Hello everyone. Good afternoon. I have the privilege of being on stage the first one. Good afternoon, good morning, and good evening to those of you who are listening on the webcast today. I'm Louis Igonet. I'm heading the investor relations for Tikehau Capital.
Really delighted to be here with you in person. Looks a little bit surreal, but it's real, and what we're gonna talk about today is real definitely. It's been a while since we had a capital markets day back in 2019. We are very happy to be here with you. In a few words, the agenda of today to first start with opening remarks from Antoine Flamarion, Mathieu Chabran, our co-founders.
We'll go through the opportunities, growth opportunities on the alternative asset management space. Deep dive into how we view impact investing, sustainability, and how we want to address private clients going forward. We'll deep dive as well into our asset management strategies, explore the outlook in terms of scalability, profitability for our asset management.
We'll have a Q&A session, a quick break, and then go back to talk about our synergetic balance sheet, how we invest this compounding balance sheet. Aryeh Bourkoff will go on to the financial model before we end the session. Who will be your speakers today? Well, first and foremost, Antoine Flamarion, Mathieu Chabran, our co-founders. Cécile Cabanis, our Deputy CEO in charge of human capital, sustainability and communication, will walk through our impact investing and sustainability strategy.
C écile joined in September of 2021 with a wealth of experience. We're happy to have you on board, Cécile, today. Thomas Friedberger, our Deputy CEO in charge of investments, macro and research, also co-CIO. In fact, a Tikehau veteran, if I may say, a founding shareholder of Tikehau. Thomas, thank you for being there.
Aryeh Bourkoff , a familiar face to many of you, who'll talk about the financial model and walk you through some scalability aspects of the model. What we're gonna talk about today, in other words, what you need to remember before you leave the room, and please don't leave after this slide. First, we are on a strong journey, which is set to accelerate in the asset management business. We are on strong markets. We'll go back onto the tailwinds.
We have an increasingly scaling and increasingly profitable asset management platform, which is, you know, very much supported and with a compounding growth effect coming from our profitable and liquid balance sheet. All that is powered by people, is powered by talent and powered by culture, and that leads to a compelling value creation model that we will walk you through and which is on the verge of, you know, accelerating for the coming years. Without further ado, maybe I would like to welcome on stage Tikehau Capital Co-Founders Antoine Flamarion and Mathieu Chabran. Thank you, gentlemen.
My coffee.
Coffee. Important coffee. Antoine, Mathieu, it's great to be on stage with you today. What a journey, I would say. Not only since, you know, you created the company back in 2004, since the IPO back in 2017, but even since we all got together here in London, three years ago in 2019. Tikehau has probably changed dramatically.
We made, you know, many progress on many fronts. The environment has changed as well. Competition has changed. Macro environment has changed. Looking back, I mean, how would you measure, you know, the progress made by the company? And what about things and, you know, metrics and also things that cannot necessarily be quantified? Antoine, would you walk us through our thoughts on that?
Thank you, Louis. Hello, everybody. Thanks for attending this capital market event. We'll try to keep it simple and fun because, you know, after two minutes, I saw your face. You're like so. You know, we'll try to make a little bit of fun. You know, first of all, we are entrepreneurs in the financial services industry, and for the last 20 years, the entire financial services changed.
We used to have large banks and insurance companies, and the entire landscape has been changing. If you look at Goldman Sachs market cap now, it's smaller than Blackstone. If you look back 20 years ago, you know, Blackstone was a Goldman Sachs client and a small client. This entire world is changing, and we are for sure benefiting from that.
You have now 17 alternative asset manager listed in the world. You have six in Europe, and we are part of that. How are we measuring, you know, our success? We don't know yet if it's a success. We think, you know, it's the beginning of the journey. I don't know if it's chapter two, but we are just starting. We started the firm in 2004 with EUR 4 million as you know.
Now we are a EUR 4 billion market cap company. We are managing close to EUR 34 billion, and we are still counting in euros. Some are counting in dollars, so we may change that. But you know, one big take for the day is that we may adapt the currency of our asset management.
Joke aside, that's where we are now. You know, to measure the success, you've got couple of metrics and obviously it's not only financial metrics. As you know, we are building something for the good, and we'll discuss a little bit later, sustainability. But part of the measurement is really the size. As you become bigger and more visible, I think you get some acceleration trend. When we started with EUR 4 million 18 years ago or seventeen and a half years ago, will it make sense, you know, to be a EUR 34 billion AUM.
Hopefully, reaching a much bigger size and as you know, on the blue circle, we decide not to put, you know, some numbers. Now, as the world is becoming uncharted territory, we may unchart a little bit the series of figures. We started with EUR 4 million, now it's a EUR 4 billion company. You all know the market cap of JPMorgan, which is $400 billion. I think, you know, the trend is there. I don't know if it's our trend, but the trend of the industry is really there.
Yeah, maybe on some metrics about, you know, the growth on the asset management business. Could you just, you know, walk us through the track record there?
When you look at the key metrics we've been following, obviously, we looked at our management fee rate. As you know, there is a huge pressure in the asset management fee industry. People are always talking about declining margin. It's true in the traditional asset management.
When you look at the alternative asset management, and you've got a good proof of concept, when we floated, when we did IPO of the company, we were managing at 75 basis points on average. Now we reach 102. Main reason obviously is that we are changing a little bit the product mix, doing more private equity, more opportunistic real estate. That tells you that there is no stress on the margin.
Obviously, the CAGR of all the key indicators you see here have been growing at more than 100% per year, at least for the fee related earnings and the asset management EBIT. We released our guidance this morning. As you know, you know, the CAGR is a little bit less ambitious than that. You know, we always have been on the conservative side, and you see on the next few slides that we've been all the time over-delivering.
At the time of the IPO, you know, we set a few targets, AUM, EBIT margin, percentage of the balance sheet invested in our fund. You know, after 2021, we are almost there. One year in advance, and it has been very turbulent. Since we founded the firm, we had the global financial crisis in 2008, the sovereign crisis in 2012 and 2013, the pandemic, now we have unfortunately a war next door in Ukraine.
You know, it's really becoming uncharted, but despite that, we've been over-delivering and over-reaching our target. I think, you know, the goal and the plan is to continue to act as entrepreneur. As we say, you know, we are on the ball, we are responsive, we are creating, we are not competing, and the playground is huge.
Thank you, Antoine. So now if we step back for a minute, you know, after, you know, this journey as you described it, and, you know, what does it take to, you know, to build, to grow a business like Tikehau Capital? Maybe starting with a provocative question about this ever ending debate, you know, about, you know, do we need to do you want to be asset light? Do you want to be asset heavy? Mathieu, maybe this provocative question is for you. Can you help us please settle that debate, you know, once and for all?
Is that provocative? You know, what does it take to build? It takes some equity. You know, that's how we started 18 years ago. You know, Tikehau was a balance sheet before being an asset manager. This balance sheet has been the, you know, the engine effectively fueling our asset management development from 2006 onwards.
I think we, you know, as you and I have experienced over the years, the fact that we've been able to tell our investors or shareholders or partners that this alignment of interest that the balance sheet provides whenever, you know, you launch a new strategy, you create adjacencies that will become, you know, a flagship fund, you know, further down the road.
Because, you know, we like, as Antoine said, you know, create, not compete. What we've been trying to do over the years and what we are still doing, even more so given the uncertain and certain times, is to hopefully find the next big idea. Remember when we launched private credit?
For those of you who've been, you know, following us ever since we were, you know, we were listed. In 2007, 2008, our first direct lending fund, that was not even a direct lending fund at the time, we didn't know, was EUR 125 million. Fast forward, you know, 15 years, it's a EUR 10 billion practice we have. At the time, that was a new initiative, a new strategy. Same thing with, energy transition that, Antoine touched base on. We, when we came, you know, to the market in 2018, I mean, it seems like yesterday, but it was a long time ago on this, strategy.
That's because we had this balance sheet that enabled us to put our conviction to work, you know, demonstrate the merits and then, you know, scale it up. You know, for me, you know, this is not a debate. It, you know, it goes together. The model has been built like that. We intend to keep capitalizing on this on this balance sheet.
We're now more and more exposed to our own strategies, which is creating, we're talking about compounding. Why only give access to third-party LPs performance of our origination platform when we can ourselves dedicate our own equity and create this, you know, compounding return that LPs are looking for, where your balance sheet can be exposed to that. You're opening, you know, a second engine of performance.
Obviously, you know, the ecosystem that Tikehau has, you know, has been built on, and some of you, many of you, have been part of that for many years now, and I really think has made a difference. That's where the balance sheet is a differentiating factor. I'm sure, you know, we speak about M&A.
You know that M&A has been only very selective at Tikehau for the past few years, but that's a great currency. You know, it's also a currency, you know, to do that. You know, very much I think that when looking at Tikehau today, 2022, it's part of the model. It's a whole, and that's a whole that we believe, as Antoine said, has been over-performing, and we keep in over-performing.
Applying the Tikehau recipe, I'd say, to the acquisitions we're making by you know, investing in their own strategies and scale them up, I guess, also part of the balance sheet capital use. A word, you know, on the platform maybe and you know, it's a people business. How often you hear you talk about the fact that it's a people business.
You know, there's a good reason why we talk about human capital, in fact. As we grow, and we grow pretty fast, as you know, you alluded to, how do you make sure that you know, there is a something cementing this platform and that you know, these 700 people are in fact one single team? Antoine, you wanna share all your thoughts on that?
Thank you, Louis. I mean, part of the journey is to build a firm. It's not only about, you know, raising money, investing, managing the investment, delivering, reporting. You know, at the end of the day, we are building a firm, and it's a people business. Obviously, we've been investing a lot in making sure we develop our own capacity, so it's not only 700 people in certain offices around the world.
But you have to invest in the culture, in the DNA of the firm. Obviously, it's learning by doing. I think we put together an amazing platform in which, first of all, you know, we have this very strong alignment of interests. You don't see that very often in the financial services industry. All the partners of the firm are investing.
When they join, they invest money in the firm. We feel like, you know, also regulation is changing because regulator from around the world are asking more and more skin in the game. You see that, for instance, in the CLO business. We invest in all of our strategy. Employee and management control 57% of the firm, so each time we invest EUR 100 million in a fund, that means we collectively invest EUR 57 million.
In terms of, you know, management of the risk, you know, we feel like we are all a risk controller, and that is part of the culture. Each time we are launching a new strategy, for instance, we are launching, as we speak, energy transition in the U.S. on the back of the success of the European one we launched a few years ago.
You know, the team is investing there. Everybody is really aligned. Then obviously, you need to execute in a very efficient manner. It's becoming more and more uncharted, as we said. You know, we'll discuss probably later inflation, interest rates. Just to give you a sense, if you invest EUR 1 billion in 10-year French government bonds on January 1st, this EUR 1 billion is worth EUR 900 million. So it's EUR 100 million of mark-to-market. We're gonna see some turbulence coming from the large institution, and we need to make sure that we execute properly, and we ar e not trapped in, you know, either the wrong country, the wrong asset class.
We've been maybe lucky or not. We discussed Russia and Eastern Europe a little bit later, but as we said when we announced the results, you know, we are excited as entrepreneur focusing on the growth, but we make sure, you know, we avoid the trap. Chinese real estate, investment in Russia, we are doing nothing in Africa, right or wrong, but that's what we decide to do.
We are not part of the big technology boom in the U.S. You all saw what's happened. Making sure we execute properly has been part of the culture. Each time we bring people on board, we need to make sure that not only the interests are aligned, but we continue to execute.
Maybe comment on Mathieu on the U.S. maybe as a case study of
Yeah. And even before that, you know, on the culture and the team, and I think you can. You've got a slide where you have a snapshot of, you know, the team today. We're talking about the journey. I mean, Tikehau today is 700 people, 37 nationalities, 13 offices. We announced this morning, you know, the opening of a new offices in Israel.
It's you know extremely diverse, and sitting in the U.S., as you can imagine, you know, the DEI is becoming, you know, an increasing topic of focus. That's something, you know, I like to stress because when we last met in London for the last capital market day, it was probably half the size in terms of people.
You know, the Tikehau journey, the Tikehau story is really about, you know, all this team that is developing, you know, across the world with these boots on the ground that make the big difference, you know. In our view, we're very convinced, Antoine and I and the rest of the team, that we make the difference by having boots on the ground.
We don't visit LP every three years because we have a new fund, a new vintage to sell. We talk to the investors, the partners every day. That generates come back to the ecosystem. That generates some deal flow, some ideas, some opportunities. We just don't wait for the info memo, well organized in a process.
Obviously, we look at that, but we've been able to generate that thanks to the people, the team, and it's been growing ever, you know, even through the pandemic, where we have grown in many new geographies. I was mentioning Tel Aviv this morning, but we opened Frankfurt, you know, last year, and it's starting to pay off. It was Amsterdam two years before, Japan, obviously the U.S., you know, four years ago, which is a big market. Just since you're asking, you know, Louis, I can use this example. We'll come back to that.
When one of these big hubs, London, Singapore, New York, Paris being a place on its own, obviously, you know, when we have these hubs, it's to spread the perception, the footprint of the brand, what makes a difference with the LP, with partners, with investors. Being there on the ground every day, I can tell you that it's a massive uplift to the perception, to the reach.
You know, as of today, when you look at the team, one thing I did not insist on is talking about diversity. We've got 43% of women at Tikehau, and including at the top senior level. In this industry, as many of you know, that's one area that has been challenged a lot. That pays back because, you know, we need this diversity in the way, you know, we approach things.
I was saying earlier on to some younger people, you know, this morning, 14 years of experience, but you cannot cheat with experience. Effectively, having this new generation challenging us in the way we operate, in the day, you know, in the way we invest, makes a significant difference. I will not underestimate to me that it's also built, you know, on this team, on those people that has taken us to this stage.
Maybe if I'm adding something on the culture, the DNA and the platform we put together, which is very difficult to, you know, perceive from the outside, because from the outside it would be, okay, what's your FRE number? What's your FRE margin? What's your growth? What's the return on equity of the company? What's your IRR?
The multiple on your latest exit in Italy, Assiteca, two point six. Very good. But when you build a firm, when you develop a company, you want to make sure that the culture is there. As you expand, you want to connect the dots, because as you see on this slide, you know, we have an international advisory board. We've got a lot of operating partner. We are leveraging a lot of shareholder.
You know, we try to do repeated business with our partner and shareholder, and that's true from institution. You know, you invest, they are a shareholder, they are an LP, they co-invest. You want to launch a new initiative, like we partner with a lot of different corporates. As you know, we partner with Total in the energy transition.
We partner with Airbus, Dassault, Thales, Safran on the aerospace. We are gonna announce in the coming days a partnership with some large corporation in the agro regeneration space. You know, you need to make sure that you connect the dots within your shareholder, within your partners. It's very important. As you expand, as you grow, it's a key differentiator.
Everybody has been piling stupidly into SPAC in the U.S., and then it came to Europe and suddenly everybody say, "Okay, let's do SPAC." You know, we take the 20%, looks good. You know, the market's in disarray. What we've been doing is that we partner with a long-time shareholder, Bernard Arnault, through Financière Agache, and we launched a series of SPAC.
In nine months, despite that the market is closed, we have already three SPACs. Two in Europe, one in Singapore, and using always the same methodology, partnering with the best. For instance, the first SPAC we have, we hire two CEO, Diego De Giorgi and Jean-Pierre Mustier to run a SPAC in the fintech space. In Singapore, Neil Parekh, former Australian banker, is running the third SPAC.
I think, you know, that's the way we've been connecting the dots. You want to do repeated business because as you expand, as you grow, you want to make sure you cement all that. It's becoming super complex because 13 countries, 700 people, you know, hundreds of shareholders, hundreds of LPs, you want to make sure you connect the dots. I think now we are beginning to see the acceleration. You see that obviously on the numbers, but not only on the numbers. I think you can expect more from us on these fronts.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for that. Now that we get a sense of, you know, platform, which is a key enabler, the balance sheet, which is, you know, compounding growth across the board. Let's talk a little bit about the outlook. I mean, you alluded to, Antoine, at the beginning, you know, given this, more than EUR 65 billion guidance. When I, you know, hear you talk to employees around the company, I hear you often say it's still day one. Presumably it was really day one in 2004, but it feels like today, 18 years, almost 18 years after launch, is still day one.
I guess probably that ties back to the culture you were referring to, but you know, since it's just between you and me, can you share with me what makes you so confident that, you know, Tikehau will keep growing and increasingly profitable? What makes you so confident about our prospects? Mathieu, you wanna give it a shot?
Sure. Because the real day one, you know, it was a one-man show, and then, you know, we started, you know, developing, and today it's day one with an infrastructure, which is, you know, certainly by European standards, close to second to none, the quality of people, which is second to none. This balance sheet, coming back to answer the question, that's the main cylinder of growth to be able to replicate this very virtuous model.
The infrastructure, this close relationship with investors and partners. This virtuous circle that we like showing, which is, okay, create, not compete, we innovate. We discussed that at length. You launch a new idea, but no one trusts you because, you know, oh, it's the first time ever seen. We never heard about energy transition in 2018. Well, we believe in that.
We get some balance sheet capital, we bring a corporate strategic partners, and here we go. 12 months later, the portfolio is 60% invested, and then people come because it's becoming a really appealing strategy. You start effectively scaling and you can expand to the U.S., as Antoine said, you know, we're launching, you know, the same, you know, the same strategy.
You then have, you know, this very virtuous circle that we've been explaining, which is you've got your own capital, you invest, that bring the people, the LP, you scale, then you've got the management fee, the performance fee. All that is not to be looked at, you know, in a position because it's, as I said, you know, it's just, you know, it's just one.
Yeah, I know Louis, is that as your firm grow, and remember that Tikehau Capital, the listed entity, you know, benefits from 53% of all the carried interest performance fees, then it materializes and we'll come back to that. We're not accounting like certainly in the U.S. and some here where, you know, you're accounting as it progresses, when they realize. As the firm grow, as they materialize, you've got the third engine of performance, you know, kicking in. Yes, it's certainly day one of chapter two. That's probably the way I would put it, Louis, but in this virtuous circle.
Okay. It's about, you know, moving to the next level, scalability, driving operating leverage. Also, everything that has been, you know, the firm has been investing in is not yet at maybe its full potential. Talked about performance fees, about, you know, investment portfolio compounding interest, you know, investment returns. Now, you know, looking at maybe three main metrics, Antoine, maybe you wanna walk us through the 2026 outlook, even though we know that 2026 is your major milestone, you know, in the growth of the company.
It's tricky because I gave you the $400 billion market cap of JPMorgan, and now we have to go back to some smaller figures. The only thing we can say is that when we started this firm, you know, with EUR 4 million, and I remind you it was 50 people investing EUR 4 million.
Obviously the journey has been amazing. The growth has been amazing. Innovation has been really strong and will continue to do that. The guidance we released this morning, and we see that as guidance. As we said before, you know, we try to be very conservative in the way we approach things. That's why, you know, we keep over-delivering.
First of all, you know, we said EUR 65 billion of AUM, so more or less doubling that. Obviously we want to make sure that we raise AUM which are profitable because obviously you can do a very different strategy, which we will not pursue, is, you know, buying traditional asset manager, you know, generating probably limited revenue, no margin, and probably not positioned on the right sector. We're gonna continue to grow, and you will expect, and you'll see later that this growth is coming from all the engines, all the geographies, all the asset classes, including some innovation. I mentioned agro-regeneration.
As Mathieu pointed, when we started energy transition, and by the way, before the fund of 2018, which is a EUR 1 billion first time fund, and the next one is gonna be probably in this EUR 3 billion-4 billion range. We started in 2012, 2013, by financing companies in the energy transition space. We use our direct lending platform to finance energy transition, and then we migrate that into private equity.
We're gonna continue to innovate and, you know, we put this EUR 65 billion, it's with limited innovation. Obviously, and we discussed that at the end, but, you know, we can expect probably more growth from new territories, new geographies, new asset classes. In terms of profitability, then obviously it create a very strong operating leverage.
We put our FRE guidance at EUR 250 million. When we listed the firm, we said in 2019 that we'll do EUR 100 million in 2022. You know, it's gonna accelerate and on top of that, as you know, 54% of the carried interest and 100% of the performance fees of our UCITS fund are within the balance sheet, within the listed company.
That means that when the PRE kicks in and you probably all looked into detail this morning on the Partners Group results, which is our closest peer in terms of PRE percentage, you know, it's more or less now EUR 1 billion coming from FRE and EUR 1 billion coming from PRE. We have the balance sheet and the balance sheet is a key differentiator. There are not so many firms with the balance sheet. Bear in mind, when you have the balance sheet, you are the one with the option.
Y ou know, if you want to give back the balance sheet to the shareholder, you'll do it, and then you become an asset light and you probably all have read the Brookfield comments from Flatt, you know, saying, "Yeah, you know, we may spin off the company." When you have the balance sheet, you have the option and you'd better have the option. When it's becoming turbulent, you know, there is something new every quarter. It's interest rate, inflation, and we'll see more crises coming.
Maybe, you know, tonight you cannot turn on your iPhone because there will be a major cyber attack. Then what's happening? To tackle that and to make sure we deliver, you know, we have this balance sheet and we've been very calm on the balance sheet. When we published our results 10 days ago, we have EUR 1.1 billion of cash on the balance sheet and a EUR 700 million, EUR 725 million credit facility. So it's EUR 1.8 billion.
Now when you have EUR 1.8 billion sitting on your balance sheet, you can do tons of things because as you all know, you know, the entire landscape is changing and the value of a lot of asset management company, finance company have been declining. The largest hedge fund manager in the world, Man Group, is a EUR 3 billion market cap.
That tells you, I'm not saying that we are buying Man, by the way. We don't want to be active in the hedge fund industry. You know, we're gonna invest this balance sheet. We've been delivering mid-teens, and I think, you know, we're gonna probably increase that because the portfolio will be more mature. This is what we gave this morning and, you know, obviously the plan is to make sure we continue to over-deliver.
Maybe-
If-
No, if I may. The balance sheet is the best toolbox an entrepreneur can think of. You know, sometimes when people take a company public, it's an exit, right? It's to monetize, sell. You know, when we listed, we saw if you've been following us, you know, there was no primary, no secondary. Twice we tapped the ECM market, not because we needed to reinforce our equity base, it was to effectively grow. We tapped the DCM market.
You know, as of last night, we got our second investment grade rating from S&P after Fitch a couple of years ago. We're building, you know, a credit curve, as we say, with the various, you know, issuance being the first sustainable bond issuer, you know, as an asset manager in Europe, it's another tool.
We now have, you know, EUR 1.5 billion syndicated facility with a pool of banks that would not have talked to us had we not have, you know, this balance sheet. As an entrepreneur, that's the best tool we can think of.
Maybe moving on to how 2021 is a good example of, you know, the returns we can bring to shareholders thanks to this compounding model. You know, with basically on this slide, wanted to remind you people about the dividend policy and the capacity that we have, you know, given this compounding model to deliver on both, you know, ordinary dividend and the capacity to distribute more than that, given the strong growth of the portfolio. Circling back with the EUR 250 million guidance, I mean, many of you have made the calculation, but it implies, given the dividend policy, which is to distribute more than 80% of our FRE and PRE, that shareholder returns are set to increase pretty dramatically.
Maybe a final word before we wrap up on the session about, you know, we talked about the plan, what's in the plan, but, you know, also what's not in the plan because, you know, there are some additional options that we can explore. Touch base on a little bit of both of those items, but maybe opening up, you know, to the wider perspective on these items. Will we see M&A opportunities, look at new geographies? Can you walk us through maybe a bit of a option there?
Sure. I mean, Antoine alluded to it, maybe the optionality, but in a good way that you have, because we cannot time the market. You know, three months ago the world was a different place, you know, than it is obviously today for many reasons. Again, as an entrepreneur in a growing firm, in a fast-growing firm, M&A, we've been asked, you know, all the time about the M&A.
Valuation three months ago was very different from today. For us, the arbitrage is always, you know, are we buying goodwill or are we trying to create goodwill? When we ask hundred to the capital allocation committee of Tikehau, is it to pay someone out who's selling or is it to invest as working capital and build, you know, as we've been doing.
Now, things might change. We showed in the past that we could be extremely reactive. Antoine mentioned a few of them in the aerospace private equity, in infrastructure. This transaction were made over the past three years at an average of 6x-8x EBITDA. You guys are all experts, and you know where we trade and where it has traded, you know, lately.
Now, if things go back, come back, you know, we can do it very selectively in some geographies, in some products. It might be faster to effectively buy and expand, and we can do it. You should expect us, you know, to effectively do that and see that nothing transformative but this bolt-on acquisition. The new geographies is core.
I think, you know, we told you three years ago that our priority was industrialization of our processes, of our asset management and internationalization. Three years later, obviously across Europe, I mean, we're mapping now very nicely with the perfect footprint, you know, all the Western Southern Europe. There's certainly some key markets in the Nordics maybe to, you know, to address. Asia, out of Singapore, out of Seoul, out of Japan, you know, over the past six years, we've made tremendous progress. In the U.S., you know, more recently, which is really the Americas, Canada being, you know, a great market.
There are still some untapped market for us where if we had to open an office in Canada or in Australia, yes, you have to, you know, to finance the working cap for, you know, EUR 1 or EUR 2, and that's where the balance sheet again is a great differentiator. You know, on permanent capital, I mean, probably, Antoine, you want to address that, but...
Yeah. You know, we had the plan, and obviously there will be other plan because we've got the balance sheet and we've got option. Mathieu mentioned M&A opportunities, new geographies. We'll discuss a little bit later also retail because it's becoming a big, big theme. When we list Tikehau, 1% of our AUM was coming from retail channel. As of now, it's 20%, more or less, direct and indirect. Obviously we're gonna accelerate that. Permanent capital is a big theme, very different in the U.S. and in Europe. In the U.S. it's been mainly driven through insurance company purchase. In Europe it will be really different from regulatory reason, but we already put in place some permanent capital, so we've got two listed REITs. When you manage a listed REIT, you know, you manage permanent capital.
We've got a private real estate company with, you know, no maturity. We've got some SMA with no maturity as well. We are already in the permanent capital. We're gonna accelerate that with our own way of doing things. As Mathieu mentioned, and we as well, we've got a lot of option. There is the plan. We're gonna deliver and hopefully over-deliver the plan.
Because the market, because the economy, the macro, the geopolitical environment, you know, is changing super fast, so you want to make sure you adapt, and when you can, you know, launch a business of SPAC, you do it. When we started investing in cybersecurity directly and indirectly, we've got some balance sheet investment into some cloud and cybersecurity firm. We've got now our own team managing cybersecurity firm.
Unfortunately, you know, the cyber will accelerate. Energy transition was also a good example. There is the plan, but you should expect us, you know, with a lot of new idea, innovation and continuing at an accelerated pace.
Well, thank you very much, gentlemen, for these insights. That's a great transition for the next item, which is a quick video on our corporate culture, which illustrates, I think, you know, everything you just described. Thank you, gentlemen.
Thank you.
We'll be on stage later on.
Finished.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is an organization that just exemplifies the benefits of having entrepreneurial cultures and spirits, and you see that show up in the innovation, in the products. It's a company that operates realistically at a very large size, but still maintains this sort of hustle mentality, that I think is super valuable.
For me, it's entrepreneurial mindset.
Entrepreneurial spirit with the resources of a large company. A commitment to ESG and climate-friendly investing.
An incredible focus on impact investing.
The firm really has investment policies and procedures that line up very directly with its investors.
We're an asset manager, but we're also an investor. In all of our flagship funds, we invest significantly alongside our LPs. Having our money following our LPs is quite key. It's clearly alignment of interest.
We say deals have no wheels here, because the idea is that unless a business is based where it's trying to grow, it doesn't have the foundation to understand the opportunity that exists.
We raise money locally. We deploy money locally with local teams, local experts.
They're able to inject that sense of innovation.
We're trying to go fast. We're trying to be innovative.
Audacity and innovation.
Is the innovation.
I think that forward thinking, again, is very sort of obvious from the top down at the organization.
Here I would say nimbleness. It's clearly a strong part of our culture.
It's impressive to see organizations have the nimbleness to be able to pivot and really embrace that change.
It's changing in pretty much all aspects. I joined 15 years ago. We were probably less than 12 people managing EUR 300 million, something like that. We are now managing close to EUR 35 billion. We are close to 700 people, and we are operating out of 12 offices globally. A few things didn't change, and that's essentially around the DNA of the firm, the drive, the ambition. What hasn't changed is probably as much important as what has changed.
Tikehau is a place where talent thrives.
People are passionate. People want to succeed, and people want to keep exploring new geographies, new products, new strategies.
To be part of this adventure, you know, it's been a very strong and lasting growth for the company, and it's very stimulating to be part of it.
Thanks for the attention. Without further ado, maybe moving on to chapter 2 of today's presentation with Thomas Friedberger, who's gonna join us on stage. Thomas is gonna walk us through the growth opportunities in the alternative space. Come up. Thomas, please come on. Thank you.
Thank you, Louis. Good afternoon. Let me talk for a moment about the growth opportunities in the alternative space. Assets under management globally are roughly $110 trillion as of today, growing at a 6% CAGR, thanks to a strong tailwind, namely the increase in global savings.
Tikehau is positioned on the alternative segment, which is growing faster than the market and will be enjoying a 16% market share in 2025. Indeed, looking at surveys like the most recent Preqin Investor Outlook survey, for example, a vast majority of CIOs intend to increase their allocation to alternative asset classes in the coming years.
Not only alternative will enjoy a 16% market share in 2025, but also a 46% wallet share with a net revenue margin of 90 basis points on average, confirming alternative as the most profitable segment in the asset management industry. Let me wrap it up. A growing asset management industry in which Tikehau is positioned on one of the fastest-growing segments, representing almost half of the revenues of the whole industry.
Now, despite this very, very favorable trend in asset management that should continue, our conviction is that the dispersion of performance between asset managers and even between alternative asset managers will increase as growth will be more concentrated on businesses benefiting from mega trends. Here is why.
The three mega trends that have been strong tailwinds for corporate profits since the mid-1980s are now reversing simultaneously. Those favorable trends were lower long-term nominal interest rates, lower corporate tax rates, and globalization. They have allowed companies to over-optimize their production costs, their taxes, the level of capital they are operating with to maximize return on equity.
This is not necessarily, to be honest, bad news, as the search for infinite growth at any cost to justify high levels of debt and high valuation does not work properly. It has a negative impact on climate and biodiversity that's related to the to the E of ESG, on social inequalities, relating to the S. It creates bubbles and misallocation of capital relating to the G. We all know a more sustainable growth model, taking into account extra financial criteria is the way forward.
In this new environment, where over-optimization creates vulnerability, companies will be forced to invest massively in order to achieve both gain in resilience and remain competitive. A new CapEx cycle is starting, and CapEx creates dispersion as good investments are only made by the best companies. The COVID crisis and the crisis in Ukraine are accelerating those trends.
Applying our motto, create, don't compete, Tikehau has been building expertise over the last couple of years on what we thought would become megatrends. We've done so by setting up investment teams, offices plugged in the local economies, partnering with corporates and sector specialists, creating an ecosystem of business partners and relationships that will act as a strong competitive advantage if those choices prove to be the right ones. Which are they?
Well, first of all, let me start by saying that we intend to stay away from high duration risk because we think long-term interest rates will continue to go higher. We intend to stay away as well from unreasonable multiples. Antoine alluded to it. It's not in our DNA to invest on unreasonable multiples. We intend to stay away from market beta because we are convinced that the value creation in asset management is definitely switching from asset allocation to asset picking, and also, we intend to stay away from highly levered companies. In a world growing at a slower pace, high growth will be concentrated on megatrends.
It seems even more obvious in the context of the crisis in Ukraine, but energy transition, cyber, and digitalization look like clear megatrend to us and have been for some years now. For example, the T2 Energy Transition Fund, Antoine and Mathieu were alluding before, is to date still the largest private equity fund in Europe, fully dedicated to energy transition, and we intend to launch the equivalent strategy in the U.S. In cyber, we manage the largest European private equity fund dedicated to the sector.
Digitalization, what is it? It's about investing in tech enablers, allowing companies to digitalize production process, to digitalize supply chains, relationships with their clients and vendors. That has been the main focus of Tikehau Growth Equity Fund number two, and the success of fund is on the agenda.
Real estate, asset reconversion, I'll come back on that in a moment. With regards to special situation and hybrid capital, I'd say European companies in particular will have to face pressure on margins and will, at the same time, need to invest. Being able to provide special financings and hybrid capital solutions will create opportunities. It's also about bringing resilience to European companies, what we are talking about here.
By the way, the asset management sector could also fall in this category, as explained earlier. Like energy transition and cyber, asset management is fragmented, it's undercapitalized, it's growing fast, so there is high economic value in being well-capitalized in this sector, which we think we are, and opportunities on that will be addressed at a corporate level, as mentioned before.
This shock is also an opportunity to invest in quality businesses at reasonable valuations. Direct lending in that manner has proven its robustness and flexibility during the COVID crisis. I'll come back on that in a second. In listed equities, the consumer staples sector currently enjoys the highest valuation discount compared to broad indices since the dot-com bubble in 2000.
The sector is performing well at passing on inflation to the consumer and is a play, essentially a play on the growth of the middle class in emerging markets, and in Asia in particular. It's one of the main convictions expressed in our listed equity funds currently. Banks are well capitalized. They are more robust than in the previous cycle.
They should also benefit from the steepening of interest rates yield curve, but we prefer to play the theme through the sub-fin segment as risk rewards look higher than in equities. Tikehau has been managing a dedicated fund in sub-fin with the same portfolio manager for more than 10 years.
Last but not least, sorry, higher dislocations bring value opportunities. What we mean here by value is either opportunities coming from providing liquidity to sellers or having enough capital to be contrarian on segments or sectors with a strong potential of recovery. Tikehau has been pioneering the private debt secondaries business with a fund managed out of New York, having recently executed the largest ever secondary transaction, providing liquidity to one of the top-tier LPs globally.
Private equity secondaries in Asia looks also very attractive. Asia is a large region. It's difficult to find the best players in private equity. The GP-led private equity business will develop on the back of the strong growth dynamics at play on this continent. With regards to short-duration credit, our short-duration strategy currently enjoys around two point five yield to worst expected returns for a zero point eight duration, which look to us as an interesting value proposition as well.
Aerospace is one of the largest contributors to the European trade balance. Having suffered extreme stress with the COVID crisis, the sector is made of large OEMs, some of them being our partners, but also hundreds of smaller suppliers lacking capital.
Tikehau has been mandated by the Spanish and the French governments to manage private equity funds aiming at consolidating the supply chain of the strategic sector that has also to converge towards net zero trajectory. The supply chain will need to adapt. All of this can be wrapped up in one sentence: companies, governments, and investors need to build resilience in order to evolve toward a more sustainable economic model.
Building this resilience is what we've been doing at Tikehau through our different businesses. We intend to accelerate on this, and we intend to put a lot of energy into it. Here is why we are confident our business mix is highly coherent. Private debt is about financing the real economy. Mid-size companies represent 1/3 of the GDP and 1/3 of the jobs in Europe. It's strategic for governments.
It's probably, by the way, the reason why government-led national recovery funds are direct lending funds. We've won mandates in France and in Belgium. On top of being a floating rates business in the context of inflation coming back, direct lenders, often being the sole lender, can measure and report the impact of those financing on job creation and the environment. Direct lending is about creating local resilience.
The dialogue between the sole lender and the borrower generates flexibility, and we like that. Real estate is about bringing resilience to the strong urbanization trends at play globally. 50% of mankind currently live in cities. It will be 70% in 2050. Core real estate, addressed through Sofidy, is about investing in well-located and highly adaptable commercial or residential assets.
Value-add real estate is about asset transformation and reconversion to adapt to new urban schemes by creating green spaces, creating energy efficiency of buildings, creating density, limiting commuting. Here also, we can measure and report on impact. We build a strong expertise there, and we are confident we are also on a mega trend, on that manner.
Private equity is all about bringing patient capital, sector expertise, and network to companies, partnering with industry experts to allow entrepreneurs to accelerate the development of their business. Tactical strategies is about bringing special financing and hybrid capital solutions to companies who need to adapt, to pivot, to accelerate, to remain agile. Tikehau Special Opportunities Fund II will soon be fully invested, and the successor fund is on the agenda as well.
Last but not least, what we call capital market strategies is essentially the management of concentrated portfolios of high convictions based on our own fundamental financial and extra financial research. It's providing Tikehau with a 360-degree view between liquid and private assets in credit, in equities, and in real estate. It's highly scalable, and just like retail-oriented real estate funds in our core real estate strategies, it's accessible to non-professional investors, raising the Tikehau brand awareness because happy investors in those products are potential shareholders for Tikehau.
Let me finish with what are the key success factors in this industry. Well, first of all, the generation of excess return looks pretty obvious. We will go nowhere without generating superior performance. With regards to large-scale platform, it is necessary to broaden the deal flow to remain selective.
It's also necessary to source larger transactions, being able to offer co-investing opportunities to our clients. Impact and sustainability, I will let Cécile in a second elaborate on that, but definitely we are convinced that extra financial expertise generates financial value. Democratization of private markets, I will have the privilege to talk to you a bit more about that in a moment. Innovation, create, don't compete.
We've proven over the past couple of years that innovation brings value, and we intend to accelerate on that manner. Last but not least, alignment of interest in an industry which is highly undercapitalized. We think that skin in the game makes a difference. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Thomas Friedberger. Don't go too far 'cause we still need you for the next session. Just before we deep dive into both sustainability and impact investing at Tikehau, as well as what we're doing with private clients, maybe a quick video on how we view, you know, impact and sustainability and how we're committed to this strong thematic. The video, and then we'll have Cécile Cabanis on stage and Thomas Friedberger again. Thank you.
Climate agenda cannot wait. I mean, the issues we are facing are global. You see today a real focus from the whole institutional investor base on this matter. Yes, it's an investment opportunity, but it's just, you know, just cannot do otherwise. It's a necessity. We're only 3,000 days away from the target that we all set, and the amount of savings that need to be transferred are some EUR 3-EUR 4 trillion every year.
This is where private market managers have a huge opportunity and actually, you know, responsibility to be part of this transformation. Tikehau Capital is an alternative asset manager, managing more than EUR 34 billion. Today, across three continents, Europe, Asia, the U.S., 700 people. It's a very diverse base is all focusing on this unique goal, making sure that transformation happens.
Private sector is very important to combat climate change. The investment need required to decarbonize our system is just enormous. In fact, more than 75% of the financing gap will come from private sector.
Our responsibility is really to channel, with discipline and selectivity, the choice of where we are putting the money, how we can support tailored financing solution in order to make sure that we are both complying with economic performance. But it's not economic performance versus the overall value creation. It's economic plus environmental plus social performance as a whole.
Otherwise, you won't create any sustainable value. The Sustainability by Design approach is really how we formulate the theory of change and how we build an impact framework to be credible in saying what we do and doing what we say when it comes to supporting the transition and the real economy.
Here, we accept science, we act pragmatically, and we accept a framework that is compatible with what the science is telling us.
The impact framework is around different pillars. The first one is the intentionality. The second step is really around what we call additionality. The last one, maybe the most important, is impact measurement.
We are here to support their growth, and therefore we are very involved in their development. The quicker those companies grow, the bigger is the offer of decarbonization. That's the main target of the fund that we're currently doing. I co-manage a fund that is called T2 Energy Transition. It's a European fund that is fully dedicated to the decarbonization of our economy.
We collect the global savings, and we invest in the companies that are providing either products or services to help them to reduce their carbon footprint. We are speaking about energy efficiency in factories, about penetration of the renewables, and the penetration of the electromobility. We have been investing in several countries in Europe. Today, of course, we have been investing in France, but we've got portfolio companies in Spain, in Italy, and in Ireland.
The next step for us is to create a new leg in North America with a fully dedicated team that will replicate what we have successfully done in Europe with this fund with more than three years. The team is currently arriving that will start to invest in 2022.
Sustainability shouldn't be, you know, just an opportunistic move at the risk of being way too artificial. Sustainability is at the core of what we collectively, you know, as people, as civilization, have to embrace in reinventing, you know, finance and the way which resources are being used and allocated. We at Tikehau have a very flexible way of showing results within this timeframe, but more importantly, showing the way and hoping that others will join us in this imperative.
Good afternoon. Let me take 15 minutes to walk you through and deep dive on our sustainability agenda and impact framework and show you how it's been built and how it's fully equipped to now answer the mega trends that were mentioned by Thomas on both transition and resilience.
Sustainability journey at Tikehau started around a decade ago with a very strong conviction that we had the ability and the duty to anticipate the trends in order to make sure that we were building innovative, relevant, and scalable solution to support the real economy and making sure we were accelerating the positive change that were needed. As you can see, every year, we've been building very consistently the framework, the foundation, the capabilities. We've been leading in deploying innovative solutions.
We've been pioneering, and you heard, Pierre Abadie talking about the T2 Energy Transition Fund. For that, as you see, we've been recognized and awarded. Now, the journey has just started. We build the foundation, we build the platform, and we are now fully equipped to accelerate. When we talk about sustainability agenda and impact platform, what are we talking about?
The title on the slide say, "Sustainability is fully embedded in our business model." It's not just words. What it means is that 100% of capital allocation includes sustainability criteria, both in the analysis and in the decision process. We discussed about alignment of interest and how the balance sheet is a very strong enabler. In addition to that, 20% of the variable compensation for the talents is based on a climate and people objective.
Following the inaugural sustainable bond of last year and the most recent US private placement, we have now 63%, more than 63% of the debt that is linked to sustainable criteria. In order to address the critical challenge in climate, biodiversity and society as a whole, we have built a platform where we define four very strong priorities, and these are serve in terms of guidelines in building our innovative solution across the platforms. What we have today is now more than 70% of the AUM, which are classified SFDR Article 8 and 9 outside real asset business, and more than 80% when it comes to private equity business.
Within that impact platform, we've been sharing that already since the beginning of the presentation, we have made sure that we were focusing and accelerating our strategies on climate. You heard Matthieu on the video. We have an emergency when it comes to climate change. 3,000 days to reduce by half our carbon emission. 3,000 days to unwind 50 years of history.
If we look at our impact platform and the strategies that we've been developing, Thomas mentioned a few of them, cybersecurity. Mentioned the potential on real estate reconversion, and you can see that we are really leveraging our multi-asset platform. Let me deep dive on what I said has been our focus and acceleration, which is climate and biodiversity dedicated fund and strategy.
For almost a decade, we've been financing companies that are supporting energy transition. This is very important because even when we launched, it was mentioned earlier, when we launched the T2 Energy Transition Fund, as you can see, it was ahead of the Fit for 55 package from the E.U. Now, with all the strategies that we've been building across the platform, we have more than EUR 1.5 billion of capital commitments that is really targeted into fighting climate change and decarbonizing the economy.
If we deep dive on the T2 Energy Transition Fund, Pierre Abadie mentioned that there were three areas that were really important. It's penetration of renewable, it's low carbon mobility, and it's energy efficiency. If you look at the bottom of the slide, you can see that we've been having very strong output.
We've been now investing EUR 800 million in 10 companies, and you can see the very strong outputs that we have on these three areas beyond the very strong financial performance. With that, we are now fully ready to accelerate. We mentioned the decarbonization fund and strategy for North America.
We have announced this morning the closing of a new adjacency, which is Tikehau Green Assets, that we will present later in the presentation, and we are working on a regenerative agriculture strategy. If you look at the top of the chart, with all the platform that we've been building for the past decade, we are fully ready and fully equipped to also address the REPowerEU plan that came out following the current crisis. How did we build that?
It was not by chance, but it's through three very important things: a discipline framework, big capabilities and organization, and a governance. If we start with the framework, I mentioned that overall, all capital commitments includes a sustainability criteria in the analysis and the decision. If we focus now on our thematic and impact investing, we have a specific approach with five pillars. The first pillar, I mentioned it in the video, is intentionality. What is the theory of change? What are we trying to address? The second one is additionality.
We are putting capital, but much more than capital with our expertise and knowledge. We are engaging with management teams to make sure that together we can enhance their sustainability knowledge, understanding and roadmap. The third pillar is measurement and reporting, and this is key because you don't manage what you don't measure.
Measurement and reporting is absolutely key also to build transparency for the stakeholders of our companies and for the stakeholders of our fund. This is the overall framework, and then we have added two very important pillars. The first one is alignment of interest. Alignment of interest, we mentioned earlier, more than 75% of the balance sheet is committed into our fund alongside with our clients to make sure that we are fully aligned in term of interest.
Alignment of interest could also be what we pioneer in our unit ranche and corporate debt business with ESG ratchet, and it also answer to additionality. What we do is we have developed ESG ratchet, by which your interest margin is adjusted upward or downward based on sustainability achievement and criteria.
In order to be relevant, we do that company by company, and generally, we are setting three to five objectives maximum. I've gone through the four pillars. The fifth pillar is independent assessment, because it will be very important to give comfort to all the stakeholders of the companies and not the fund that we are walking the talk when it comes to achieving the impact objectives and making the right progress.
This framework is operating by talents and an ecosystem of people. Very importantly, we don't have a sustainability team centrally. What we do is that we put sustainability experts within the business team because it is the way that you would ensure proximity, agility, upskilling and action. Second, I said that we had been very focused on climate-dedicated strategy.
Last year we decided to set up a climate action center, and the word action is important. It is harnessing the financing solutions and making sure that we are aligned with the guidelines of the International Energy Agency, the IPCC and the objectives set by the EU. It's an ecosystem of around 30 professionals. It's a mix of sustainability experts, business teams, and also taking talents from the broader ecosystem of Tikehau.
This is led by Pierre Abadie as you saw on the video. Organization alone is not enough. You need a best-in-class governance. We set up a governance at all levels of the company, from the board oversight on strategy and monitoring progress, down to very specific task forces per business to make sure that we are making the right progress in terms of delivery and short-term priorities.
On top of that, when it comes to capital allocation, we have specific governance, including for our fund nine, an impact committee that would be part of the decision process to ensure that the portfolio and the allocation matches the objective in terms of impact of the fund. Last, I think it's very important because I think what makes your strength is your differentiator. It's very important to understand how this has been possible, how it has been possible to build the differentiator that put us now at the forefront and fully equipped to address the trends.
It's because of a unique culture and unique assets. It's an entrepreneur-led company. It's a young and agile organization. We have a strong balance sheet. We have a multi-local and multi-asset platform which enables to connect the dots and cross-fertilize. We are very passionate and engaged teams.
Last but not least, a proven track record when it comes to the solutions that we've been building. That's how everything what I said earlier has been powered, including what Antoine and Mathieu mentioned in terms of being able to do best-in-class partnerships. It's with that that we've been pioneering. It's with that that we've been accelerating and scaling. Doing that, we've been growing in expertise to address the trends of today, and we are fully equipped now to really accelerate on those. Thank you, and I will leave the mic to Thomas on private client.
Thank you, Cécile. Let me add a few words on private clients because it's really a growth priority for the group going forward. As you can see on this slide, about 20% of our assets under management come from high-net-worth individuals, private clients and family offices.
We are observing a strong interest from non-professional investors for private assets as people more and more want to finance the real economy, they want to have an impact on the environment and on social issues. They want to invest locally and with purpose. The strength of the Tikehau platform has allowed us to accelerate in product innovation, as I will show you in a minute.
It's fair to say also that regulation is becoming more favorable in Europe with regards to private asset investments for non-professional clients. Technology, interestingly, is completely changing the distribution model. On top of offering a broad set of traditional vehicles like open-ended funds or listed REITs, for example, we've managed to innovate in offering private asset solutions to non-professional clients.
We put here a subset of examples of innovations that have been performed over the last couple of years. For example, in 2019, we partnered with Fideuram Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking to distribute a solution investing across the whole Tikehau capital platform.
In 2020, we partnered with Banca March in Spain to set up our first ELTIF fund, European Long-Term Investment Fund, which is a very interesting format for distribution through private banking. Last year, we also innovated in the unit-linked space in France by launching two unit-linked products eligible for life insurance contracts fully dedicated to private assets, one in private equity around our T2 Energy Transition Fund with CNP, the largest life insurance company in France, one with our partner MACSF, which is the first ever unit-linked product fully dedicated to direct lending, and which is, to date, a great commercial success. As you can see, Tikehau is addressing the opportunity in several ways.
Historically, Sofidy has been covering non-professional investors, both directly and through distributors. Private wealth solutions has been set up, so it's a group that has been set up this year to offer tailor-made solutions to high-net-worth individuals and family offices, including co-investment opportunities, which is a large development angle for us. Also, the group covering distributors across countries has been reinforced. It's now able to to offer both liquid and private asset solutions to private banks and IFA platforms. A digital distribution expertise has been developed internally through Homunity.
Thanks to this setup, we are able today to offer to private clients a full range of investment solutions covering all our asset classes in a vast number of formats, ELTIF, retail-dedicated real estate funds, co-investment vehicles, unit-linked products, club deals, usage daily liquidity funds. It's now all about expanding this service to more geographies. It's now the objective. Thank you.
Thank you, Thomas. Moving on to the next section, and then after this section, we'll have a quick break. We'd like to deep dive into the trends driving the growth of our asset management business, and I'll have the pleasure to welcome on stage again, Mathieu Chabran, our co-founder, Aryeh Bourkoff , Deputy CEO, and Thomas, also, who'll be joining us for that session.
First of all, maybe moving on to the next slide, you know, the three main takeaways of that section is gonna be first, what's the growth trajectory within our asset management business, which is in fact the reflection on the execution and investment performance. Second, you know, what we can offer to clients, what kind of performance we can derive from our investments and our strategies.
Third, Mathieu will deep dive into how scalable our strategies are and how that is gonna drive, you know, growth for the next chapter. Welco ming Aryeh, Thomas, and Mathieu on stage for that session. Thank you.
Thank you, Louis. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Happy to be here today. Let me start maybe by that, and maybe I will start, you know, with a very simple but critical principle in our business. I think it's all about performance. We're going to try to demonstrate to you today how are we achieving that performance all around the platform.
The main message we want to provide around that is effectively, you know, this kind of virtuous flywheel effects that is going to drive the overall business for the year. You know, starting with deployment, obviously, relying on a very strong deal flow that we are able to generate all around our businesses. Having very strong discipline into investment within selectivity, notably.
Effectively building on our track record, building a solid performance all around our firm, which will at the next stage, you know, generate a strong dynamic within our fundraising. Let me start maybe, you know, with selectivity and how does, you know, our selectivity translate into figures. Well, the main message here that we wanted to provide you is that from 2017 to 2021, we have been multiplied by three the number of opportunities we've been reviewing all around our processes. That means, you know, we are relying on a very strong deal flow that has been massively increasing years after years.
Here you can clearly see the effect, you know, of the overall platform relying on the 700 employees, the 13 offices we were mentioning, and all the operating partners working along us, you know, providing that strong deal flow. Meanwhile, that deal flow, you know, has been increasing massively.
We have maintained a high selectivity rate, which stands above 95%, consistently over the past year. That means that we have decided, you know, to discard more than 95% of all the opportunities we have been reviewing over those years. Maybe a strong message here and why maybe, you know, why are we probably more selective than what you can find elsewhere. You have here three main messages on that slide that you should keep in mind.
First one is that because founders and employees ownership is close to 57%. Here we have a full alignment of interest between shareholders, management, and all other stakeholders. Second reason is because, you know, 9% of our AUM are coming from our balance sheet. Here, once again, we are fully aligned with our LP, with our clients into the way we are managing our AUM.
Third point, third takeaway of that is that, you know, within our portfolio, more than 75% of our portfolio are invested into the funds that we are managing. We think, you know, that these three points are clearly differentiating factor in an industry where we see sometimes lack of alignment of interest. Talking about performance, it's important to provide you some concrete data point on our performance and our asset quality.
You do have here on the left part of the page, some indicators on our funds. We can talk first and foremost with direct lending, you know. You will see that the performance of vintage three, vintage four, on exited transaction stands above 10%. Actually, such performance, you know, is clearly helping us strongly to fundraise 5th generation, which is ongoing.
On special opportunity, we have a similar trend where we currently have IRR on TSO, which stands above 30%. On the growth equity side as well, you know, our Tikehau Growth Equity Secondary, which we have contributed assets from our balance sheet, stands with an IRR above 30%, so very strong achievement. On the infrastructure side as well, the fund generation 1 stands with IRR above 15%.
By the way, here you can see that once again, such performance is clearly helping us and providing strong support to fundraise next generation. Star America Infrastructure Fund II has achieved above EUR 700 million into the fundraising. That's about fund performance. Second one is about quality of the assets.
You know, we are managing portfolio company, and so within all the funds we are managing, we do have assets. Important to provide you with some KPI on the quality of those assets. First one is about our direct lending platform, where we are benefiting from a low 0.48% default rate across the platform since 2014. Another KPI interesting is about our real estate business, and notably the rent collection rate, which stood above 90% for the years 2020 and 2021.
You know, we are running on a very diversified portfolio, and we have been crossing the COVID crisis by maintaining this high level of our rent collection rate. Latest example we just provided on Antoine, he referred to previously, but you know, our growth equity fund has just announced its latest disposal, which is an insurance brokerage company in Italy, Assiteca, where we've been delivering, you know, a 2.5x multiple and a 45% IRR on that transaction.
Well, to conclude with this section, you know, I could not pass on fundraising because clearly I think that slide is demonstrating, you know, all about our business model. If you have good performance, solid portfolio result, well, the dynamic around fundraising then comes naturally. For the year 2021, we actually achieved EUR 6.4 billion net new money, which is more than 50% increase compared to the previous year. That clearly here demonstrates, you know, once again, the very strong confidence of our LP, of our clients into the business model of Tikehau Capital.
Those inputs into net new money clearly transform itself into very strong increase of our fee-paying AUM. You can see here on the right part of the page that our fee-paying AUM has been multiplied by three between 2017 and 2021. You know, fee-paying AUM is clearly a strong pillar of our revenue generation capacity for the coming years. I will let maybe Thomas now provide you a f ew data on our offer.
Thank you, Aryeh. What are our clients looking for? Well, they are looking for yield through income-driven products providing predictable returns in the you know, mid to high single-digit area. This covers private debt, core real estate, liquid fixed income. It's currently a bit less than 80% of our assets under management. To be noted, most of those investment solutions are indexed on inflation or are floating rates.
It's important to keep in mind in the context of the comeback of inflation, of course. They're also looking for value add through products driven by capital gains, and those products have both back-ended but higher returns. Those cover private equity, liquid equity, tactical strategies, value add real estate, and infrastructure.
This is the part growing fast in our asset mix. In yield products, we have a strong expertise. Teams are in place, giving us a high operating leverage brought by the geographical expansion of our LP base, but also by strong adjacencies. For example, the private debt secondaries business or the direct lending impact business are new businesses growing fast and having developed thanks to the private debt expertise.
For value add, those vintages are less mature, but they are positioned on what we think are the right trends. As alluded before, they are more profitable and highly scalable thanks to their positioning on growth trends, for example, cyber or energy transition. This graph is plotting the level of fees vertically against the time horizontally.
As you can see, those value add strategies are positioning at the top end of the chart, and the cycles are growing. I would say the product mix is evolving and diversifying, which will bring profitability, scale and stability in revenues. Thank you. I will pass it on to Mathieu now.
Which is a great transition, you know, before I move on to the scalability. Just to add here, we're not a TKO. We don't see TKO as an asset aggregator. I mean, Antoine alluded to that. It's not about, you know, being the biggest and adding through M&A or organic growth, you know, at any price. It's about having a profitable growth.
I think we demonstrated earlier on, you know, over the past five years, or I should say even since inception. It's important, you know, as a transition to the scalability that we all keep that in mind. The scale is at the core of the development because you can have the best next big idea. If it's just a balance sheet investment, as we said, which is a start and which is at the core for a virtuous, you know, development, it doesn't really help your asset management business.
Here, you know, as we said, we've got this emerging strategy defined as, you know, smaller, I should say, funds, smaller strategies, because, yes, you have to go through the institutional process with your third-party investors. By the way, that's one thing we did not touch base on. What we see in the cycle of fundraising is that we start with our balance sheet. We bring our friends and family, you know, as we like to say. You bring some people who can react quickly.
You know, some family offices, people who don't go through consultants, people who take a view and can help you know, to get the next phase. We'll talk about the co-investment opportunity later. You start having, obviously, the more institutional base that very often gets you the scale, but has a process in itself, you know, which is longer.
Being able to address the whole spectrum, and Thomas touched base on the retail part, that we can effectively embark during this fundraising process. Again, it's another factor of scale. Once you've, you know, scaled an emerging strategy and you get to the established phase, then people are no longer challenging you on the merits of the strategy, on the merits of your positioning and on your expertise, and then you can repeat through vintages.
That's actually an interesting slide of the various drivers to get you to scale. As I say, it's first, you know, the vintage growth. You know, I'll illustrate later on that effective strategy you started with EUR 100 million, six loans six years later, you know, be a EUR 3 billion vintage strategy. Obviously, the frequency, you know, we're not trying to deploy and invest as quickly as possible just to be able to raise the next fund that, by the way, we hope to get bigger, to get more performance fee, et cetera. The model is not the model of TKO. We will invest if and only if we see the opportunity.
In 2009, our first special opportunity fund, in 2007 I should say, you know, when we launched our first special opportunity fund, the world got to such a place that we did not invest the whole fund because we didn't see the opportunity. We didn't try to deploy, you know, at any price to go back on the road and raising up the next fund.
The frequency, you know, is also important. The distribution is, we just touch base on. It's effectively how wide can you go in, into, you know, how many client customer base to effectively reach out to a broader audience. I just made a comment as an aside, and I know that sometimes I can make, you know, too many digressions.
We can talk about retail, which is a great way to grow. Don't forget that the overall pie of the industry and the TKO pie as a whole will keep on growing because there is an unlimited untapped of geographies, of investor base, institutional investor base that are obviously much bigger asset allocators. We keep on focusing on this, on this multiple angle, even if it takes, you know, sometimes longer. The customization is very important. People want bespoke today. You know, they want the fund of one. They want the bespoke approach where they can effectively have their own investment criteria.
That comes without, you know, pushing them a product, but trying to pull and get to, you know, what would be their investment criteria and design. The cross-selling we just mentioned, I mean, today we've got 2/3 , if not more, of the TKO LPs which are invested in more than two strategies. The hardest step is always to get into, you know, the first meeting and then if you deliver, because performance is key.
As Aryeh said, you know, today's performance is tomorrow fundraising. Let's never forget that. We all came out of a very favorable 10 years, you know, that was very accommodating. It's important that we don't lose that, we don't lose sight of that.
That's, you know, an example also on the geographies. TKO is first and foremost a European player. You know, we expanded outside of domestic market here in the U.K., then in Belgium, you know, in Italy, in Spain, in the Benelux, with a local presence everywhere, by the way. We just added Germany last year. As we moved into Asia five years ago, in the U.S. more recently, obviously, you know, you have more work to do to promote your brand, to raise the brand, you know, to make the impact, if I may say, you know, with your investor base. And that is paying off.
It's paying off because we haven't been doing just the fly in, fly out to Singapore, to Melbourne or to Toronto, but to have some people on the ground developing this dialogue. You know, today, as you can see, last year, you know, we raised more than half of our fundraising outside of domestic market, and we obviously expect this trend to continue.
A quick snapshot on the U.S. and on Asia, which, I mean, on the U.S., on Americas, as I said, you know, earlier, four years over there, you know, as we've been doing everywhere in every single market, planting the flag, promoting the brand, trying to convert that into relationship, into fundraising, then establishing some dedicated investment strategies. We have, you know, some few data points here.
I mean, right now over there, you know, we're running some public credit through CLOs, through high yield. We launched the secondary private debt activity, which is very complementary to what we've been doing on the primary very successfully for the past, you know, 10 years.
As we like to say, you know, it's an adjacencies that we're gonna scale because, you know, we managed to do that and get $1 billion in the ground in a matter of 18 months, thanks to the balance sheet. We brought, you know, those investors and family offices. You know, a few example of partners, but also shareholders. It was important for us, like we did in Asia when we arrived there in 2014, and when Temasek, you know, became one of our strategic partners.
The same thing happened, you know, with Morgan Stanley, and then we broadened the horizon of our partners. In Asia, where we've been, you know, under the leadership of our partner, Bruno de Pampelonne and JB Fayet, Neil Parekh, now, you know, over there, its hub in Singapore, in Korea, in Japan, and same thing, you know, Temasek became a shareholder. It's opened up, you know, new relationship.
T&D out of Japan became a strategic shareholder, and you develop, and you grow, and you scale your footprint in the region. There's still much more to do, obviously, in Asia like in the Americas. I touch base on the co-investment model and the customization. Many of our investors, you know, they...
Yes, they can invest in a fund, in a commingled fund, in a blind pool of capital, but they also want to, you know, they also want a little bit a la carte, you know? What they want is when you have effectively the special of the day, they want to look at, you know, co-investment opportunities in equity, in real estate, in credit, in secondary credit. That's where back to the balance sheet.
We're able to do that because we have the balance sheet. You know, the firm can invest, the balance sheet can effectively come in, and if you will, warehouse like many of our U.S. friends, but nonetheless competitors have been using their balance sheet very successfully to grow their asset management business. That's what we do, and that's how we.
That's an example we did with Egis, which is a leading engineering firm where we've been able, alongside our energy transition fund, to bring in a significant sidecar, if you will, investment proposal for some LPs. Maybe here, Louis, direct press? Okay. An example of, you know, another adjacency that is scaling up that we've been able to launch TGA, Tikehau Green Assets.
Investing my return. Well, this is the question that investors are asking today. Hi, I'm Clara Mouysset , Investment Director at Tikehau Capital. Let's talk about impact investing. What does TGA do? Tikehau Green Assets or TGA is a real asset fund designed to invest in small decarbonizing assets, meaning equipment that aims to lower the carbon footprint of its end user. This is a fund classified as Article 9 under SFDR.
Concretely, TGA invests in many fields such as energy efficiency of buildings and industrial sites, low carbon mobility, sustainable agriculture, clean energy, and the circular economy. For example, we could invest in heat pumps for factories, LED lighting for sport stadiums, eco-friendly cooling system for retailers, electric vehicle chargers, recycling units, or vertical farms. As a result, TGA provides exposure and access to sectors that need to accelerate their transition towards carbon neutrality.
Now what is new and innovative about this fund? There are very few financing solutions for distributed assets in the market. TGA aims to fill this financing gap by providing flexible, tailor-made asset financing solutions, this in partnership with specialized companies that promote decarbonizing strategies. TGA acquires these green assets and provide them to the end users through long-term service contracts. As such, it should provide investors with predictable contractual income while offering the potential for higher returns.
How does Tikehau analyze the impact of the fund? The impact analysis is key throughout the investment process from deal screening to deal monitoring. For each asset, a quantified decarbonizing objective will be set beforehand, and the performance of the portfolio will be assessed and reported annually to investors. This evidences the impact objective of TGA, which really lies at the heart of its investment philosophy.
Another example of the scalability, and we can transition with direct lending. TGA is the latecomer, if you will, within the wider impact and climate platform that started with EUR 200 million three years ago now. We're getting close to EUR 2 billion across the product that Cécile walked you through.
This TGA is a great example. I mean, the team came to us, and they said, "Well, there is a blank here in our, you know, in our offering that will be key to cross-sell because of what Clara, you know, just walked you through." What did we do? The adjacencies that we were talking about, we launched the project.
We got some very good news actually over the past, you know, few weeks, and then we can scale, and we know that it's unlimited. It's at the crossroad of infrastructure, of corporate financing, you know, very bespoke once again. So this scalability aspect. Here, it's, you know, it speaks for itself.
I was referring to this EUR 120 million fund in 2007 that we now call direct lending, the reality Max, Laurent Del isle earlier on told you about that. You know, at the time it was a pre-crisis fund that was a beginning of a new asset class that was not defined per se in Europe. It was the case in the U.S.; it was not in Europe. Fast-forward 10 years, it's a EUR 3 billion...
It's a EUR 10 billion overall, you know, private debt strategy. The last one was EUR 2.1 billion. We're currently raising the vintage number five, and obviously will be a higher fund. All that, you know, goes across our strategy. If you fast-forward, it comes back to what Antoine was saying about the. I don't even like to call them guidance. I mean, we come back that first is not guidance. What we gave you this morning is where we will be as a natural execution of the plan now that it is fully funded, in a way, both infrastructure, people, and resources. You know.
Well, that comes to the number, not to repeat, although maybe we should repeat that. That's where we're heading. We're not heading, as you know, the target that we're aiming for. That's a natural growth of the execution, as I said, of this operating leverage and the scale that we'll be able to reach. We're providing you here with some kind of a view of how this will grow. Value add is growing, that the profitable growth that Thomas was referring to. That's how we manage to grow from 75 basis points to 102, and there's still room to grow.
That's how, you know, we managed to grow through where we're gonna be going from 36% to a mid-teens operating margin, and there's still much more, you know, to be gained there and getting into this more than EUR 65 billion by 2026. I think, you know, that I'm probably the last thing between your coffee break, so we wanted to take a few questions. There's still, you know, some parts to be covered, but we'll be happy not to leave any question unanswered.
You have mics in the room, and so please raise your hands if you have any question. Antoine is gonna join us on stage, and we may also take a couple of questions from the webcast. John. Thank you.
No question, no coffee.
Yo. Mandeep Jagpal, RBC Capital Markets. Two questions, please. The first one is on the AUM growth profile. You've got a doubling of AUM by 2026. Given the step-up in fundraising in 2021, how should we expect the shape of the AUM to grow to that date? Will it be, for example, a similar level of fundraising each year for the next five years, or will it drop down and then continue to accelerate up?
Second question is on cross-selling. I think you mentioned two-thirds of clients are in more than one strategy at the moment. Is this clients investing in new vintages of the same strategy, or is it like Tikehau being able to cross-sell into other asset classes? I'm trying to get an idea here of how big the opportunity to cross-sell is now that you have a wider asset class offering.
I might, you know, just answer the second one because I just covered that. It's effectively going wide and then going deep. It's effectively having, you know, investors investing across different strategies and then across new vintages. That's really part of, you know, the whole holistic approach, you know, we are developing with the business development team. It's both effectively.
Your first question on the fundraising, you know, if you do the math, we raised EUR 4.3 billion in 2018, EUR 4.1 billion in 2019, EUR 4.2 billion in 2020, and then subsequently, we raised EUR 6.3 billion in 2021. If you go from 34 to 65, everybody has been doing the math, so, you know, five years, it's a 6+ billion on average.
So, you know, we think, and we may be wrong, but we've been, and I say a couple of time, probably very conservative and, you know, it's gonna be bumpy and you never know what could happen. You know, interest rate increasing is changing a lot of things. But we feel like the trend is really big for private assets.
You know, all the CIOs globally would like to allocate more into these, you know, private assets, so we are benefiting from that. Number two, our innovation, you know, and we continue to be at the forefront because Tikehau Green Assets is something new. It's a fixed income slash infrastructure dedicated to green assets. It's something totally new, like our private equity energy transition.
If we do properly our job, and our job is make sure, you know, we deliver performances, Aryeh has been touching base on these performances. You know, we deliver performance, and we've been delivering performance for 17 years because if you are not delivering performance, you don't raise money. Are we gonna raise EUR 6 billion per year? We don't know. Maybe this year we raise zero and the next year 12.
What we think is that because of the scale, and Mathieu took the example of direct lending, you know, we start with, you know, a EUR 100+ million fund. I'm telling you, when we're knocking at the door of investors saying, "Well, you know, we are raising a direct lending fund," you know, people will tell us.
Direct lending. No, but the banks are lending money. It was the case in Europe in 2008. Nobody remember, but that was the case. When we start marketing our energy transition fund in 2018, same story. Energy transition, what for? Why? You know, the entire fundraising of T2 has been probably done in the last three to four months.
I mean, it's been work. I think, you know, the accelerating trend and pace, you know, will probably enable us to go at a quicker pace, hopefully. That's coming from innovation, new product, new geographies. You know, we mentioned this morning, Israel, but the two largest insurance company have already invested EUR 500 million with Tikehau without having an office. Are we gonna be able to accelerate that? Hopefully.
Mathieu menti oned next office could be Canada or Australia. New geographies, innovation, new product, scale, and last thing, retail. We've got already 20% coming from retail investor. It's becoming the next big thing. As I said, Blackstone is raising $10 billion per month in the U.S. coming from retail. We are plugged to any channel. Private bank, IFAs, we have a slide on Omnity. We never mention Omnity.
It's a EUR 10 million turnover company, EUR 4 million EBITDA. It's a totally digital platform. 45,000 clients registered. We start selling our fund. Now we sell third-party fund. We are gonna expand this platform. We have a project called Opal, which gonna promote third-party funds from our ecosystem to private clients.
Very long answer to the question on the EUR 65 billion, but it will come, you know, through various channel, various geography, various product, innovation. Scaling up project and direct lending is a good example. As you become bigger, you know, you talk to the bigger guys. Obviously the bigger guys, they invest EUR 500 million in your strategy, and we are getting close to that. I think it's gonna probably accelerate in the fundraising.
Thank you. Next question, maybe Arnaud and then Tom. Sorry, miss. The gentleman right here with a hand up. Thank you.
Good afternoon. Two quick questions from me. Firstly, on M&A. Can I check if your targets exclude M&A? Are they entirely organic? You did highlight M&A as a bigger opportunity. Clearly we've seen a lot of private managers come to market last year, a lot of interest for this year. With maybe valuations coming down, are you seeing a bit more interest from people looking for a way to list maybe through a sale? That's my first question.
Yeah. The targets are organic, okay? Obviously we can add some M&A as we've done over the past five years, very selectively. As I mentioned, nothing was transformative. We see it the same way. You know, we want execution of the plan to be perfect. We all know that an M&A transaction can look very good on the spreadsheet, but the execution consequences can be more challenging when it comes to a people business.
What we've done so far was really to add some expertise, private equity, aerospace, cybersecurity, infrastructure in the U.S. that we can build on, you know, if we were to expand here in Europe. We're always looking at M&A around three objectives.
One, that obviously it's diversifying from a business standpoint. I think it's fairly unlikely you would see us doubling up in some core market or core strategies we're already active in. To your point, if the valuation were to retrench, and we saw that on the public market, it took what? Two months to effectively pull back significantly. Maybe the IPOs that were realized last year or that were in the pipeline, to your point, or the trend around minority stake investment. There's been a lot of growth around with stakers in the U.S., now in Europe. The Dyal, Petershill, Blackstone, Hunter Point, many.
Obviously, valuation, you know, could become much more appealing for us if effectively the arbitrage of using balance sheet capital to grow was less interesting than using balance sheet capital to buy. That's really how we are approaching how we're approaching M&A. We've got a dedicated team at Tikehau, you know, screening all day long some opportunities. We're plugged with banks.
We're plugged with managers. You would be surprised how many incoming calls we get from managers who are not trying to sell themselves in a process, but just to get access to the balance sheet. Because, you know, they need to raise the next vintage. They want to raise an adjacent strategy. Here again, even for others, it becomes, you know, appealing.
Here you can have some very interesting structuring or some kind of, let's say, merger, you know, more than acquisition. It comes back to also the people and the culture, which in our business is a, you know, main hurdle.
You know, to add a few things, I mean, number one, these targets are without M&A. On the other end, we've got the balance sheet, we've got cash, so we are always looking at all the companies and all the transactions. For instance, the latest transaction announced last week, and you can talk to Peter Carville over there.
You know CarVal, we know them for 20 years, okay? It's been bought by Alain Rauscher for EUR 750 million. It's a small company, so you know, we look at that. We look at, you know, all the possible private market transaction. We’ve been looking in private equity, in real estate, in private debt, in infrastructure.
Our view, and we may be wrong, but we decided to take, you know, a very calm approach so far on acquisition. You have three examples there of acquisitions we made, very different. Purchase prices are very limited. And you've got really, you know, two different strategies here.
The best-in-class, and let's call them, you know, for now, and obviously it could or it will change. You know, Blackstone has only made one major acquisition in the U.S. in 2007. They bought GSO for $900 million. And the idea was to get distressed first credit, you know, pre-crisis, and it was the right call. Mathieu mentioned Bridgepoint.
I don't know how familiar you are, but Bennett Goodman sits on the 16th floor of our building in New York. The guy who founded GSO is sitting with us in New York. The other firm that made no acquisitions, probably the best, you know, performance in terms of stock price in Europe is Partners Group.
You have this school, and we belong to this school probably, and then you have other school doing large acquisitions, EQT being one very good example. We are contemplating everything. We think that the price paid so far has been fairly crazy in this industry. Bear in mind, five years ago, nobody would look at alternative asset managers. Bridgepoint, who just became public.
You know, some of the historical partner sold their share for a fraction of the value of the IPO just few months before the IPO. Nobody was really realizing that, you know, this sector is super appealing. We came from a sector that nobody has a clue to super appealing and super expensive.
As Mathieu pointed, you know, there are cycles, so we are gonna look obviously at acquisition. We spend our time, as I said, we have a dedicated team. But you should expect us being very calm on the multiple paid. There is no doubt about that. Just if I may, Louis, I mean, because we never get bored in our business. Last week was a new first, you may have...
It's all public, you know, CBAM, which was one of the fastest growing CLO asset manager in the U.S., and we have just opened here in London, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Eldridge, an insurance company. They sold their business to Carlyle, but without any employees. They just sold the business and the management contract. How attractive can that be? That's an interesting step also, you know, into our industry. Obviously, you know, if you can remove the cultural risks that effectively increase, it's more attractive, obviously it becomes a totally different proposal.
You have a, another question, Arnaud?
I had a second question. We've seen a trend, I mean, with TPG and others, even KKR, of a higher share of carry going to employees. Perhaps that's a view that the market doesn't appreciate enough the value of carry. Is that something you've considered?
You know, obviously, compensation in this industry is a topic with a majority. We create our own model, putting the bulk of the carried in the structure. Are we changing that? Not for the time being, because that's part of our DNA. Obviously, you have to adapt to the market, but our retention rate has been pretty strong, especially for the management as a whole in the various geographies, in the various business units.
In the U.S., they probably migrate the compensation model, and figures are public. For instance, Scott Nuttall's latest package is $1 billion. Jonathan Gray at Blackstone, same thing. You know, are we in this territory? I don't think.
Are we moving? You know, you have to be curious and to look at what's happening in the sector. We feel like, you know, we probably keep the same business model, i.e., a bunch of carried and performance fees in the listed company.
Thank you. I think Tom raised his hand and then Nicolas, afterwards. Thanks.
Thanks. Thanks for the presentation, guys. I had a couple of questions. Firstly, I completely hear the points you're making about the balance sheet and the compounding of growth that enables. I also note the comments you're making about Brookfield and what they're potentially looking to do. I'm trying to kind of synthesize those two things. Is it possible that you might observe if Brookfield does ultimately decide to split its fee business from its balance sheet and that works out well, it could be something that you would consider? That would be the kind of first question.
Secondly, I guess on the retail private wealth piece, is a platform like iCapital one that you are currently kind of listing products on and looking to kind of distribute via, or are you kind of accessing that piece of the market in a different way? Thank you.
Maybe on the retail, to your last question. You know, 20 years ago, the market was fairly different because all the savings were embedded mainly in insurance company banks, and retirement plan and system. All that is really migrating, and you observe that everywhere. You just mentioned iCapital.
For those of you who are familiar, Tikehau is a shareholder, yeah, so you can talk to Benoit. iCapital raised $40 billion last year, $20 billion the year before, and $8 billion only in January. And so, you know, this trend is becoming massive. For various reason, difficult to. You know, there is long-term trend, but I think, you know, during the pandemic, people were at home, you know, with their device, and they start, you know, putting money everywhere.
That has been probably an accelerator to retail money coming into private assets. To tackle that, we'll be really multi-channel, being able to partner with probably one of the largest or at least the most profitable private bank in Europe. Teaming up with Fideuram in Italy or Banca March in Spain is one avenue, and we'll continue to pursue that. I mentioned Homunity.
You know, we are very calm on the fintech because we think valuations are fairly crazy. We decided to build our own fintech distribution channel. We're gonna accelerate that. The retail appetite is probably bigger for this private asset. They will be trapped because you know you need to. You know, it's 10-year money.
If performances are different or bad, you know, there will be bad surprise. You have to be very cautious. Then Qobviously when it comes to reputational risk, we think that you have to be very cautious with retail in general. He's gonna answer on Brookfield.
No.
We will.
I thought you had answered the question.
We'll get to the spin-off plan now. I thought you had answered the, you know, the question. I appreciate why you're asking the question because you're always debating. Our conviction is very strong from my team, you know, and we try to demonstrate that.
A t a time where everybody is trying to create a balance sheet, all the, you know, asset light, the traditional GPs are trying to build a balance sheet either by way of effectively letting a minority investor in, you know, the GP stake I mentioned, or the listing. Or even, you know, SPACs. I mean, for some of them, you know, it's creating I mean, long-term, you know, flexible, you know, capital. As much as, you know, we've been, we will...
We've been listening, we're looking at what's happening, we also saw that when Brookfield makes an announcement, few days later, people write, "Well, is it such a good idea actually?" Antoine talked about optionality. Being an entrepreneur-led, as we've been saying all along, and being fully aligned with any shareholders, in the interest, obviously we will monitor the optionality. But at this stage, we think it's a powerful engine for growth. Because having the optionality on your side is always a good thing. To do the math very simple, and we did it on purpose, obviously, we've got EUR 1 billion of cash, a EUR 700 million facility, so let's call it EUR 1.8 billion.
We've got 475 million of shares, so that's been that, you know, we can give EUR 10 per share, if you want like that. Is it the good things to do? You know, we are the largest shareholder, so, you know, we get EUR 1 billion out of that. Okay, great. As I said, we are builder, entrepreneur. We want to grow the company, you know, continue to have fun by building the company.
I think with the balance sheet, you have the option. With no balance sheet, you don't create, the energy transition business. With no balance sheet, you don't do the direct lending, you don't do the SideCar, you don't do the CLO in the way we are doing it. We managed two listed REITs with the balance sheet.
Without the balance sheet, probably not possible to do it this way. We have the optionality, which is always good. We think we're gonna use the balance sheet, and we're gonna compound the balance sheet, and we've been doing that for the last 17.5 years.
You know, if you remember when we listed the firm, at the time we listed, we made more or less EUR 400 million of net income. Only EUR 1 million was coming from the asset management. You saw the figure we released for 2021, EUR 140 million is PRE and FRE. I think we multiply by 100 the profit of the asset management, and we're gonna continue to do that.
We've got the balance sheet invested in our strategy and in other strategies, and we have few slides to comment that. It's a powerful tool. All the people who get listed, you know, when you talk to them, and we've been talking to them, ranging from, you know, the founder, the CFO, you know, they say, "Okay, we'll sell a little bit of share, but, you know, we raise money to launch seed new strategy."
They all are pursuing the same thing. We have to be objective, you know. They have no balance sheet. Now they have a little bit of a balance sheet. You know, we feel very happy with our big balance sheet. There are multiple ways.
I'm prepared to, if I may, take the bet that when we next meet for the next Capital Market Day in a couple of years.
In six months.
There will be more models with this long-term evergreen, call it however you want, you know, balance sheet type. Look at what Apollo did with Athene. Look at what KKR did with Global Atlantic. Like, I'm convinced, we are convinced that this is the way, and that's why we want to accelerate with that.
Thank you. Maybe one question for the gentleman over here. Please raise your hand. Yeah.
Thank you very much. Nicolas Mayen from Kepler Cheuvreux. Two questions, please. The first one, you talked a lot about the tailwinds in the alternative asset management industry. That's something that actually Partners Group spent a lot of time this morning on. They also mentioned that they've never witnessed so much competition in that space as well. I wanted to know if you witness this competition on returns, on pressure on investments. That's the first question. Then the second question, if I can play devil's advocate. You talked a lot about launching new strategy, new geographies, new products. Aren't you afraid at some point to lose focus? Thank you.
Hmm. No.
I'm losing focus. Competition. You know, we used to say and we'll use it 5x already: Create, don't compete. To be frank, and I don't want to be arrogant, but we don't feel like there is competition. We are managing EUR 34 billion. We are very small. And you will not find us in the competitive landscape. We are not doing LBO control.
That's where, you know, everybody is competing. As I keep saying, you know, firm starting with an A doing LBO. Apax, Advent, Apollo, Astorg, you know, tons of people. We are doing minority private equity. Tell me who is doing minority private equity in our space, limited people. You will find sovereign wealth fund, large family office.
The way we've been developing the business, and maybe because we had no choice because we started very small with our EUR 4 million, you know, frankly, we don't feel too much competition. Energy transition. When we start doing investing in equity in 2016, investing in Total Eren, at the time it was Eren. You know, they had difficulty to find a partner to invest. We did that, bringing on board Peugeot Invest.
It was a EUR 60 million investment. This company already today is close to EUR 400 million EBITDA. We have 6% of that. At the time, you know, nobody was looking there. Now everybody wants to enter the energy transition. As Aryeh mentioned, we have already, you know, 10 assets, 10 companies in the funds. We feel like, you know, we have assets, we have the team, we have adjacencies with Tikehau Green Assets. When it comes to energy transition, we don't feel too much competition for various reason.
The big guys, they are looking at, you know, elephant hunting in the energy transition. We don't have so many elephants, so I'm curious to see, you know, where they will deploy money. But we feel like, you know, enough opportunities for us and, you know, maybe we are missing one thing, but we feel like, you know, we have limited competition, and it's been true for, you know, latest real estate transaction.
We purchased in Portugal, thanks to our strong Iberia presence and a strong office in Madrid, 4,000 flats in Portugal at 6% yield for EUR 800 per sq m. The competition was only two other bidders. It was Cerberus and Lone Star. You end up being in a country competing only with two guys.
We don't see, you know, Patrizia from Germany, Allianz, you know, looking at Portuguese real estate or KKR with their real estate arm. Competition, a little bit, but not much. I think in all of our strategy, we see limited competition. There will be probably more competition because more people are coming to the market. But, you know, we may be wrong.
Aryeh Bourkoff and I finish on the competition. You know, we continue to be super disciplined on the way we invest. You know, 95% of the opportunities we decide not to pursue. We look at them. We have enough opportunities, limited competition, and we continue to deliver return. That will be the first thing. On the focus, I let Mathieu answer because-
He's very sensitive, you know, so. I mean, you lose focus if you don't have the local origination, if you don't have, you know, obviously the expertise, if you don't have the people up front. Here again, you know, you need to front load your expenses because if we're launching Clara, you saw here, who joined us a few months ago.
I mean, she had to be there for us to start marketing the fund with the rest of the team. So if you cannot effectively support this working capital that is required to launch a new strategy, to open a new office, you know, effectively you're losing focus and you're running like a headless chicken, you know.
What we've been trying to do, and that's why we see now the operating leverage is really kicking in, is by frontloading this expertise within core verticals. Private debt, private credit, and all the way, you know, we define that. Direct lending, leveraged loans, special ops, CLOs. Oh, by the way, you have CLO here in Europe.
We extended the CLO in the U.S. We've got the same John, who you saw on screen earlier on, overseeing all that. Very synergistic because the credit team, headed by Rodolfo Casellas, who's been with us for 15 years now, you know, they're all integrated, like-minded in the way they approach credit. You can lose focus if effectively you don't dedicate the right resources. If you anticipate this growth, that there is no reason why you wouldn't scale, you know, the strategies.
Maybe one other last example. We launched last year, Tikehau Private Debt Secondaries. Everybody has been doing, you know, secondary private equity. Nobody has been doing secondary private debt. We launched that. It's a first-time fund. It's a, as we speak, a EUR 325 million fund. It's not, you know, a huge strategy so far, but now you launch a first-time fund with EUR 300 million.
A nd subsequently, we've been able to purchase a $500 million dollar commitment into the largest, uh, mezzanine fund based in the U.S. at a discount from an Asian, uh, insurance company. We bring co-investor. So that means that the likelihood we have, you know, over a billion in this strategy after 18 months is very strong. We have a dedicated team, very seasoned.
The return of this fund so far is 1.5x multiple. It's secondary private debt, 1.5x multiple. We feel like we build the firm by innovating, creating, and the management fee relative to the one or two, by the way. There are a few strategies probably where we are not at scale or we never get at scale. At the end of the day, we, if you lose focus, then you stop growing, you deliver less profitability, and you start doing wrong investment. In a challenging environment, I think we continue to deliver. We feel pretty comfortable on that. Maybe,
Yeah, maybe it's time for a break. Let's take a 10-minute break. Here, let's meet at 3:25, if you don't mind. Thank you. There's a catering area right next door. Thank you.
Okay, thank you. If you don't mind, please take a seat. Before we get started with the next section, a quick video that will, you know, gather some testimonials from portfolio companies, partners, people from our ecosystem on how they view Tikehau and what Tikehau brings to them. Quick video, and then we'll dive into the next section. Thank you.
The culture of Tikehau is about daring. Daring means think big. Daring means things that nobody has done. This pioneering aspect of Tikehau is very much shared with Amerant by Amerant Corp.
It's a lot of velocity and scale, in the same time, taking the time to look at the details and to support you.
Very strategic long-term thinking and being able to execute. It's one thing to plan, it's another thing to be able to hit the ground and execute, and I think they've proven that they can do that.
They do what they say, they say what they do, and that level of integrity is very essential when you do business.
For me, Tikehau is exchange, innovation, support and experience. The constant sharing of knowledge, ideas, and connections. Strong experience, highly strategic and innovation.
We felt understood by Tikehau because we had strong international expansion strategies, very strong M&A strategies, and that regional global footprint of Tikehau was a perfect match for Amerant Corp.
We had a really good fit with the team, and we had this lunch where we realized that this fit, that it was easy to speak together. They took time to understand what we do, et cetera. It was really a question of entrepreneurial fit, benevolent, taking the time of looking at it, challenging it. Its network of advisors and experts that we are leveraging the network.
You know, at the end, for companies like us, it's about people. The journey we're doing is a collective journey, so we want to surround ourselves with people who share the same values, who share the same aspirations and ambition.
I think that at the end of the day, we're gonna go through difficult times, and we're gonna go through volatility in any cycle, and maybe more in the coming years than in the past years. But the people and the relationships will get you through that volatility, and the more depth of those relationships, the more you can work together in a concentrated way to find opportunities, even in different market cycles, not just when things go straight up.
Okay, embarking on the fifth chapter of today's presentation, I will welcome on stage Aryeh Bourkoff and Antoine Flamarion to walk you through how we are deploying our capital and how the synergistic approach in portfolio allocation. Gentlemen, the floor is yours.
Thanks. Good afternoon again. Welcome back after the pause. Maybe I'll start with here, and just wanted to illustrate, you know, how our investment portfolio has been evolving from 2017- 2021. You can see here on the page that actually the proportion invested within our funds has been jumping from 33% to more than 75%.
Which means that actually over the last five years, we have been investing massively within our funds. You know, we've been aligning our interest with those all of our LP. You know, back 2017, those 33% were representing EUR 500 million. We are now talking about EUR 2 billion of investment within our funds. And by the way, you know, those 75% are...
Represent already the high end of the targeted allocation that we had announced back in our last Capital Market Week in 2019. Maybe a question here, interesting to understand is why do we have an investment portfolio? Well, simply, you know, because that's a key asset which is going to allow us, you know, to compound growth in all of our businesses.
Our portfolio, as we said, you know, is divided in two layers. First, in blue, our invested ecosystem and direct investment, roughly EUR 600 million. Then the investment within our funds, EUR 2.1 billion. Those investments, you know, within our funds are key because first and foremost, they will allow us, you know, to compound third-party fundraising. Also accelerate innovation. We did touch base previously on Tikehau Green Assets, on T2 energy transition.
These assets is key to launch new strategies. Also, co-investments alongside Tikehau strategies, which is a key allocation. Finally, you know, all these investments will allow us as well to build, you know, a strong and predictable investment returns for the targeted return on equity that we have announced earlier today, and which is part of the new guidance. Focusing now on our own strategies.
I did mention the EUR 2.1 million of investments. You have mainly three components within this 2.1. First and foremost, the allocation within our funds, which stands actually at EUR 2 billion. Then the co-investments alongside all of our funds, standing at a bit lower than 100 million euro.
Finally, the amount invested within the three SPACs, you know Matthew touched base on that, in a full alignment of interest, more than EUR 40 million invested by our balance sheet, you know, a SPAC which is, you know, that natural extension of our asset management business since 2004. Why do we consider our balance sheet as a terrific launchpad to our new strategies? Well, mainly three reasons that you can see here. First, innovation. We did touch base on that. You know, that balance sheet, you know, allows us to develop new concepts and to innovate.
Thanks to that, we can build the team, we can do investment, we can build a track record, and then thanks to that track record, we can effectively go and meet customers, LP, and demonstrate them that the processes we have initiated is proper and is properly delivering some real return. Second, obviously, because that balance sheet also helps us in growing new strategies, you know, with a strong support from the balance sheet.
Finally, as well, you know, the scale-up effect on all the established strategies of the group, which is obviously the third impact of that strong launchpad which we are considering as our balance sheet. A good example, you know, of that launchpad I was mentioning is obviously T2 Energy Transition.
We did touch base on that, but back in 2018 when we created that fund, you know, we had actually the investment from the balance sheet, which has supported the new launch of that strategy, which has allow us, you know, to demonstrate that we were able, thanks to that new strategy, to clearly, you know, create some expected strong return for our LP.
Now an important question you may ask, and actually, by the way, that's a regular question that we are receiving, is how much do we need to invest into our funds? I think, by the way, that the proper question is not how much do we need to invest into our fund, but how much do we want to invest into our fund?
Because we want to invest into our funds, not only because it's going, you know, to help us on third-party fundraising, but because we want to benefit from the performance of our funds. This is key. The main takeaway, I think, of that slide is to understand that from 2017- 2021, we have been taking on average EUR 500 million commitment per year within our funds, with different strategies that you can see here, either private debt secondary, CLO, energy transition, real estate value add.
What you need to consider for our next stage of expansion from 2022- 2026 is that we will take an additional EUR 500 million of new commitment in all in our strategies that we will be launching starting this year up until the end of the plan in 2026. Now, having said that, main question should be how these commitments are actually affecting both our AUM and then our investment portfolio. Well, as far as AUM are concerned, no change on that. Obviously, the commitment from the balance sheet will be computed within our AUM once these commitments are signed.
Second effect important to keep in mind is the effect on our investment portfolio. Here you need to keep in mind that the cash out associated to these commitments will actually be spread over the fund investment period. So here we are talking about 3-5 years to properly monitor the real impact of the balance sheet commitments into cash out, but, or as well, into effects within our investment portfolio. So good question here: Why do we want to invest into our funds?
Well, we want to invest into our funds because actually we want our balance sheet and we want our profit and loss to benefit from the returns of our funds. You know, we want to invest into our funds because we know our funds. We have designed them. We know how they invest. We know the quality of the assets we are in, they are investing in.
All this KPI, you know, by knowing all these funds, we are actually building a kind of portfolio allocation, which arrives here to EUR 2 billion of investments. Thanks to the allocation in mix, you know, between private equity, real estate, private debt, capital market, we are here, and we are here to deliver this 10%-15% IRR by allocating, once again, our balance sheet within all of our strategies in order to deliver strong returns. I will let Antoine maybe tell you a few words about our ecosystem investments.
When it comes to the balance sheet, you know, Aryeh is doing the EUR 2 billion part, and I'm doing the EUR 500 million part, so obviously I will be quicker. We invest in our funds, as Aryeh mentioned, because, you know, we have strong team and that will deliver a return, and we've been building the firm over the 17.5 years like that, by investing our money. And as I was mentioning before, you know, when we've IPO'd the company, the bulk of our profitability came from the balance sheet investment.
Now we are migrating more into an asset management business, but we will continue to invest the balance sheet in our fund, as already described, but also in two different parts. One part is our ecosystem, and it's been, you know, paramount at building the firm. We invest with partners, and you see a few examples, because that generates co-investment opportunities, expertise, network, additional geographical footprints. I think, you know, that's been part of the strategy initially, and we're gonna continue to do that. You'll see when we detail the ecosystem.
The direct private equity investment is more the legacy side of the balance sheet. We used to have balance sheet direct investment. We are migrating that to an asset management business to generate management fees, performance fees, and carried, but we still have a few things. We had a few listed investments that we sold in 2021, GWS, Assystem, and Eurazeo, delivering a good return and putting less volatility on the balance sheet. We still have a few investments. First, I start with the ecosystem.
Some of you will be familiar with this name, some will not. I'm taking two examples on two different things, J.C. Flowers and Augmentum. We invested in these two. One is a listed company, the other one is a fund dedicated to financial services. Thanks to that, when they both sold Interactive Investor to Aberdeen a few weeks ago, you know, they were both shareholders, we both have money there.
In addition to realizing returns, we co-invest with these two firms. They are invested in financial services, so that will give us additional ways to tackle fundraising. For instance, Augmentum is investing mainly in the fintech space. As a consequence, we talk to their portfolio companies, which will start selling some of our funds. Same thing with J.C. Flowers, and we are doing.
By the way, we could add also Stone Point Capital, which is a U.S.-based dedicated firm focused on financial services. We trust, we try to cross-sell, cross-fertilize around the platform. Are we obliged to invest to get that? No. But as always, you've got skin in the game, so you know, you have a better intel on what's going on. It's been like that, you know, since inception.
You saw Aryeh on the screen. You know, we are doing various things with LionTree. Thanks to them, we invested in Univision. I don't know how familiar you are. We made a EUR 40 million investment from the balance sheet. The company is now making more or less a EUR 1 billion EBITDA.
You know, that generate opportunities return, cross-selling, expertise, cross-fertilization, and obviously, you know, it takes time because you want to extract, you know, the right thing with all this ecosystem. We decided a while ago to invest in this ecosystem, and it could be fund, it could be companies. One, it's delivering performance. Two, it's bringing added value to us, expertise, and that's enable us also to grow in some geography whereby it's more difficult. We want to have exposure in Southeast Asia. What do you do? You partner with Temasek, that's one. Two, you know, you invest in Dymon Asia, which is a buyout Southeast Asia fund.
You know, that enables us to understand what's happening in the region because you get the reporting and it's always better to, you know, receive the reporting, talk to the portfolio company, rather than reading on the newspaper what's happening in Southeast Asia. It's not huge amount of money. It's delivering return, and we're gonna continue to do that, and that has been part of our secret sauce.
The legacy part, which is now smaller in terms of costs, just taking one example of a portfolio company we are still invested in called Claranet. It's a U.K.-based company but global. When we invested in this company was making EUR 55 million EBITDA. It's now making EUR 85 million EBITDA. We own 17%. Partners hold 3%, and the remaining is the founder and the management team.
It's mainly doing cloud and hosting. You know, it's gonna be a very good investment, no doubt, but that's part of the legacy, and as you see, it's smaller. And then just some realized investment from the balance sheet. As we said, you know, we've been always delivering return from the balance sheet. You've got a few different examples.
JESCO is a Singapore-based company. JRT is global. And SPI is mainly Continental Europe. We discussed a couple of times the balance sheet, you know. We see that as a key differentiator as long as you deliver performances because if not, then you get twice the punishment. You want to make sure the balance sheet is synergetic, and you cross-sell, you cross-fertilize.
I took earlier the example of energy transition. Without the balance sheet, it would have been very difficult to scale this business. Obviously you need to be disciplined because as I said, you know, delivering return is always complex. You need to make sure through your capital allocation committee that you deliver return in the long term, and you can tackle various opportunities as well.
I give you an example. You know, if tomorrow interest rates are increasing at a much faster pace, that's creating turbulence in the credit market, then you will have a lot of stressed, distressed credit. We used to do a lot of that in 2008, 2009. Now we have a fund doing that.
By the time you launch the third generation of the fund, if the market is collapsing tomorrow, at least you have the option, but you need to be disciplined. If you are disciplined, then, you know, obviously it's profitable.
In short, you know, we are gonna continue to use the balance sheet, mainly in our funds more and more to get scale, but also we continue to be opportunistic on various investment because, one, we generate return, two, it's synergetic, and three, you know, it's enabled the entire firm to understand what is going on in the various part of the world, the various asset classes, and the various capital structure.
We used to say, you know, be curious. When you invest in funds, you know, we want to make sure that everybody at Tikehau has access to the reporting because, you know, that generate idea, thought, and expertise. I stop here on the balance sheet.
Thank you, Antoine, Aryeh. I will ask Aryeh to stay on stage for the final section of today's presentation on the financial model. It's gonna be a wrap-up of some things that you have heard already and some clarity on the financial model and how we're gonna crate value for shareholders. Aryeh is on stage. Right after that section, we'll have a second Q&A session, and then a couple of drinks all together. Thank you so much. Aryeh.
Thanks, Louis. Well, maybe, you know, I think that the main message we wanted to provide you today is that we are just at the beginning of our journey, you know, to deliver strong, sustainable, and growing returns. You know, the three pillars of that delivery are here on the slide. First and foremost, fee-related expectation.
We touched base on that, and I'll come back in a minute, but EUR 250 million, which is our guidance by 2026 in terms of fee-related earnings. Second component will be obviously our performance-related earnings potential, and I'll come back to that in a minute. Obviously, the third component will be that perpetual capital base that is generating strong return thanks to the allocation within our funds that I've just described.
Mathieu talked previously, you know, about scalability, and why is that scalability so important? Well, actually, because, you know, it is driving our operating leverage within our business model. As such, you know, we wanted to provide you with a quick illustration of how we intend to increase our operating leverage. You know, when we are launching a new strategies, as we stated previously on TGA for T2, we need to actually build a team to frontload the OpEx. As such, we are facing a J curve, obviously. No doubt on that.
You know, then when we have our successor funds, the new vintage, when we are leveraging on the track record of the fund, increasing the size and reinforcing the team, no doubt as well that the revenue growth attached to those new vintage is clearly much higher than the additional operating expenses that we need to face. Actually, we think that the potential, you know, to increase our operating leverage is real across all our funds and all our strategies.
Thomas presented you earlier today, you know, the split between value add and yield strategies. Here again, you know, on both of them, the operating leverage is concrete. You can see that on value add, where usually we are operating less mature strategies with vintage number one, vintage number two, we are benefiting from a high level of management fees.
As such, that level of man-management fees is clearly higher than the operating expenses that we need to implement in the context of this launch. As far as yield products are concerned here, we are talking on closed-end strategies more mature, such as TDL V, such as well our volume-based strategies. Here, we are talking about capital market strategy, about CLO, and clearly here as well, you know, the operating costs are already in place.
Clearly, all the additional revenue that we will generate with the additional AUM on these strategies will clearly trigger a strong operating leverage. All of these drivers clearly enable us, you know, to provide you with this new guidance by the year 2026, which is to achieve at least EUR 250 million of fee-related earnings.
Very strong increase compared to the latest figure we had delivered back in 2021 with EUR 95 million of fee-related earnings. As far as our FRE margin is concerned, you can see here that we are expected to increase from 36% to mid-40s.
Maybe a few comments on that, just to keep in mind that as far as the working assumptions around that figure are considered is that we've been taking into consideration, you know, a conservative approach as far as our revenue are compared to our AUM at a level of 100 basis points for the next five years. Performance-related earnings. I know we've been talking about that today, but just wanted to provide, you know, you a few additional data on that.
Because clearly, on top of the fee-related earnings, our performance-related earnings, mainly made of, carried interest and performance fees, are a key earnings generation engine for the coming years. What are the main takeaway that you can see on that page? First is that our AUM eligible to carry interest have been multiplied by two from 2018- 2021. That actually stands at EUR 14 billion.
Second takeaway is that those AUM eligible to carry the interest have been increasing by 25% during the year 2021, which is actually a higher percentage than the increase of our AUM. Which means that we've been focusing, you know, primarily our fundraising efforts on AUM eligible to carry interest.
Maybe a few data points to keep in mind on that, which can obviously very important, the amount of AUM which are currently invested stands at EUR 9.2 billion. Third KPI to keep in mind is obviously the amount of AUM which have an IRR above the hurdle rate. It actually stands at EUR 5.5 billion, representing an increase of more than 80% compared to the previous year.
I would like maybe to stop just one minute on some of our key features when it comes to performance-related earnings. First and foremost, you know, the shareholder friendly allocation that we have currently. 53% of our carry interests are allocated to the listed entity. 100% of performance fee. Second point to keep in mind, the cautious profit and loss approach.
We do not accrue any performance fee or carried interest. We wait that the performance is realized across our funds to book those performance fees all around. You know, that prevents us, you know, from any negative revenue impact, which is key to understand and to address earnings generation for the coming years.
Third takeaway of that slide, obviously, is the midterm profitability attached to those AUM, as more than EUR 14 billion are currently eligible to carried interest. We wanted to provide you know, as well, a final word on that, on how do we compare to our peers as far as the carried interest allocation is concerned. You can see here that the shareholder proposition for Tikehau stands at 53%. The sector average stands at 36%.
Here, once again, we're seeing that the shareholder proposition that we are proposing is much more appropriate and very positive versus our peers. Now maybe moving to capital allocation priorities for the coming years, which means that actually how this cash flow will be used for the coming years.
We've been touching base on our two natures of revenue, our cash flow from the asset management, mainly made of fee-related earnings and performance-related earnings. Those cash flows will be actually returned to shareholders in the context of our dividend policy. You know, we stated that more than 80% of the cash flow from our asset management business will be distributed to shareholders, benefiting strongly to our shareholders.
As far as the cash flow from the investment activity is concerned, portfolio return, capital recycling, those cash flow actually will be made of, you know, of financial means to fund our future organic and inorganic growth. We've been talking a lot today about our balance sheet, our key asset. I think it was important also to provide you with a few data points on our balance sheet to keep in mind.
Investment portfolio, EUR 2.7 billion. I guess you have these figures in mind. It's been repeated a lot today, but important to keep in mind. Second one, cash and cash equivalent, which stands at EUR 1.1 billion, and an undrawn credit facility of EUR 725 million. Our balance sheet is consequently liquid and benefiting from a strong shareholder equity of EUR 3 billion.
In addition to that, we wanted also to update you on our credit ratings. Since 2019, we were rated investment-grade BBB- by Fitch Ratings. We are very happy to announce to you today that since last night, actually, Standard & Poor's has also provided us with an investment-grade rating, BBB-, which is, I think, once again a strong recognition of the strength of our financial model and our financial perspective for the coming years.
If you put together, you know, all these resources and the use of capital in the short to medium term, what is the outcome? Well, the outcome is actually that we are benefiting with more resources than uses. Having a look at our resources, EUR 1.1 billion of cash, plus an additional EUR 725 million of credit facility.
On the midterm, we are also benefiting, you know, from our portfolio investment, EUR 2.7 billion, which will return capital. We are expecting this return of capital. Not taking into consideration the net cash flow here, we have a total of resources which stands above EUR 4.5 billion in the next medium term. In front of that, use of capital from an organic point of view. We said we had EUR 1 billion of uncalled commitments within our funds, and in addition to that, as mentioned previously, an additional EUR 2.5 billion of commitment within the funds we are managing, within Tikehau funds, that we are expecting for the next five years.
Ultimately, you know, that means that the main outcome is that we are benefiting from EUR 1 billion of resources that could be used either for growth options which have not been completed, you know, within our plan at this stage. I think there was a dedicated section from Mathieu and Antoine on that to know how these additional resources not computed within our plan could be eventually used in our next expansion phase from 2022 to 2026.
Important point, I wanted maybe to conclude on that one. Obviously, which is an important point, but how are we going to achieve this mid-teen returns on equity by 2026? This is a new guidance we have provided this morning, important one from a return on equity perspective.
First, I think it's important to mention here that we will be using our balance sheet. We've been repeating that a lot today, but that's a big asset, a main asset that we will be using, you know, in the context of that return on equity. That balance sheet, you know, will obviously be used not only to fuel our asset management business, we touch base on that, but, you know, scalability, operating leverage and a strong generation of fee-related earnings. Second point will be driven, you know, by the performance of Tikehau funds that will obviously drive our performance-related earnings, but as well all of our portfolio returns being invested within our funds.
Third point obviously, investment portfolio with our direct and ecosystem investments that will drive as well the overall results to the mid-teens return on equity by 2026. Thanks for that. I will now leave Antoine maybe and Mathieu for the closing remarks.
Now we are delivering the real plan in the next few slides. Forget everything. Now we are gonna show you the real plan. We gave the guidance this morning. You know, the most important thing is that we remain and we're gonna remain entrepreneurial in the changing, in the fast changing financial services industry. That's a key advantage because there are only a few entrepreneurial-led firms today.
If you look at least the 15, you know, entrepreneurs are retiring, and that's not the plan. We're gonna continue to drive this company as an entrepreneur, as an entrepreneurial company. We're gonna continue to be ambitious, and our mission is not only, you know, financial KPIs. Cécile explained to you that our ESG is really by design.
Also, by the way, you know, the ESG framework is changing super fast. Give you the example of this week, sorry, last week, from the German government, that they decided that they will invest EUR 200 billion in their defense system. But now it's really ESG because, you know, you invest in defense, but that saves democracy, so it's very important.
Joke aside, we're gonna continue to be really investing in ESG, and we are a young company, so we have no legacy. As I said very often, we don't have oil and gas, so our life is probably easier when it comes to energy transition. Thomas, you know, mentioned the mega-trend, and you know, everybody probably has the view on where the mega trend is and it's agricultural, it's cyber and so on. You need to make sure that you identify the trend, but you deliver. Delivering is always super complex, and you need to deliver on the fundraising, but more important on the performances.
As we said, you know, the cycle for the last 10-year has been really crazy, probably due to central bank intervention, interest rate declining, and we think that's coming to an end. We don't want to be over-pessimistic because as you know, we are very optimistic, but we feel like it's gonna be probably bumpy in this industry.
That will lead us to a lot of opportunities and hopefully, you know, we are gonna accelerate. When you look at the figure with our CAGR have been more than 100% for various KPIs, you see that the plan to deliver above EUR 250 million of FRE is a 25% CAGR. Do you think we wake up in the morning saying, "Oh, we're gonna go grow at 25%?" The answer is no.
There is no doubt. We're gonna continue to make sure while maintaining a strong discipline, we remain ambitious. To be frank, we don't think it's ambitious. Some people would probably consider it's ambitious, hopefully not internally, maybe externally. You know, we started with EUR 4 million, and nobody realized that EUR 4 million is nothing. Now it's, as Mathieu said, it's beginning of chapter two.
The only difference is that we manage EUR 34 billion. We've got 700 people. We've got a strong balance sheet, a strong track record. We've got partners and friends all around the world. You know, there are not so many firms having strategic investors such as Morgan Stanley or Temasek or Financière Agache, for instance. In various parts of the world, we've got strategic partnerships, and I think we're gonna continue to leverage that.
You see the trend with corporations. We partner with various corporates. We are gonna continue doing that and, you know, we announce something in the coming days, as I said, which gonna be very innovative again. You know, you should expect us doing that. I'm gonna stop there.
No, I mean, just wanna add, you know, Antoine is talking about the team. Today, you saw six or seven of us, and there's many of us onstage and many of our partners in the room. Don't underestimate the 700 people working 24/7, you know, across the three continents now that we have. Because as much as we may still be impatient to take the company to the next phase, we're also very conscious of the journey that we've been through.
I'm interrupting my partner because, you know, we arrive on Monday, and we found that the city was, you know, pretty empty. What people are telling you, well, Monday are like the Fridays now. Nobody's working in the city. Mathieu mentioned, you know, we are working 24 hours. The team are very committed, and I think the financial services industry is changing fast. You know, people more agile, nimble, and entrepreneurial will benefit from that. I think we are-
They're working 27 because we're across, you know, three continents. That's what I meant, you know, but. No, I mean, that I think it's important to stress. Also to stress, you know, the work that has been done by the Investor Relations team, you know, to get us together back here in person. You know, thank you, Louis, Theodora and all the team.
Yeah, it's about taking perspective. I mean, this CMD, it's, you know, it was three years ago now because of the pandemic. The type of exercise, you know, we wanna do to maintain, you know, contact with you. If we give you a little bit more vision, direction than what we can do on an earnings calls, you know, every quarter. Things are changing.
I mean, what Aryeh just said, you know, on the screen. As much as we are optimistic, don't know what the knock-on effect spillover will be of the overall situation. A month ago, we were being, you know, interrogated on the interest rates, right? Now, you know, it's over, obviously, you know, the war situation. Tikehau was born, you know, on the back of the tech bubble, let's say 2004, a few years after, you know, 2001.
We entered our childhood phase with Lehman Brothers. Many of our partners who are today, you know, running businesses, heading some businesses were with us at the time. Obviously, you know, all these crises have enabled us to grow. As much as we're not trying to time the market, because our job is effectively to invest across cycle, it's important that now we can also rely on a team that's been together for some of us, you know, 17 years, 15 years, 10 years, have been investing across the cycles.
You know, like a good sports team, we don't have to look at each other to understand, you know, what the other one is thinking. That has a lot of value that obviously you cannot visualize in an exercise like that. Antoine said, and you know us, you know him particularly, you know, over the past few years, yes, we remain extremely ambitious, but we are trying to give Tikehau the resources for this ambition.
It comes back to this discussion that we've been having about the infrastructure, about the capital resources. It could be, you know, just a way of getting to cruising altitude and effectively doing what Aryeh was saying. You take a fund, you scale it up, you do the next vintage, and you start again and again. Effectively, we are trying to open up these adjacencies, strategies that will become the differentiators, five years, you know, five years from now because the world is not stopped. I mean, private market 20 years ago was only LBO. You know, that's what LBO was and real estate somewhere.
The way, you know, it has evolved across asset classes by giving access to such a different and wide investor base, we touched base on that, you know, over the past few hours, you know, is a massive opportunity to grow. Hopefully you will see us in the coming years as motivated and, I should say, you know, convinced by the opportunity ahead of us.W Hopefully you found this exercise today useful. You know, we're gonna take Q&A because it has to be an interactive, and that's also a message for the people maybe on the webcast. Don't be shy. I think we can send some question on the webcast. With that, it's up to us to thank you for your time and your presence today. Let's get some question, and then we can have a drink. Monsieur Gibela. The mic.
Please.
Please.
Over here, please.
This gentleman right here with a hand up. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. I've got a couple of questions that are a bit more short-term. I mean, given what's happening and your history about communicating quite cautiously about investing, I'm wondering how you're seeing the investment outlook right now. Have purchase price multiples come down yet? Are you seeing a good pipeline of investments? Are you gonna be deploying that uninvested capital on the dry powder as you talked about? That's my first question. Secondly, could you give us an update as to how your funds have performed year to date, given the market volatility? Thank you.
Well, happy to start with the pipeline. As I said, you know, we're not trying to time the market, and we've got a number of strategies that can address some investment opportunities across the cycle. One could expect that on a Special Opportunities strategy, which is not a distressed play, you know, it's really trying to take advantage of either a dislocation on the public market or a shortage of liquidity on the private market where we can provide some bespoke solution. I mean, obviously this is a time in the cycle where one would expect that effectively it will, right?
Now, we've been debating the DCM landscape right now, and effectively a number of transactions that should have gone the public route, either through a leveraged loan syndication, a bond, you know, are a little bit on hold, and that's where, you know, our private strategies, you know, can step up. You may have seen over the past few weeks some jumbo private financing, you know, being underwritten.
I'm talking, you know, Europe, U.S., obviously different dynamic right now. On the real estate, I mean, as always, you know, there is all this beyond the past few weeks, okay? I would say more post-pandemic, what Thomas was walking through all the plays around the repositioning of real estate, you know, is very much also an opportunity for us.
There is the short-term play. Our capital market strategy colleagues, I mean, obviously have been able to take advantage of some market volatility because they buy securities every day, I would say, you know, and it's liquid. On the private side, like we had in 2020 in different circumstances, and obviously in 2012 and in 2009, it generally is a great time, you know, for bespoke capital, for non-publicly syndicated or distributed securities.
What we are trying to anticipate and trying to base on the exposure to this region is how much of the, as I said, knock-on effect are not yet priced in. We tend to be extremely cautious on that part. The teams have been the whole weekend, you know, that past the beginning of the events, you know, we really tried to understand what was happening with banks. We ran through the Lehman moment. We know that a company can be a A A on the Friday night and be defaulted, you know, on the Monday morning.
We spent a lot of time here, without being too technical and boring you, but try to understand what the ISDA cancellation and swap termination meant. Was there a lot of exposure out there that was not, you know, on the balance sheet? Could we have some kind of a, you know, domino effect? We're trying to understand what we can assess and measure.
Obviously we have no crystal ball as to how things unfold. Bottom line, it's I think it's a pipeline that should fill up naturally because the public markets are drying up or actually, you know, closing for some time, potentially. Generally, this time of the cycle, we've been outperforming, let's say. One of the few things will change the landscape, and Thomas touched on these three megatrends from a macro point of view, which the interest rate increase will create trouble and opportunities. You know, people buying core real estate at 3%, and we are not doing that.
There are a lot of insurance company, pension fund who have done that for the last three years. You know, as we speak, 10-year U.S. is at 2.4, and it was at one point four January 1st. I think the interest rate increase will probably create turbulence. There are a lot of companies, people, firms operating with a lot of leverage. I think that will create refinancing issues, probably decrease in valuation.
Too early to tell, but you know, we've been tackling and making sure we can seize the opportunities when they are there. You know, the cycle for the last 15 years have been, you know, very easy. Nobody realized that. We may be wrong, but it has been very easy. We start seeing things changing.
Chinese real estate, Eastern European investment, taking the U.S., all that change already. Nobody realized that. Especially people operating in a private market, you know, they consider that LBO fund A is selling to LBO fund B, which is selling to LBO fund C. You know, everybody gets carried, management package, all that is continuing. It's the big party. We're seeing it's changing, and we'll see.
We may be wrong. We start seeing not dislocation, but future violences. During the pandemic, for instance, we start doing real estate financing in the U.K. We never have done that before. I think we did five real estate mezzanine with warrants. Why that? Because, you know, people are carrying real estate with a lot of leverage. It's been easy so far, but I think it's changing.
There is no precise answer. You want to make sure you have the right team, you have the right resources and the dry powder, and you have to be ready to invest, because at the end of the day, you know, our job is to take risk, and we are investing. Yeah. If I can come back to what Thomas Friedberger was saying, what should we be avoiding if things were to hit the fan is duration and over-leverage.
Duration in what we do is being mitigated because in private credit everything is variable, you know, it's floating rate. On the real estate, some kind of a perfect hedge because all the leases tend to be indexed, you know, on inflation. On private equity, we don't do buyout, as Antoine Flamarion was saying.
We don't have some portfolio companies that may be 7x levered and 30% drop in their EBITDA because of pandemic and because of the crisis. At least we are immune from that. It doesn't mean that, you know, our portfolio won't be impacted, but not having that, you know, to manage give us much more leeway to focus on the opportunity.
Couple of questions in the room, maybe the gentleman right here who didn't have the opportunity to ask a question and then over the right. First, this gentleman over here, please. Thank you.
Thank you. It's Nicholas Hammond from Citigroup. Thank you for the presentation today. A couple of questions from my side, please. They're just a kind of follow-up on, I guess, the last one. I'd like to ask about follow-up on the private debt and direct lending, please. Just ask you to kind of push you a bit further on how you might expect private debt and to perform in a deteriorating macro environment, I guess particularly direct lending.
But I guess that goes also for TKO, but also the broader market as well, so which players maybe we should be thinking about if in a downside scenario we should be cautious about. I mean, my understanding is that direct lending is typically lending to more highly leveraged parties and weaker credit quality borrowers. It's an asset class that's grown very strongly post GFC. I also did note the low historic loss rate that you have posted.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you for that disclosure.
I was about to pick up on that because rather than words, you know, at least these numbers with the benefit of 12, 15 years, and your first fund is 2007 now. I don't know if 15 years is a cycle, but we lived a number of outside events there. I think that thanks to the discipline and underwriting, Aryeh pointed out a very important thing.
Despite our growth in AUM, we still manage to maintain the selectivity rate in our underwriting and in our deployment. That's thanks to, again, the investment we made in broadening the origination platform and making sure that, you know, we were at 5%, 6%, 7% of transformation rate. When you're managing, you know, 100 million and you're doing, you know, 10 deals a year, it's not the same thing as, you know, 10 billion. That's something again that we've been very obsessed with because we don't wanna be the biggest and as I said, you know, deploying at any price and to go back.
Yes, we have the scalability, but the best, as some of us have been repeating, you know, the best chief risk officer is ourselves because there is a significant commitment of the balance sheet into this, you know, into this strategy. I think my main answer, you know, is that we've been through a couple of cycles now. I'm looking at Cécile, you know, 2007, 2008, 2011, obviously, you know, 2020. The blip in the credit market in 2015.
You know, credit is about diversification. You know, it's unfortunately, you know, in a credit portfolio construction, unlike equity, you know, if you have a zero, it impacts, you know, your performance. In equity, you can have a 20x to make up for the performance. That's the best answer I can give you.
Like, I mean, it just
Sorry, to... You know, we put this slide in addition, which is by vintage, you know, the average leverage of the portfolio company. You see that even TDL V on average is a little bit lower than TDL IV. I think we've been very disciplined. Some of the competition has been lending over 6x-7x . You know, we try to be disciplined. We can be disciplined because we have very large local team and we have huge sourcing capacity. So far, you know, that's illustrating what we're seeing.
Given that private debt often is what? Private debt is seen sometimes as bear market capital. Have you seen a change in client demand in that space?
You know, I think what's happening right now is that a lot of clients are trying to assess, you know, their exposure to Ukraine and Russia. Do you have a factory, a plant, some people? Then do you have investment there, direct? And then do you have indirect investments? We've been through that and probably are lucky, but we don't have, you know, people in Ukraine or in Russia. We don't have any direct investment.
We have few direct investments, which divided by the way in two category again. You could have companies exposed to raw material where there is huge inflation. So if you have to buy titanium, 50%, the titanium is coming from Russia. So, you know, there will be inflation there. The question, can you pass that to your clients?
We have a little bit of that. We are buying, for instance, we have an Italian company called EuroGroup, a company producing electric battery. Main clients are Tesla and Volkswagen, very successful company. They are buying 13% one third of their steel from Russia. Obviously we'll have to buy steel elsewhere. That's, you know, one leg of indirect.
You can have companies whereby they have assets in Ukraine or Russia. For instance, Total Eren has few wind farm in Ukraine. But for us it's pretty limited. But I go back to your question. People are trying to assess that pension fund, insurance company, family office. They are trying right now to see what's their indirect exposure.
Probably they've been a little bit more cautious in the past, you know, few weeks. Also, it takes time because the way it works is that institutional investor, they say, "Okay, I'm allocating EUR 10 billion to private market next year, EUR 5 billion private equity, EUR 5 billion real estate." Then, you know, they have their plan already for 2022.
Are they changing that? Not so quickly. That's one. Two, you can discuss later with Fred, who's there running our sales and marketing, but we've been pushing very strongly on retail. You know, the retail demand is super strong. Especially in an increasing interest rate environment, we see this demand continuing to be strong. But it could evolve.
Thank you. That's helpful. Then the second question I had was just about growth and the FRE margin. I mean, you clearly have a lot of white space, a lot of growth opportunities you can expand into. Just curious how you're thinking about how you prioritize those opportunities and all these expansions. In that context, given so much on investment, so many launches. Can you talk about the expectation on the evolution for the FRE margin? Is it just a steady grind up, or is it kind of just a bit flattish and then more of a jump towards the end? Thank you.
I mean, it's related to a question earlier on competition. You know, we really feel like the space is really a blank space. There are tons of things to build and to be done, because, you know, as I said, very simple trend, more and more savings from around the world and all this saving has to finance, you know, all the transition, digital transition, energy transition, cybersecurity, agro regeneration.
There are tons of things to do and if you are creative, I was just looking at a pitch at lunch, which is, I'm gonna make it very brief, but KKR purchased a large insurance company in the U.S. It closed a few months ago, and now they are raising a sidecar to co-invest with the insurance company, okay? Very passive.
They just invented a new business, you know, sidecar co-invested with the insurance company. For the people, you know, smart, on the ball, reactive, creative, there is a huge space and we feel like, you know, I'm not even sure that we know all the opportunities we'll launch, we'll tackle, but you should expect us, you know, being creative again. That's been that less competition and probably more wide space, at least for now. That's what we see.
The FRE margin is a combination of more profitable strategies as you know, Thomas, detailed. The fact that you know we are invested, we front-loaded you know as I tried to explain the infrastructure, and so we've got the operating leverage you know kicking in. We'll have to add some people, obviously margi nally, but you have this effect. If you start you know if you benchmark us and you see where we're coming from, you can see where we should be landing.
Thank you.
Thank you. I think next question was from Carlo over here, then a few guys. Yeah. Carlo? Yeah.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for the presentation and taking my question. Actually, I have a follow-up and two questions. The follow-up is on the interest rate scenario and on retail clients. I was wondering what are the geographies you see more opportunities? You actually have agreement with Fideuram and Banca March, which are very geared to interest rate scenario. I'm wondering if you are thinking about other geographies in particular or to further extend those specific geographies.
The second question is regarding the client diversification. I'm referring to Slide 47. Private investors and family offices are 20% at the end of 2021. Where do you expect to land in 2026? If I may, a question on ESG. Actually, this is more a secular trend. I'm curious about your view in this respect.
Clearly, there is a lot of debate about the performance of ESG funds. Do you expect most of your peers to become impact companies? Where do you think to land about Article 8, Article 9? We don't know about the evolution of the regulation, if there will be another article later on. The question is, do you expect in 2026 2026 will be 100% ESG AUM?
Maybe on the first question, you mentioned Fideuram and Banca March. I mean, a couple of points. Number one, you want to do repeated business with your partners, so that's one option. I'm telling you that we are talking to probably all the large financial institution ranging from Singapore to Abu Dhabi to Canada.
This feeder structure takes some time to put together. We have, you know, a lot of discussion open, but it takes a lot of time. You should expect us, you know, in the coming years launching a new product like that to tackle retail clients through private banks. We've done that in the past, and we're gonna continue to do that.
Now that the platform is bigger because you can navigate with your certain offices. I think you should expect us doing more of that. The retail, obviously, which is part of that, when we listed, we had 1% of money coming from retail investor. Today, it's 20%. Are we giving guidance to 2026? The answer is no. Too early, probably.
But we expect that to grow because there is more demand from retail investor, and I think we put together a strong team. Mathieu and Thomas describe our private wealth efforts. We have already a lot of strong European and Asian families invested with us in some specific strategies. You know, we like spending time with private client because they invest money, they've got expertise, they bring ideas, they bring deals. You should expect more on this front coming from us.
Some cross-selling coming because the 20% is already a chunky part, you know, if you benchmark to other managers, and that's thanks to a number of platforms we own or have developed, you know, like Sofidy on the real estate, which has 50 or 60 thousand individual investors. We mentioned Omnity, who effectively gives access to 40 thousand investors. When you start, you know, cross-selling that, and it's really retail, you know, defined as very modest investment. We're not talking large family offices or private bank distribution or all the platforms Antoine was talking about, the high capital platforms and others, which will be incremental.
Now, keep in mind that the overall pie, as I said, will keep growing, and we still have a focus on, you know, institutional money. So if it stays to 20% when we get to EUR 65 billion, there will be a significant step in absolute term, you know, for retail. But that's not in terms of proportion we're thinking, but very much how can we embrace the overall, the total addressable market, let's call it like our friends do in the growth equity space. Cécile, do you wanna maybe pick up on ESG?
Yes. On your question regarding impact and regulation, what you can take as an assumption is that indeed, more and more strategies will be Article 8 or Article 9, and certainly 100% when it comes to private equity. On a broader picture, I think the ultimate goal is that one day we don't talk about impact anymore because it will be totally embedded and a routine. This word will hopefully disappear.
Thank you, Cécile.
Thank you.
Question for the gentleman over here. Mandeep, go ahead.
Hi. The balance sheet portfolio is a key pillar of the new ROE target. The returns on that. For the balance sheet portfolio, you've a target of internal rate of return of 10%-15%. Are you able to provide what the return has been historically or when we can expect it to reach the target range? Does this target range allow for the increase in value-add strategies that are expected over the next few years?
Yeah. Happy to start with that. So there are two things, as Aryeh and Antoine walk you through. The fund investment, which have been increasing, you know, from 30%-75%. The fund investment, you should really think about that. As you know, since we're invested in everything we do, we will be in some 5% target return strategies.
I don't know, you know, some corporate lending, the TGA, for example, fund, and all the way to 25% in private equity, in special ops, in some of the real estate, you know, business. So if you blend that in the allocation we're making, it is designed to return at cruising altitude effectively, once you've mitigated the J curve that Aryeh was saying, you know, this 10%-15%.
Then there is the ecosystem path that, Antoine, you know, walk you through, and which tends to be primarily, equity investment. You know, it's designed to be more effectively in the upper part of the targeted return. Last year, you know, it was a 10.1%, I think, Louis, that we reported, you know, last year. As you get a more mature fund portfolio and portfolio in itself, that's how we construct the balance sheet. And we tend to think it's the return on equity.
We'll be debating among ourselves whether we should be creating another KPI, which would be the KPI telling you, "Okay, I use 100 from the balance sheet." The investment is designed to be making mid-teens, but by using this, capital that will also generate a fee component, you know, over 10 years, let's say, margin plus a PRE, that in returns will create, some kind of return on capital employed return. We said we're gonna keep things simple.
Because we've been, you know, developing in the last few years our thematic private equity and our opportunistic real estate, which are supposed to deliver or designed to deliver more than 20%, and we are investing more of the balance sheet into these strategies, we are fairly confident that the return on equity or the return will be probably higher thanks to that. Because if you invest, you know, only in your senior loan fund delivering 4%, you know you can only deliver 4% at best. And we've been switching already that.
Maybe just something to add to your question. Within our value add strategies, our funds are really recent, really young. So typically, you know, some of them still in investment period. So that's why the ramp up is gonna be gradual. But as this strategy matures, that would increment, you know, their portfolio returns going forward. Any other question from Tom over here? Yeah.
Thanks. If I could just come back to the rationale for the balance sheet. I'm just joking. I don't want to get chucked out this close to the drinks. No. What I wanted to ask you about is, you've been really successful at winning kind of governmental mandates, large governmental mandates. It feels like some of the strategies that you're running on the kind of aerospace and defense side and on the energy transition side are super relevant for particularly what some European governments are gonna be looking to do over the next few years.
Do you see scope for material new mandates to get awarded over the next couple of years? Given your kind of relationships and experience so far, I mean, presumably you feel quite well placed to kind of win those if they do come.
I mean, there is clearly a trend which, you know, is probably good for the transition and the economy of having, you know, government money, and that's, you know, during the pandemic, the EUR 750 billion plan in Europe, but now there is a new plan coming. So it's, you know, people with the right resources, the right expertise will probably benefit from that, and we've been benefiting from that. This trend is accelerating, there is no doubt. I mentioned the EUR 200 billion from the German government, you know, into defense. So we'll see more of that coming. Are we pursuing that? You know, it really depends.
We're gonna pursue that if it's the right, you know, opportunities, return and economics, because you want to make sure that if you raise specific strategies, it's gonna help you deliver the right FRE and PRE. There will be probably more of that coming. Is it a good news? Partially, because for all of you, it's bad news because, you know, taxes will increase massively in the coming years, there is no doubt. You know, I'm not sure that, you know, we want more European plan and actually global plan.
We've been granted by the Belgian government, by the Spanish government, and by the French government mandate. It's also highly competitive. You know, you spend a lot of time because it's prestigious to manage money from the government. For instance, in Belgium, you know, it helps us a lot to grow the profile. You know, you have Antin or Bridgepoint, as I said. We continue to pursue these opportunities. You know, it's not a business per se. I don't know if that answers your question, Tom? Yeah.
Yeah. If I can add, you know, Tom, on that, I mean, because beyond the, it's not the prestigious aspect, the strategic aspect. Because when you get two things, step back. We want most of this mandate because we invested significantly in the firm, and that's a fact. 12 years ago, we won in France the first direct lending mandate on the back of the Euro crisis. You may remember.
We were, you know, some of us at the beauty contest, and then we told the people we were allocating money, which was, you know, public money, "Oh, and by the way, you know, we want to invest side by side, you know, with you." We remember that we're looking at each other like, you know, I mean, we're not looking for a hedge fund. You know, we're looking for an asset manager. 10 years later, we won these funds because we invested significantly.
The Aerospace Fund, it's EUR 200 million from the French state, it's EUR 200 million from a combination of four large strategic corporates, and it's EUR 230 million from us. So again, it makes a difference, you know, in winning because you effect.
They can effectively represent that they're not giving public money to someone else who's just trying to make money with public money. That's step one. The second step is, you know, when you win mandates in Spain, in Belgium, in France, and then you start talking to a public pension fund in Korea, in Japan, in Canada, in Australia, it's a bit of a track record, you know? You have to show that you've been effectively doing that already. It's very important for the brand building, the brand awareness, and the brand promotion.
Thanks, both. Very clear.
Thank you. I'm just gonna take one question from the webcast, 'cause most of them have been addressed, and then I'll leave you two. Two questions for the price of one, if I may, 'cause the question is about how about M&A in the private client space or wealth management space. It is something that you're, you know, considering, you know, looking at or not?
It's a good question because it's you know. You've got assets and liabilities. Where do you invest, and where the money is coming from? We discussed retail and obviously some of our peers you know are looking at private bank distributor. As always you know we are looking at such.
We are not sure that's something we'll pursue. It will really depends on the opportunity because at the end of the day the distributor you know it's very difficult to see the value chain. Some of them have been very successful. Some of them became less successful. We have to look, and by the way, the market is very different in each country. I don't know.
In the U.K., you can buy a combination of IFAs or a private bank, and then, you know, it will be very different in France, totally different in Italy, very different again in the U.S. We’re gonna look, but probably same approach as M&A in a very opportunistic manner and very disciplined in terms of price.
Thank you. I think you had a question, Nicolas.
Yeah. Thank you. Sorry. To come back on the balanced investments and on your portfolio, you reached 75% of investment within your funds, and you actually commit to increase that by roughly EUR 500 million per year. I want to know if the 75% should be seen as a floor from now on. Just to follow up, you have, I guess, EUR 180 million indirect investment from a private equity legacy. Should we expect this to disappear, or is it something that you might use going forward as a seed for a new strategy? Thank you.
You know, I think the 75%, it was a previous guidance. We are 75% invested in our funds. As we say, we're gonna continue to do that, there is no doubt. Not because we need it, but because we consider we are very strong, you know, specialty team, real estate team, direct lending, private equity.
So, you know, we generate return through that, and we're gonna continue to do that. Because at the end of the day, I know that we are. You know, nowadays, people are looking at ARR, multiple of turnover, but at the end of the day, you need to make net income, and that's enable you to receive dividends. For shareholder, I think it's good and at least.
For you know, the management and the employee, dividend matters, so you need net income. To generate the net income, you know, we're gonna generate net income coming from the asset management, but coming from the balance sheet as well. The balance sheet investing in the fund create more recurring revenues, more diversify. We gave previously the 75% guidance from the balance sheet invested in the fund.
We are one year in advance there. I think we're gonna continue to do that, and probably increase a little bit. We keep some flexibility to potentially, as Aryeh described, do M&A or launch new initiative. We've been very strong at using the balance sheet to launch new strategies and energy transition is a good example.
I think I mentioned three times, but I think now it's we are about to sign agro-regeneration. It's another example where we invest the balance sheet, so we want to continue to use this balance sheet. Now we've got this legacy portfolio, and we call it a legacy portfolio. All this investment are super successful so far.
You know, they will be disposed from time to time. Few of them are really larger than other, and we have a lot of them because when we were small, you know, we invest EUR 1 million in a fund. Or we co-invest EUR 1 million in a real estate deal. Are we gonna do that? The answer is no, because, you know, it's a lot of management time, reporting and so I suspect that we're gonna reduce the number of investment of the balance sheet probably.
Thank you. Maybe if there's no question, there were maybe one question from the webcast when it comes to how you see going forward your asset class mix evolving and, potentially the room to add, you know, strategies which are not yet in the prospectus, which are typically, you know, European infrastructure or mezzanine, you know, other kind of asset classes we could consider tackling in the future. If you wanna take that.
Well, if we take a bit of, you know, perspective when we listed in 2017, it was EUR 10 billion AUM, and 50% was private credit, direct lending of some kind. We said that we wanted to rebalance, you know, the business mix, and we said partly towards real estate and equity, private equity, let's say. If you fast-forward, you know, five years, you know, we've managed to do that.
We've broadened the real estate into real assets. Effectively, we added back to the question about the M&A, you know, I mean, Star America is, was, EUR 400 million AUM business, a team of 20, some very engaged, you know, founders with a bit of transition for one of them. A great platform to build on, you know.
If you fast-forward 18 months, it's EUR 1 billion AUM, and as we said, in terms of valuation, it was, you know, a relative for us. We can build, you know, with this expertise we have, you know, granted based in the U.S., but one of the two founder is a European. He happens to be French. It's a pure coincidence.
Today we think that the opportunity to expand into infrastructure in Europe that we haven't seen so far on a risk-adjusted basis, we can do that. You know, we can effectively step into that. The business mix is very much not about having, you know, four different businesses equal. It's very much about, first of all, the market opportunity for us to invest.
I don't think you heard us saying that we were moving into some cryptos or anything like that because we have no conviction. I'm, you know, I'm sketching a bit, but if you have no investment conviction, we will not propose an asset management strategy. That's first. B, it has to be effectively a scalable and profitable business lines. We've had some discussion in the past about some real estate debt, infrastructure debt.
I mean, some strategy which require much more volume, but are much lower margin. I'm not saying it's a bad business, but if you get into this business, you have to be able to scale it. That is yellow business. Yellow is, let's say 50 basis points, but the underlying operating margin of our yellow is 55%.
It's a lower management fee, but it's a higher operating margin. It's always about, you know, this balance. You know, it's about the opportunity. As we said, you know, if tomorrow, if next Monday, you know, we wake up and it's another, you know, end of the world, I mean, we know that some of the industry consolidation has happened in some adverse times, and if we can take advantage of that, we will certainly do that.
Innovation, no doubt, but scale as well, and I think, you know, we are getting some scale in some of our businesses, and then that will create more operating leverage. Real estate, for instance, it's a good example. We've got EUR 12 billion of real estate, so we are one of the largest real estate asset manager in continental Europe.
I say we're gonna scale that. We've got the team, very strong track record. We've got 200 people doing real estate. Inflation is there, so you know, there will be client demand. You know, there will be some dislocation on real estate. You know, we're gonna try to scale that, in a very significant manner while, you know, being disciplined as well.
Thank you. I mean, the good news is that we are seven minutes ahead of schedule for the cocktail. That's, I think, is gonna be my final words. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Thank you to the Tikehau team. Thank you, Theodora in the IR team. Thank you all the technician and everyone. Thank you so much.