribution, sometimes that will spark up real interest. And then we have a buyout program that's in fundraising, and we saw some good interest in that this year. So I think it's those dynamics that are all kind of hitting at the same time in the first half of this year that drove that spike in terms of mix in the private equity. I wouldn't -- I don't think infrastructure real estate are doing anything wrong. I think it's just particularly interested in private equity right now. Sarah, do you want to cover the second question on trends?

Yes, of course. And you asked about bespoke mandates and solutions. And for us, that's broken down into both evergreen products and solutions and then mandates. And as I mentioned in one of the examples, we see quite a few of our clients transitioning from a typical traditional limited partnership into a more mandate structure, which we have a lot of experience in doing and we have a head start with, I guess, in the industry so that they can customize their mandate to the specific requirements and needs that they have. So that certainly has been a trend. And I think we're well set up on that side and on the evergreen side to take advantage of the more bespoke needs that clients have and responding to that. It does go without saying, however, that the traditional limited partnerships are still a growth area within our business as well. And that was demonstrated from the first half results and the funds that we have out in the market.

That's great. And with regards to -- it is a growing sector. I do think you're seeing a structural shift for many people's public portfolios into the private markets, as indicated by some of those surveys that Sarah showed at the beginning of her section of the presentation. In terms of constraints for growth, I really do think that there's an institutionalization that needs to occur within our asset class to evolve past historical limited partnership structures towards a more sophisticated set of products that makes the asset class available. And that's one of the strategies that we've been pursuing is to be a group that's leading that innovation, providing more bespoke solutions, providing solutions that work for private clients and potentially DC investors in a more thoughtful way. And that's the biggest constraint for growth. I mean, clearly, private equity has room to run with regards to the share of global M&A activity that it occupies. But I do think that the industry just needs to take a step forward with regards to the types of programs that it makes available to investors to make them a little bit more user-friendly. That's the third question.

We have a couple of questions actually from the webcast tool from Charles Bendit from Redburn. Dave, I think, actually the first 2 are for you, which basically he asked that following a strong period of divestments, whether you could please share some thoughts on the dynamics that you are seeing in the different exit channels at the moment? And likewise, also since it has been a very strong period for investment activity, whether it has been harder to complete transactions and maintain pricing discipline in a market that appears to be buoyant. And the last question will be here for Hans, where he basically will ask -- or basically asked, how our hiring has been during the first half of the year and how it will continue for the remainder of the year. Dave, do you want to start?

Sure. So with regards to the trends or the dynamics within the exit channels, I would say that people are being a little bit less prescriptive with regards to the exit processes that they ran. Maybe in the past, people would launch an exit process with a very strong hypothesis on if the best route for an asset was to go public, if it was to sell to a strategic or if it was to sell to another financial buyer. Today, you see oftentimes people starting and initiating an IPO process. Also having conversations with large strategic acquirers and private equity buyers at the same time. That was actually the case on GlobalLogic. We were preparing to go public and had some conversations with a large strategic that ran kind of simultaneous. And we're also in discussions with a number of other potential acquirers as well. And so that's maybe one trend of note that we're observing in the exit market. So I think it can be challenging for buyers who don't have a clear focus and a clear orientation because I think you'll see probably win rates come down unless you were just laser-focused on the right areas. The question was asked that it's been a strong period for investment activity and how do we maintain our pricing discipline? Our strategy is to pursue a global relative value strategy. And so we work on these themes for a very long period of time that we come together in a global investment committee and we'll evaluate the risk return trade-off between opportunities that we're seeing in one sector against the opportunities we're seeing in another sector, opportunities in one geography against another geography and really finding the opportunities -- the investment opportunities for our clients that represent best global relative value that we're seeing in the market at this point in time. And that's the strategy that we've pursued for a long period of time, and it works. We're not a firm that tries to time the market. We find the best opportunities in any given vintage for our clients to construct thoughtful portfolios with those. And then we are laser-focused on value creation right now as a means for offsetting some of the pressure that we're seeing on valuation. Sarah, do you want to -- or Hans, do you want to talk about some of the hiring trends?

Yes. Over the first half, our headcount was essentially stable. Now you need to remember that in 2020, our average headcount was up 12% on the back of very strong hiring in 2019 when the headcount was up 19%. We reduced some of the hiring in the beginning of last year. And the outcome of that is that our headcount is essentially stable. But again, it's after 2 years of very strong hiring. Having said that, we will step up and increase again, the hiring because our strategy continues to be is to support future growth, and we do that with our margin targets.

We have a question from Máté Nemes from UBS.

I have 2 questions, please. Firstly, on investments and holding periods. Some of the examples you mentioned, obviously, were very successful transactions that came after 2, 3, 4 years of investment period only. And also broadly, I think, in the industry, we've seen basically a compression in the investment cycle as well. So I'm just wondering how do you view this shortening of investment in holding periods or cycle going forward? Is this sustainable? Is this something that could continue? Or it's unlikely that this can be sustained for an extended period? And then secondly, in the first half, you've seen a bit of an increase in the share of investments in APAC. Could you perhaps highlight some of the opportunities you see in the region and whether we should be expecting the share of the region to keep rising from here?

That's great. I'm happy to take those. So with regards to holding periods, I think over the long run, you're going to see an extension of duration, not a shortening of duration. Obviously, this is a very active and robust market environment, and there's a number of very active buyers that are prepared to pay what would be attractive prices for sellers of good quality assets. And so there might have been a shortening of holding periods in this period, in particular. But over the long run, number one, investors are much more focused today on compounding value than they are on distributions. It used to be before you could raise your next program, you had to show a certain level of distribution. And today, we're seeing investors that are much more focused on compounding for the long run as opposed to on getting quick distributions. And so I think that demand and push from clients will show up in longer holding periods by service providers and asset managers. And so I think that shortening of the whole period duration that you've observed in this current period will be trumped ultimately by the longer term more structural change. And with regards to share of investments in Asia Pacific, we do have some upside in that region. Asia in any given period today can be up to, let's call it, 1/3 of global transaction volumes. So we have some good upside there. I think we have a fantastic team on the ground. A couple of the advanced pipeline opportunities that we had included on were in Asia Pacific this period. But I would expect gradual growth in that area, nothing dramatic in the near term.

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