Thank you for standing by and welcome to the GQG Partners Inc. 2023 full-year earnings release conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. This call will contain forward-looking statements including statements of current intention, opinion, and predictions regarding the company's present and future operations, possible future events, and future financial prospects. While these statements reflect expectations at the date of this call, they are by their nature not certain and are susceptible to change.
The company makes no representation, assurance, or guarantee as to the accuracy of, or likelihood of, fulfilling any such forward-looking statements, whether express or implied, and except as required by applicable law or the ASX Listing Rules, disclaims any obligation or undertaking to publicly update such forward-looking statements. Participants recording this call may use such recordings for their internal business purposes only and are prohibited from making any part of such recordings available to the public without the prior written permission of the company. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Tim Carver, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thank you, and thank you all for joining us for our year-end 2023 results. We are very pleased with the result for the year as we'll get into here. If we go to Slide 2, I'd like to start with some financial highlights from the year. We first with flows of $10 billion for the full year ending for the full year of 2023, which I believe to be an outlier amongst our listed peers. That meant that we ended the year with funds under management of $120.6 billion, which was a 37% increase from the end of 2022. We've also had solid flows beginning 2024, and as of yesterday, we're nearly have added nearly $3 billion in net flows. Net revenues for 2023 grew 18.5% to $517 million, while net operating income grew 15.7% to $384 million.
Our earnings per share grew by 19% from roughly $0.08 to roughly $0.10, and the board has declared a fourth-quarter dividend of $0.026 per share, which represents a 90% payout ratio of our distributable earnings. If we flip to Slide 3, I'll give a couple of highlights on the business. First, as you know, I believe this business begins and ends with performance, so that's where we'll start. The good news is that on a long-term basis, our performance the team has put up just truly exceptional performance. We're going to get into this in a little bit more detail later on in the slide deck, but all strategies have now outperformed their respective benchmarks on a three- and five-year basis.
We have top-decile 5-year Alpha and Sharpe ratios for our four core strategies, and 11 of our 12 mutual funds now carry Morningstar gold medal ratings. On the back of the strong performance, our distribution team has been busy, and we've now achieved a top 10 U.S. mutual FUM family, which is something that is truly extraordinary for a firm of our age. You know, if you'd asked me this when we set out to start the business, that we could be a top 10 U.S. mutual FUM business inside of being 10 years old, I would have said there's no chance. So really an extraordinary accomplishment. In Australia, the flows have continued to be strong as well. We were the number 1 in net FUM flows for our global equity strategy and number 4 for our EM strategy in Australia this year.
Our UCITS complex surpassed $5 billion in 2023, and we continue to see strong subadvisory momentum across the board. We've grown the team fairly substantially over the past couple of years. We now, at the end of the year, stood at 189 in terms of total headcount. We added 35 people over the course of 2023, really focused on infrastructure and client-facing roles. And as we've talked about before, you know, my belief has been that over the past in 2022 and 2023, we really were growing our headcount in part to catch up with the growth of the business and in part for new initiatives. I believe largely that headcount growth is behind us.
Now, of course, as we grow incrementally, there will be some headcount adds, but I think the large growth in headcount that we've seen over the past couple of years really should taper off at this point, and we should see operating leverage in the core business. Finally, strategically, one of the most important things that we're undertaking right now is to launch an office in Abu Dhabi. Our view is that Abu Dhabi and the entire Gulf region is a strategic area for us in terms of asset growth as well as investment opportunities. Importantly, we believe that Abu Dhabi can afford us the opportunity to recruit talent from around the world, giving us a competitive edge in the all-important efforts around talent acquisition. If we move to Slide 4, you can see here simply the long-term performance.
Of course, this year, our emerging markets equity strategy had an exceptional outcome. International equity was very, very strong relative to the benchmark, and our global and U.S. equity strategies trailed their respective benchmarks on a one-year basis. But here you can see in all four strategies on a three, five, and since inception basis, they've all outperformed quite meaningfully. Going to Slide 5, you all know that I like to talk about our operational value added, and this is where you can hold us as a management team to account for whether or not we're adding value for our shareholders. I like to think of GQG at the beginning of the year as taking a snapshot and saying, "What did we do as compared to a passive version of GQG in terms of adding value?" I look at that in two factors.
The first is what net new funds were we able to drive? And secondly, what excess return compared to the benchmarks were we able to deliver? In 2023, you see that we added $10 billion in net flows and another nearly $7.5 billion in excess return. It's an excellent result from the team. And even more importantly, if you look to the right side of this slide, you can see what that looks like aggregated over the course of three years from 2021- 2023. And you see we've added almost $50 billion of excess FUM as compared to a passive version of GQG. It's really an exceptional result from my perspective. It only happens when a team comes together and really works effectively across the entire business.
With that, I'll pause, and I'll hand it over to Mel, and I'll come back in a few minutes to talk a little bit more about performance and a little bit more about distribution. Mel?
Thanks, Tim. Please turn to Slide 7. Our financial results are driven by long-term performance of our strategies. At the end of 2023, each of our four primary strategies, net of fees, has outperformed its benchmark on a trailing three- and five-year basis, as well as since its inception date. We believe GQG's high returns and low risk relative to the benchmarks and our peers are useful indicators of future growth. I'm pleased to report that in 2023, GQG's business continued to grow as measured by many key financial metrics. Let's quickly visit some of those metrics. During 2023, our funds under management increased 37% from $88 billion in 2022 to $20.6 billion by the end of 2023. Net flows increased 25% from $8 billion to $10 billion. Revenue increased 18.5% to $517.6 million. Net operating income increased 15.7% to $384.4 million.
Net income after tax increased 18.7% to $282.5 million. Our diluted earnings per share increased 19% before rounding to the earnings per share disclosed in our audited financial statements of $0.10 per share for 2023 and $0.08 per share for 2022. Dividends on 2023 earnings is $0.091 per share, dividends declared, up 17.3% from 2022. While we continue to invest in talent and the overall business, we were able to maintain a healthy operating margin of 74.3%. Slide 8, please. Our revenue includes asset-based management fees, which represent more than 96% of our revenue base, and performance fees, which represented less than 4% of revenue. We believe a high concentration of asset-based management fees in the revenue mix relative to performance fees creates stability in the revenue stream, particularly in times of market volatility, and is the foundation of quality earnings.
Our weighted average management fee increased 48 basis points in 2022 to 48.8 basis points in 2023, which we believe remains competitive. As a result, we may be less likely to face margin pressure in the future relative to peers with higher average management fees. Performance fees continue to represent a small portion of GQG's business. We have performance fee agreements with a total of 22 clients across all FUM investors and separately managed accounts, collectively representing approximately 5% of FUM at year-end. In 2023, revenue from performance fees totaled $19.7 million, representing 3.8% of our net revenue, and increased $9 million from 2022 due to strong relative investment returns during the look-back period of the performance fee agreements. Operating expenses increased 27.3%, with approximately 60% of our expense growth related to investments to grow earnings, and the remainder focused on managing the scale of our growing business.
Regarding compensation, as you know, GQG is a human capital business, with those expenses representing 56% of our total operating expenses in 2023, in line with the two prior years. The increase in compensation expense in 2023 is primarily the result of investments in new talent, annualized compensation associated with 2022 hires and 2022 market adjustments, and increased bonuses associated with 2023 employee performance. Third-party commissions, a FUM-driven expense, increased primarily as a result of growth in our U.S. mutual funds. The higher general and administrative costs are the result of managing a growing business with increases in legal and other professional fees, new leased space in Sydney and New York City, and increased digital marketing coverage. IT and information services costs were down modestly, the result of a new trading system previously included in IT service costs but reclassified to operating expenses within the general and administrative line item.
Taxes continue to be the largest single expense and increase with the growth in net income before tax, partially offset by an effective tax rate that declined from 28.23% in 2022 to 26.97% in 2023, reflecting various state changes and apportionment. Three factors, the geographical client mix, the apportionment state income rules, and unique state tax rates have the most significant impact on changes in the effective tax rate. It's difficult to forecast our effective tax rate with precision due to those three factors evolving every year. Over the last two years, the range in effective tax rates has been approximately 125 basis points. GQG continues to have a strong balance sheet. Slide 9, please. We have no debt, and our assets are more than nine times our liabilities. Our revolving credit line with HSBC was renewed in 2022 for two years and remains undrawn.
The cash balance at year-end is primarily comprised of the remaining 10% of cumulative distributable earnings. Distributable earnings, the basis of our dividend, is net income after tax plus the tax cash savings from the goodwill deferred tax asset resulting from the IPO. Of note, the taxes recoverable balance of $5.2 million in 2022 was utilized during 2023 for tax obligations in the U.S. Please turn to Slide 10. The primary uses of cash continue to be working capital and dividends or distributions. All the quarterly dividends paid in 2023 were 90% of distributable earnings, as is the dividend we're declaring today of $0.026 per share, a total of $76.8 million.
Other uses of capital include furniture and fixtures in the New York office and an additional purchase of FUM interest in the GQG global strategy associated with compensation plans designed to create alignment between GQG employees and clients. I'll turn it over to Tim Carver and Steve Ford to provide an update on the business.
Great. Thank you, Mel. If we can now move to Slide 13, I'd like to start here, and I think this slide helps really elucidate just how special the investment performance has been that the team has put up over the past five years. So what we did here is we looked at all active equity strategies reported to the eVestment database. That's 7,588 strategies. Now, we are a quality manager, which means that we expect to outperform, and we expect to do so with lower volatility and better risk management. So when we looked at that universe of 7,588 strategies and said, "How many of those have consistently outperformed?" And the way we measured that was to look at excess return in every five-year rolling period since inception.
When you screen the 7,500 strategies for that measure, it takes that down to 164 strategies that have had excess return in every five-year rolling period. We then applied the measure of lower volatility. Of those 164 strategies, we said, "How many have had 20% less volatility than their respective benchmarks since inception?" Only 11 of the 164 were able to achieve that lower volatility. Finally, we said, "Of those 11, how many have had excess return in each crisis period during the last decade?" The answer is four. All four are managed by GQG. When you look at this slide, I think it really calls out the quality that Rajiv and the team have been able to deliver on behalf of our clients first and benefiting our shareholders as well.
If we go to Slide 14, you can see this rolling five-year excess return across our four core strategies. As you can see, the excess return has been really quite meaningful. Looking at Slide 15, this is a little bit of getting into how do we do this? How do we achieve the results that we achieve on the investment side? I think one of the most important distinctions of the approach that GQG takes is in our willingness to move portfolios around in different environments. This slide shows a snapshot of what our weightings on various sectors and various factors were at year-end and also the five-year range of exposure to those sectors and those factors.
If I pick on information technology as an example, you can see that over five years, that black bar shows that we've been overweight the benchmark weighting by nearly 20% at some times, and we've been underweight the benchmark weighting by nearly 20% at some times. At the end of 2023, we were 7.5% overweight relative to the benchmark. You can see that across all sectors and across a number of factors, we will move the portfolios around. And oftentimes, people ask about the higher turnover associated with this, but on Slide 16, what you get to is the result, which is that that higher turnover actually results in lower volatility. By moving the portfolios around, given the environments we're operating in, we're able to achieve structurally low beta and structurally higher alpha. Slide 17 depicts this in our risk-adjusted returns.
I think this is what most sophisticated investors are looking for: not just absolute returns, but what's the volatility required to get there? And again, as you can see, in each of our four core strategies, we are meaningfully ahead of the benchmark and meaningfully ahead of the peer group in terms of performance. At the same time, we have very significantly less volatility in each of those strategies. So our ability to deliver excess return with lower volatility, I believe, is the basis upon which our distribution team has been so successful in raising assets. So with that, let me turn it over to Steve, and he can talk you through a little bit of what we're seeing in terms of distribution.
Thanks, Tim. Much appreciated. Great to connect with everyone again as a shareholder and obviously as the head of the client-facing groups at GQG. As Tim walked through the performance, obviously, it makes our job in client retention and gathering new assets a bit easier, and we'll break that down. I want to start on Slide 19. Instead of talking out of the gate about flows, I want to talk about durability and diversification in this business. If you look at what we're doing in terms of growing our investor base by channel and by strategy, I think you get very different drivers of decision-making from the underlying investors.
And then when you overlay that with the performance experience that Tim spoke about, in particular, the consistency of the rolling returns, what you get is an investor base that is, by and large, having a very good performance experience across all time frames, across channels, and across strategies. And I believe that puts us in a highly durable position in this business to continue to gain and accelerate our market share. Now, if you look at the flows for the year by geography, and we broke out Australia this time, you'll see we had a very strong result in North America as well as in Australia. And I want to break that down further on Slide 20. So if you look on Slide 20, you'll see year-over-year, basically a 25% increase in our net flows.
That's driven really across all channels of distribution, wholesale, sub-advisory, as well as institutional. Institutional actually had a very nice rebound from a net negative year in 2022 to a positive year in 2023. Now, any disparity that you might see between those three channels on the institutional side, I'll tell you that I remain quite bullish on what we're doing in the institutional space, in particular because I think any redemption pressure that we experienced was not performance-related, was related more to idiosyncrasies of what is going on globally in the institutional client base about asset allocation and where they're placing risk. Then really, the bigger or the largest factor for us is really about rebalancing of clients.
If you take again that statement about how well we have done in performance relative to benchmarks and peer groups, we had many investors choose to rebalance us back to target. While that provides a near-term headwind to our asset-raising flows, it's actually a very healthy thing for the performance picture and for clients managing their portfolios. The other development for us in the institutional space is that we have decided to reopen our institutional vehicles in the emerging market strategy, which have been closed since late 2019. While that will not provide an immediate effect to asset flows, it should be able to help us add incremental flows in the back half of the year and moving into 2025.
Now, beyond that, obviously, you can see there's very strong growth over the course of the year in our wholesale business under our own brand, as well as many of our sub-advisory partners, most notably Goldman Sachs. And so let's move to Slide 21 and break that down just a little bit further. Tim talked about becoming a top 10 U.S. mutual FUM distributor by net flows in 2023. And if you've heard me speak before, you've heard me talk about how high a barrier to entry business this channel is in the U.S. It's increasingly complex, and the platforms are dominated by the largest product providers, which you see on the right-hand side of the page. We're the only boutique manager that has broken through that in terms of net flows.
That's all about the investment that we've made on the left side of the page, which has been a 7.5-year journey at this point. So with that, what I think we have is a very durable edge on the competition in that I believe investors prefer the performance attributes that we deliver, and I believe that they prefer the unique boutique nature of our story. Those two things combined with the distribution investment we've had put us in a very unique position in the U.S. mutual FUM market amongst nearly any boutique in the world. I think others will find it very hard to make the same investments and to have the same success that we've had in that market. It is a tremendous market with a huge amount of headroom for growth for our business moving forward.
Then let's look at Slide 22 and really think about through the same lens in Australia. As a U.S. manager coming to Australia, we have endeavored to be highly committed to our investor relations effort in the country. And you can see that now in terms of our wholesale team, which is 8 people alone. And if you look at what we've displayed here on this slide, you'll see that we're the number 1 asset raiser on a 3-year basis in the global equity strategy in Australia. We were number 1 last year as well. And we were number 4 last year in emerging markets. And so given the investment that we've made on the ground, the performance that we have, the distribution platforms that we now find ourselves available in, I feel like we're in a very dominant position to capture flows going forward in Australia.
I'm not good at predicting whether flows will be up massively or down on a macro basis in any country, much less Australia. I do feel confident that we're in a position to continue to be a league table leader in the categories that we compete in in Australia. Now, if we move forward to Slide 23, and if we look at kind of what we talk about as leading indicators, as Tim has noted, performance certainly being one of them, I think one of the easiest ways to do that in retail is really retail wholesale is really about Morningstar ratings and star ratings. So those, when boiled down, are simply risk-adjusted returns. You can see our very strong five-star ratings across the board.
You can see the medalist ratings that we have, which are merely a combination of those quantitative ratings as well as a subjective overlay by the Morningstar analyst. As the saying goes, past performance doesn't tell you much about future performance, but we do think it has a very high correlation to future asset raising. The final slide in that regard would be Slide 24, looking at our leading indicators of an institutional business. Again, this is a picture from the largest database in the world for institutional allocators, eVestment. It shows the viewership activity of our profile and our products in the categories that we compete in. So as you can see, 1113 puts us basically at the very top of everything that we're competing in. That's a very good thing when you have good performance.
You don't want that level of viewership when you have bad performance, but it is quite a successful indicator when you have good performance. And it's something that, again, we're proud of and something that we can measure really directly as how we increase the interest and the level of engagement on the back of very good performance. So with that, I'm going to pause. I'm going to turn it over to Rajiv Jain, our Chairman and CIO. And he's going to share with you his thoughts on markets today.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks to everybody for taking the time. As you know, markets have been quite choppy over the last few years. We've had a full bull market in tech, which peaked in actually early 2021. Subsequently, there was a meaningful sell-off in tech or aggressive growth. We had a bull market in commodities/energy. Then now, last 15-odd months, we have seen a reversal and back into sort of what worked very well prior to 2021. I think the reason why I'm highlighting this is that this kind of demonstrates the diversity and the strength of the team. It's impossible to navigate all these kind of cross-currents without having a diverse thinking process.
I'm especially proud of the fact that if you look at the PM team and now the analyst team, it's an extremely sort of diverse group of thinkers, but also a lot of empowerment at every level, which has allowed us to navigate in a reasonably good fashion. Now, if you look at the various products as such, especially emerging markets were very strong last year. There were a lot of idiosyncratic bets. I mean, it wasn't simply one or two bets. It was underweight China, but also overweight better markets. Again, very bottom-up fundamental view, not necessarily making top-down calls.
If you look at what happened in the developed market products, while we underperformed in the U.S. and a little bit global, you really have to zoom out a little bit and compare a combination of the last two years because 2022, the best-performing products were U.S. equities, global equities in that order. Last year, we sort of gave back some of that. When you combine the two, you get a much better context of what's happening. We feel we're compounding our clients' assets and our assets at a much higher base, which ultimately benefits shareholders. I think those risk-adjusted returns will help us over the long run to keep increasing our runway from an asset-gathering perspective also. In terms of where the markets are positioned today, I feel we're very differently positioned in terms of where the markets are.
2021, 2022, we were a little bit nervous about the tech side. As you know, we had begun to transition away from tech. We thought the car was overheating, so to say. And then last year, we had begun to transition back into some of the more information technology, consumer discretion-type names. And I think sitting here now, we feel particularly excited about where the earnings growth is coming from, the corporate earnings growth in general, which should help us sort of deliver over the longer run risk-adjusted, better returns than the vast majority of peer groups. So we're quite excited about the runway we see based on what has happened the last three years. And I'm happy to take questions, but I give it back to Tim.
Great. Thanks, Rajiv and Steve and Mel. With that, I think we will open it up now to questions and answer anything that's on anybody's mind.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star then one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then two. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before asking your question. We do ask that you limit your questions to two questions at a time. If you wish to ask additional questions, you can rejoin the queue. Thank you. Your first question comes from Scott Murdoch at Morgans. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Congratulations, everyone, on the result. Tim, you talked a lot there on the organic drivers of the business. Just interested in an update, if we can, on the inorganic opportunities and strategy. Obviously, the PAC bid didn't proceed through the half. Just interested in the potential to execute on something inorganic. Is that outlook looking more encouraging or less as we sit here today?
Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Nice to chat with you. It was a great question. I'm glad you asked it. So as everybody's aware, I believe, we did pursue an acquisition of Pacific Current Group this year. Ultimately, that didn't come to fruition. We did that from a very strategic standpoint in as much as we would like to expand our business into the alternative space. And we thought that was an expeditious way to get there. And so if I abstract that, we are always open-minded to finding ways to grow the business, to bring to bear for our clients' innovative, interesting investment strategies. But we don't have an objective, per se, to say that we're looking to try to grow the business through acquisition. In fact, if anything, you've also heard me say that I'm generally fairly skeptical about M&A activity in this industry.
I think it's very, very hard to pull off. You'd be more likely to see us lift out a team or take a minority stake in a team where we thought we could leverage some of our infrastructure. But having said that, Scott, we look at everything we can look at because I want to make sure that we're abreast of what's happening and that we're not missing opportunities if there are good opportunities out there. But there's nothing here now in the immediate term that I'd point to.
Okay. Thanks, Tim. You gave us enough detail on the headcount growth. Thank you. But just interested, I guess, just drilling down a bit more into that client-facing roles that you've scaled up. Just interested in what extra scale you've added to, I guess, the more revenue-generating roles, where they're sitting, what they're targeting, maybe what geographies, and what growth we expect from that headcount growth.
Yeah. We haven't disclosed the very specific numbers, but think of it as kind of over the past couple of years, roughly 50/50 in what I'll call client-facing or revenue-related roles and then infrastructure roles. And it's really across the board. So obviously, we've added headcount in Australia that's been meaningful on a percentage basis. We are staffing the Abu Dhabi office as we speak. We have increased headcount in the U.S. It's been across marketing, digital marketing, sales, internal sales. So really pretty broad-based, Scott. And the goal is to say we think of every incremental hire as an investment in the business. And we're actually, believe it or not, fairly tight on looking at the return on investment that we get. So there are key infrastructure hires that we have to make simply to support the business. And those you have to make. That's a fixed cost.
But on the revenue side of the house, those are marginal expenses that have payback expectations. And if we don't achieve those payback expectations, we'll make changes when we need to. So it's a little bit of what I was alluding to earlier that I think the bulk of our hiring is behind us. And where we'll add incremental, particularly market-facing roles, they'll be because we see very specific revenue opportunities that we'd expect to be high-margin, high return on the investment in people.
Okay. Thanks, Tim and Jain. Thanks for the detail.
Of course.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Shreyas Patel at UBS. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Just a couple of questions from me. Maybe firstly, on the EM strategy, you talked about reopening that to institutional. How are you thinking about capacity there? Because presumably, that was closed to new money because you obviously, I guess, thought that your ability to add alpha as you scale would be more limited. So just what's changed in your thinking there?
Yeah. Hi, Shreyas. Thanks for the question. Again, a good question and important one. You have to go back to our history to understand when and why we closed the EM strategy and then what's happened since then. So we announced, actually, right after we launched the firm that we would close EM at $10 billion of new assets on a soft-close basis and $20 billion on a hard-close basis. And we did that in order to show the world that we were going to be very disciplined in the way we thought about alpha generation. It was actually detached from any sense of capacity, per se. In fact, before starting the firm, Rajiv had managed much, much more than that in EM at his prior shop. So it wasn't attached to some concern that we would not be able to generate alpha.
It was more of a signaling factor in our early days. We've been, of course, very careful with that. Since we closed, liquidity and capacity in the emerging markets has really grown tremendously. Our view is that actually two things. One is that on behalf of our clients, there are real opportunities to invest in EM now that we should be taking advantage of and that having closed where we did, given the increased liquidity in markets, we should be availing clients of those opportunities. The second is there's actually, in some sense, a structural change in that what we've seen operating this business is that the scale that we can bring to bear has actually been a benefit in giving us opportunities to do deals in EM that have added a lot of value for clients.
So we actually believe the scale can be a source of alpha in its own right. Of course, we're always going to be mindful. Keep in mind, as you're well aware, we are ourselves very, very large investors in the strategies alongside of clients. We're always aware of looking at where there could be alpha degradation and we'll never make that trade because our view is that the alpha is the whole value in this business. We're very confident right now that where we are making this available to institutions around the world at a slightly higher scale makes sense.
Thanks for that, color. My second question is just around the performance fees. We keep, I guess, underestimating the size of that and how that works. And I think you called out 5% of your firm was performance-fee earning. But could you maybe break that down, how that 5% sits by strategy? And is there kind of a key metric, either the three-year or the five-year alpha, that tends to drive that outcome?
Yeah. I guess, Shreyas, we haven't disclosed those details in the past. For competitive reasons, I don't want to get into individual contracts. But what I have said is there's no one strategy or one client that is dominant in that. It really is idiosyncratic to a handful of clients. While we did have a positive outcome this year, it still represents a small percentage of our overall revenues. So I expect it will continue to represent a small percentage of our overall revenues. And obviously, we had very, very strong performance in international and EM this year. So you can imagine that that drives some performance fees when you have those kinds of outcomes.
Thanks. Maybe just to extend Scott's question on the headcount, I mean, that seems to grow faster than we expect as well. I guess just some color on how you see that growing over the next three years?
Yeah. Again, I don't want to give specific guidance. But as I said, I believe the bulk of our staffing of our sort of scaling up to the scale of the business is behind us. Now, of course, as we grow, as you have incremental numbers of clients, you have to have, for example, an additional head to do client service because there's a capacity per person and how much you can service any one employee. So there are rules like that that will scale with the business. But by and large, I think the infrastructure build that we've had to undertake as we've grown the business is behind us. And you'll recall, Shreyas, that we've talked in the past about where we're making hires are where we see strategic opportunities. So for example, we will add headcount in Abu Dhabi as we staff that region.
You should expect that in 2024. But my view is that part of the reason we're doing that is that it gives us a real competitive edge in talent acquisition and potentially a competitive edge in cost of overall employment as well. And so we're doing that with the idea that there's a strategic payback either from revenue or strategic payback from the types of talent we can acquire that we might not be able to acquire in the U.S. And so those investments will be those types of incremental headcounts will be tied to revenue. But as I say, the core investment in headcount that you've seen, that growth over the past two years, my expectation is that that will slow over time here.
Right. I guess is it fair to say that your margin won't be impacted by that headcount growth because you're adding revenues, I guess, in line with the pace of that headcount growth?
Yeah. Again, Shreyas, to me, when I look at how do I think about margin, the single biggest impact of margin is investment performance, obviously. What do markets do and how do we perform? Because revenue is what's driving the what's ultimately driving our margin here. But I think the answer to your question is likely yes without being too precise on it. I wouldn't want to be overly precise on saying would increased headcount have an impact on margin because certainly, it could do. And the timing of the revenue associated with any new hire is very hard to predict. But over the long run, I think the direction that would be my expectation.
All right. Great. That's it for me. Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Brendan Carrick at Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hi. Just two from me. Maybe one for Steve. Just on the distribution pipeline, obviously, the mix has been beneficial given the dynamics that you are highlighting just around those institutional outflows from the strong performance. Can you maybe just give a little bit more detail or specifics just around, I guess, the composition of the pipeline and maybe how you're thinking about how the mix might shift over the next sort of near term where you've got some visibility?
Yeah. Happy to do that. Look, I don't think you should think about anything differently than what our previous flows have been other than the EM reopening, which an institutional could shift the balance a bit more towards emerging markets. Too early in the reopening at this point to really make any kind of definitive statements about how much that impact would be. But obviously, anything would be incremental to what we've done over the last several years when we've been closed.
Okay. That's helpful. And then my second question for either Tim or Melodie, on the expenses side of things, just maybe could you give a bit more detail as to the correlation between the uplift in performance fees and sort of how that contributes to changes in the employee expense line? I guess just trying to get a sense that if performance fees obviously appeared somewhat elevated this year and if they were to normalize lower, what's the approximate quantum of the potential offset on the cost line if employee comp was to follow the reduction in performance fees if they were to normalize?
Yeah, Brendan. Actually, I would put almost zero correlation on that. So we do not look at performance fees and directly tie compensation to that. There is some correlation inasmuch as in a good performance year, our team's going to get paid well because they performed. And you end up with higher performance fees in all likelihood. But those are truly actually independent. And for example, I could imagine a year where we had negative performance but meaningfully outperformed the benchmark, and we paid our team quite well even though revenues were potentially down, right? So we're looking at each individual and what they're contributing to the overall success of the business and the way we comp and not tying it directly to performance fees.
Okay. Understood. Perfectly. I'll leave it.
The only other thing I want to add, just add one more comment to that is that, I mean, as you know, our performance fee driven revenue is only 5%. So there will be weak linkage anyway directly from a performance fee perspective to compensation, so.
Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And if it's obviously 3 and 5 years or various longer-term metrics that are driving the performance fees and you have a good 12-month period on performance, then that's a consideration you would make.
Yep. Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Dylan Jones at Ord Minnett. Please go ahead.
Morning, all. Thanks for taking my question, Mosemount. I mean, this might be quite quick. But look, flows, obviously, very strong to start the calendar year. I recall it was largely the same this time last year. Just thinking about expectations for the balance of calendar year 2024. How much of these early flows do you put down to sort of a seasonality effect with the tax reporting in the U.S.?
Yeah. Thanks, Dylan. It's a great question. So clearly, there's some seasonality. It's very hard to quantify. But we know, particularly in retail space, that in the U.S. tax system, clients will often take tax losses or sell positions and then come back into strategies in the first quarter of the year. And it may not even be out of ours, back into ours. It could be out of somebody else's and into ours or vice versa. So there clearly should be some seasonality in Q1. And as you know, we experienced that last year. Having said that, it's very, very hard to predict flows in the short term. And by short term, I mean over the course of one year.
What I've always said is that my belief is that the quality of returns that the team has put up, put against the distribution that Steve and the team have built, has yielded pretty consistently kind of $8 billion-$10 billion of flows a year. We had, obviously, very big outlier years in 2020 and 2021. But every other year of our history has sort of been between $8 billion and $10 billion. And so I think that there's no reason I would look at what we've done historically and say we can't do that again in 2024. If anything, I feel the leading indicators are exceptionally strong. The long-term performance is great. Our distribution just gets broader over time. We have a longer track record. We've touched more people.
I feel that that sort of $8 billion-$10 billion number, historically, there's no reason that I would believe that should change meaningfully.
Yeah. Great. Thanks. And maybe just digging a little bit more into the institutional channel specifically. I think, Steve, you gave some good detail around that. But is there any sort of additional commentary you can sort of provide around what you think institutions might need to see in the market or the macro environment to begin that rebalance back toward equities? And I suppose, more specifically, whether there's been any sort of meaningful change in the first six weeks of this calendar year?
Maybe I'll take that first, Steve, and then you can add a little more color. And what I'd say is, look, there are doves and there are hawks everywhere. And it's really hard to know who's going to be right. And so trying to predict when people will come back into the market is very, very hard. But we do know that structurally, there are allocations to equity and need to be allocations to equity. And certainly, it feels as though there's a slightly more benign environment than we've been in the past called 18-24 months. But frankly, even if you started to see a fair amount of equity activity or re-equitizing of portfolios in the institutional world, it's so idiosyncratic when we get to our own client mandates.
It's very hard to predict in the near term as to whether we'll be a beneficiary of that or not or have excess. But I do think that over the long term, I'm very sanguine that we will continue to see a very strong institutional business as we go through cycles. But Steve, you may want to add more detail.
Yeah. I know. I'll agree on all that. I think the structural asset allocation decisions that were largely driven by a very large change in rates is not maybe all the way behind us but is more behind us than it is in front of us. The rebalancing question, if Rajiv and team keep doing what they're doing, we might get rebalanced again, I suppose. But that's largely kind of around the middle or back half of years or to some degree, quarters. So we'll see how it plays out for the rest of this year. Obviously, performance is very strong. But it was really that element that was the largest driver of, I think, those partial redemptions over the course of the year, not the bigger structural asset allocation changes. That was more of a 2022 coming into 2023 event.
Got it. Thanks for that. Sorry, just last one from me. Just on the sub-advisory channel, have there been any new recent relationship wins? Or are the flows there primarily coming through existing relationships?
There's a few small wins, but they're not driving the bulk of the flows. So they're primarily the existing relationships.
Great. Thanks for that. I'll leave it there.
Thank you. Once again, if you do wish to ask a question, please register by pressing star then one on your phone and waiting for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Shaun Ler at Morningstar. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions, everyone. I've just got 2 questions. The first one, sorry for having to circle back to expenses. But you commented that we won't see a large headcount add. But there are new officers, new talent hires, ongoing BD. So when you alluded to improvements in operating leverage, how soon is that? In FY 2024, perhaps? How confident can we be that there will not be any more surprise costs? My second question is on fees. You've talked about your very competitive fee margins, less fee margin pressure. Now, I don't know the market there as well as you. But is there anything structural from stopping other managers from doing the same? Is it simply just because there's too much stuff, too much bureaucracy, and are in net outflows? Or do you have a secret sauce on that? Thank you.
Yeah. So let me take first pass, and Mel, please feel free to jump in and add. But in terms of headcount and costs, of course, as I said before, as we add offices like Abu Dhabi, there will be incremental headcount. But all I can say is I'm reasonably confident that the bulk of the hiring for the core infrastructure is behind us. And to the extent that we do have increased costs along the way, keep in mind, we are ourselves very large shareholders. We will make decisions. And I think we run this business very frugally. If you look at our margins compared to our competition, we're very thoughtful about costs. But we won't hesitate to spend if we see a great opportunity.
It's hard for me to say that there would never be a surprise expense because if we see an opportunity, we will undertake to pursue those opportunities where we see fit. On a steady state basis, again, I think we're very thoughtful in managing our expenses and only undertaking those expenses where we think it's a good opportunity for a payback. In terms of the fee margin, that's also a great question. I'll just speak to my experience in the industry and my perception of why we're able to price here and why I think that there's a real moat around our pricing. All of the things you mentioned are key contributors. If you look at most of our competitors entered this business at a time where the prevailing fees were much higher than, let's call it, circa 50 basis points.
So there might have been 75 or 100 or even 125 or 150 basis points when our competitors started their businesses. And as a result, many of our competitors ended up with headcounts that are several-fold the number of staff that we employ. And they did that because they had very fat margins. But now, it becomes very, very difficult for firms like that to bring headcount down to a level that they would need to sustain the fee margins that we charge on our products. So I think that it is very, very hard for the competition to move to where we are.
That, by the way, was a strategic approach that we took when we started this business was we're going to be very aggressive in pricing, and we're going to manage our expenses accordingly so that we can create this competitive advantage that we think is hard for our competition to match.
Great. That's there. We are showing no further questions. I'll now hand back for closing remarks. Thank you.
Great. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. And we will be down in Australia in the not too distant future to come around and see shareholders and analysts. So thanks for the time. Thanks for the interest. And we'll look forward to seeing you all very soon.