Welcome everyone to our analyst and investor call for the first three months of 2026. This is Janina speaking. I'm pleased to have our CEO, Asoka Wöhrmann, and our CFO, Martin Praum, with us today. Asoka will start by providing insights into the current market environment, recent transaction activity, fundraising trends, and our strategic positioning for the next phase of the cycle. Afterwards, Martin will guide you through the first three months of 2026 financial results and provide an outlook for the remainder of the year. As mentioned by Sarah, the call will be followed by a Q&A session. During today's call, we will refer to the results presentation, which you can find on our website. If you have any questions, the investor relations team is more than happy to assist. As usual, this call will be recorded and be made available on our website.
We will also provide a call transcript for further reference. With that, I'd like to hand over to Asoka to start the presentation. Asoka, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Janina. Dear ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome from my side as well. Let's start on the page three on the presentation. Since the second half of the last year, we have seen a gradual market recovery and a pickup in activity. We are entering a new cycle with investors actively reassessing portfolio construction and allocation strategies. The market momentum slowed in February following the outbreak of the war in Iran and the resulting increase in uncertainty. This once again highlights how sensitive markets remain to geopolitical developments but it is time to learn to live with this level of macro volatility. As I have said before, this recovery will be longer, slower, and bumpier than in previous cycles. That said, the recent geopolitical volatility represents short-term noise rather than a shift in the underlying recovery trajectory.
The mid to long-term recovery remains intact, supported by structural mega trends and ongoing capital reallocation. Real assets are increasingly in focus, offering resilient income, visibility, and diversification in a transforming environment. We continue to see compelling investment opportunities across the dual mega trends for our clients. These mega trends, digital, urban, energy, and living transitions, continue to shape our economies and societies. The current environment also reinforces the strategic importance of energy resilience, infrastructure modernization, and greater energy independence. We need greater energy independence and more efficient energy management going forward. At the same time, we are seeing growing international investor interest in European real asset strategies. In the current environment, Europe is increasingly being viewed as an attractive, relatively stable destination for long-term capital, supported by a strong and stable currency. With that, let's move to the next slide. Let me now turn to transaction activity.
Transaction activity in the first three months of 2026 was selective. In the short term, activity continues to reflect macro uncertainty. At the same time, structural demand for real assets remains firmly in place and continues to underpin the emerging investment cycle. Clients remains disciplined and selective, and particularly given ongoing uncertainty around interest rates and valuations. As a result, transaction volumes reflect a more cautious investment environment in response to geopolitical developments rather than a lack of underlying demand. A similar pattern can be seen in fundraising. Equity raised reflects more cautious and delayed allocation decisions in the current environment, totaling EUR 4.1 billion compared to EUR 0.2 last year. Importantly, investor interest remains intact. This is dominated by the cornerstone commitment from the European Investment Bank and supporting our global energy strategy.
As the visibility improves and relative value becomes clearer, we expect client allocation activity to pick up again. This should drive renewed momentum into the second half of 2026. Let's move on to the next slide, please. Let me now turn to our product offering. Over the past years, we have sharpened our strategic focus around a smaller number of high-conviction strategies and flagship products. In particular, living with a clear value add angle, sustainable and affordable housing, energy transition, infrastructure, and what we define as RE-Infra at the intersection of real assets. All of this is fully aligned with our key structural dual mega trends, digital, urban energy and living transitions. Importantly, we cover the full risk-return spectrum across real asset sectors. In sum, we have the right product set up to capture growth in the next phase of the market for our clients.
With that, let's move to the next page, please. We have used the past three years in a very focused way. We have fundamentally repositioned and strengthened our platform with a clear focus on efficiency, scalability, and integration. Today, we operate a fully integrated global investment platform, enabling faster and more efficient execution across the value chain. At the same time, we have built a more scalable and cost-efficient operating model. This is already translating into productivity gains and importantly, operating leverage. We are also making good progress in integrating data, digital tools across the platform, including across portfolio management and investment decision-making, further improving efficiency and transparency. Overall, we have strengthened profitability with management fees more than covering our operating expenses. We created a stronger, more scalable and better integrated platform. We maintain a strong balance sheet with a very healthy equity ratio.
We are well-positioned to capture accelerating market activity and generate meaningful operating leverage as growth returns. Thank you for your attention, and I would like to hand over now to our CFO, Martin Praum. He will guide you through our results of the first three months in 2026 and the full year outlook. Martin, please.
Thank you, Asoka. Hi, everyone. It's Martin speaking. Let's continue on page eight, where you can see the results of our management activities that Asoka just mentioned to you. We fundamentally repositioned and strengthened our platform with a focus on efficiency, scalability and integration. This resulted in the significant 41% growth in EBITDA, but also in net income more than doubling, so the strongest quarter of the last five. The improvement in efficiency is best seen in the development of our EBITDA margin, which improved materially to slightly over 32%. This was certainly helped by the higher annual performance fees, which we booked in the first quarter and other income items, and this explains why we are above our full-year guidance in the first quarter. Even if we stripped out these effects, we would see a good improvement in efficiency compared to last year.
We managed to keep total service fee income stable despite record low transaction activity in the first quarter, which is a reflection of the short-term noise in the market impacting both equity raising and investment volumes. Overall, if you look at revenues, a robust development given the current market environment. Our diversified assets under management base continues to show resilience also in volatile times, which benefits our recurring management fees. The reduction operating costs by 8% is a major driver for the improved profitability. I will come back to that later. Let's move to page nine, where we show our AUM with a virtually stable development over the quarter. Some selective outflows we've seen are typical of this point in the cycle, as we see clients more actively reallocating their portfolios.
As mentioned by Asoka, new investment activity for clients was limited during the quarter, but we continued good dialog with our clients on new investment opportunities. Don't forget, we also have around EUR 1.3 billion of client equity commitments we can deploy once opportunities arise. As a reminder of our AUM diversification, resilience, and quality, let's go to page 10. We continue to manage a highly diversified AUM base for our clients with around 80% in real estate and close to 20% in infrastructure investments. The debt levels on these investments continue to be low at around 30% only.
The broad variety of products and the expertise we have on the ground will prove as a competitive advantage in this new cycle, as investor focus has clearly shifted from pure asset allocation to real assets to being closer to the asset and its business plans. We again talk more about active asset management, for which our combination of big data-driven in-house research together with our local experts on the ground is a great plus for convincing investment strategies. Let's go back to the P&L and have a look at our operating efficiency. We continued to deliver on improving the platform's efficiency with operating expenses down 8%, with staff costs being the major driver here. Do not forget, we also continued to invest in both people and our operations, namely IT and data projects, to enable future efficiencies from process optimization and AI.
This is the driver for our increased operating leverage. It enables us to show even higher profitability and margins once certain revenue items will come back. A ratio to reflect this, which we've shown you also in the past, is the comparison of recurring management fees to operating expenses on the next slide. Although some of our performance fees are recurring in nature and could be included in this view, looking at the pure management fees alone, we can now show positive coverage. This makes us much more independent from market activity and also more resilient. Let's go to page 13, and let's look at the two engines we run, our asset-light investment management business and our balance sheet investments. We've seen a significant improvement in EBITDA from our investment management business based on the actions that we've taken. The balance sheet investments contribution remained virtually unchanged.
It is important to remind you here that part of our balance sheet, especially what you will find in the position participations, is not generating annual income that you will find in the P&L. Take the exit carry profit entitlements of over EUR 300 million, which we have capitalized on our balance sheet as an example. They reflect a value creation for our clients and for our shareholders over the last 13 years. As they are reflected in the balance sheet in participations and equity at fair value already, they have not and will not support the P&L lines. As we start to crystallize part of these profit entitlements, starting from this year, you will see it rather in increased cash flow from investments, but it remains a material value creation. Let's move to the next page. Page 14 shows you more details of our balance sheet investments.
We also actively used our balance sheet for selective co-investments, providing PATRIZIA and our shareholders with future income from fund participations. We will continue to screen the market for both investment opportunities, but also to exit certain positions when the time is right. Let's look at our balance sheet on page 15. We continue to run a very robust balance sheet with an equity ratio of 73% on a net basis. Available liquidity decreased to around EUR 86 million compared to last quarter, but will jump back to well over EUR 100 million in the second quarter based on expected cash flows from fees and exit carry payments. We will continue to monitor the overall market development, debt maturities, and refinancing markets, as well as investment opportunities with regards to our capital allocation strategy. Regarding the guidance on page 16, we can confirm guidance ranges for the full year.
We are very well on track for EBITDA and EBITDA margin, we also confirm our AUM guidance range despite the lack of net AUM growth in the first quarter. We remain cautiously optimistic on the market development, with equity raised numbers in April showing higher momentum again to what we've seen during the first quarter, which showed subdued equity raising numbers, not only for us, but for many other players in the market. As Asoka mentioned, we believe the recent geopolitical volatility represents short-term noise rather than a shift in the underlying recovery. The mid to long term recovery in our view remains intact. We are supported by structural mega trends and ongoing capital reallocation. Real assets are increasingly in focus, especially in Europe.
Lastly, and now coming to the last page, with our AGM on June 10th approaching, our shareholders will benefit from the eighth increase in dividends to now EUR 0.36 per share, reflecting a dividend yield of close to 5% at the moment, while we believe our earnings quality and cash flows will continue to improve based on our more efficient platform and a generally intact long-term recovery story for real assets. With that, I'd like to hand back to our operator, Sarah, to start the Q&A.
Thank you so much, Asoka and Martin, for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now happy to take your questions. To keep this conversation engaging, we kindly ask you to ask questions in person via the audio line. To do so, just raise your virtual hand with the button on the lower part of your screen. If you have dialed in via phone, you can raise your hand by pressing the key combination star key nine. With this, we will start with the first person, and this is Mr. Kaiser.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for the presentation. Congrats on the good start to the year and for taking my question. I would start with one question on your guidance. For the lower end of the guidance, could you shed some light on your assumptions? I think, or I guess my question is in which magnitude do you need to see a recovery on the market, if any? And when this pickup in transaction activity is needed to reach the lower end?
Hi, Philipp. More than happy to take the question. I think the easiest to approach this is if you look at our Q1 results, and if you strip out the annual performance fee that we have booked in the first quarter, we do believe there will be some performance fees over the remainder of the year. If you then take kind of the stripped out number and extrapolate it, this should kind of lead you to the lower end of the guidance range.
The decision on whether we will come at the lower or at the upper end of the guidance range, in our view, is driven by certainly some equity raising and AUM growth, but more importantly by transaction fees, and also, the development of the cost side, where we still believe we have some flexibility depending on how the market develops.
Perfect. Thanks a lot. Speaking of the cost side, your overall operating expenses further declined. Congrats on this development. That said, this was driven by further decline in staff costs, while other operating expenses ticked up slightly. You mentioned it also during your presentation and the timing effects. Could you quantify those or give a broad range?
In terms of timing effects, I would say we talk about a lower single -digit number, say EUR 1 million or a little bit more, that impacted the Q1 negatively for other operating expenses. Generally, if we look at kind of what we expect for the full year compared to 2025, we do expect again, a decline in staff costs year-on-year, and other operating expenses are rather flattish. Again, it really depends on the remainder of the year. If we see some better than expected revenues, that could have an impact on the cost side. Also on the other way, if the market doesn't return to a certain level, we also have some flexibility to adjust the cost base to react.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks. Thanks a lot. With the roughly 800 FTEs, is that a solid base, or it all depends on the market, I guess?
I would say that with around 800 for your modeling, we feel comfortable, yes.
Thanks a lot. My next question with regards your available liquidity. You mentioned in the presentation that it decreased given the acquisition of shares in the Dawonia Fund. Could you shed some more light on the rationale behind that? What's your current share in this fund after the acquisition?
Certainly. More than happy. First of all, we used the first quarter not only to invest in further Dawonia shares, but also other co-investments and in certain funds. The idea behind the Dawonia acquisition is still related to the mandate prolongation, which we announced recently. As part of this prolongation, there was a certain window of share trading in the fund. Like other investors, we also used this opportunity to allocate more capital because, A, we know the asset very well, B, we are very convinced of the assets and the fund and its management, and also the upside potential that our investors and we have.
To your last question, the economic interest in Dawonia from PATRIZIA at the moment is around 7%.
Perfect. Thanks a lot for the clarification. My last one, out of curiosity, everyone's talking about AI, and I would be interested in what's your vision for PATRIZIA and possible implementation, business-wise, operational-wise, efficiency-wise? Yeah, would be quite interesting to get around your thoughts.
Philipp, thank you for question. I do think it's a very valid question. You know, as you know, we have onboarded last year one of the noticeable CTOs in Germany, and for one of the MDAX companies, Christoph Fuchs, who is now set the, let me say, IT and digital landscape at PATRIZIA, and he's also an AI expert. I do think also, as you know, Philipp, my predecessor and also the founder has invested quite much in, you know, IT and digital ventures. What we are constantly took the improvements and we built for 15 years now, nearly, the data intelligence platform, what is also AI related, you know, or running by AI, the data intelligence what we are running.
It's a unique approach. Additional to that, we are now in a rollout for all the you know, all our stuff and an AI program, including you know, let me say, learning sessions and upgrading, but at the same time we are in our data strategy as well as in our, let me say, upgrading front office platforms. There's also middle and back office platforms we are going to apply AI. We and I do think I'm very confident that we can see efficiency wins, but also upgrading of quality, data, precision and all that will come.
I do think, again, we don't forget our business is also data business. I do think therefore this disruption is not. We are not protected by this disruption of the industry. We want to, also, let me say, fully in. That's what we're doing in our initiative. We have AI initiative precisely saying at PATRIZIA there's AI initiative. That is, to roll out to everyone, but also, learning how to deal with that, how to use it, and also very clear cases what we are using to upgrade and improve our processes and outcomes.
Perfect. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot. Very helpful. All from my side, back in the queue.
Thank you, Philipp.
Thanks.
We will move on with the questions from Lars von Klääff.
Yes. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. three quick questions, if I may. We talked a lot about Dawonia, and maybe I missed the info, or at least I can't find it. Could you tell us what the Dawonia fee included in your Q1 profitability was?
Sure, Lars. Dawonia fee in Q1 was primarily the performance fee, which was around EUR 12 million in the first quarter.
Okay. Perfect. Secondly, I mean, we're always talking about recurring and sticky management fees. They were down 6% quarter-on-quarter with AUM more or less remaining stable or only being down 0.7%. Is that due to a mix shift or more shift away from management fees to transaction performance fees? Or what's the explanation?
No, that's simply technical effects, Lars. In the fourth quarter, we had a higher share of service development fees and also catch-up fees in the fourth quarter, which did not reoccur in the first quarter. You typically in when you come towards year-end in certain mandates, you can calculate catch-up fees only then, which positively impacts the fourth quarter.
Understood. Many thanks. Then the last question. I mean, admittedly, I was surprised to see signed transaction volume of zero. I can't remember having seen that at all, or at least not since the beginning of 2019. What shall we read into that?
There's certainly rounding here as well. We had some signed transactions, but again, as Asoka and I mentioned, that was really the market environment and basically reflection of a certain hesitant to make decisions in the first quarter.
Okay. Adding to that, are you expecting that to change in Q2 already, or is it rather the hope for the second half of this year that we see signed transactions coming back?
No, no, absolutely. That's why it's important also to look at our pipeline, because what you see when we publish equity raised, you will only see the equity raised that's really done and dusted and has gone through all committees. We also have already client commitments that we have received, but where we haven't received the full committee approvals from the certain committees that are required. From that pipeline, as I mentioned in my speech as well, we have a certain optimism that towards the second quarter we'll see a higher momentum.
Understood. Many thanks. I'll go back into the line.
Thank you so much for your questions. We move on with the questions from a person who's dialed in with a phone ending eight eight eight. Please unmute yourself by pressing star key six and introduce yourself to us. Unfortunately, I can see that you unmuted yourself, but we cannot hear you.
Yes, it's Kai. Kai Klose. Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. Good afternoon. I've got two quick questions. The first one, could you indicate what was the split of transactions by regions or by asset classes? Would you expect to see in 2026 more signed acquisitions or disposals? Second, third question would be on the equity raising. You mentioned there was a notable increase in April. Could you quantify that to which magnitude you saw an uptick?
Let me start with the second question. As we've shown, the equity raised in the first quarter, we talked about around EUR 100 million. If you look at the April numbers, we have a similar amount in April only. That basically underpins our cautious optimism for more activity coming over the next month and quarters. In terms of transaction or investment volumes, I mean, we talk about on absolute levels, relatively low numbers. I would say that the majority was in the DACH region, and especially in the living sector. This is where we've seen activity.
Also we've seen activity on the infrastructure side, and something in Southern Europe.
Well, is likely to be true for acquisitions and disposals in 2026?
That was primarily for acquisitions. On the disposal side, we've seen more activity on the commercial side also with a focus on Germany and Europe.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kai.
Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, please be reminded that it's still possible to ask questions as we by now have one participant left in the queue, and that's Miro Zuzak. Please ask your questions.
Yes. Hi, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yes. Hi, Miro.
Hi, congratulations also from my side. I have one clarification question regarding the operative Nettoaufwand, which has come down a lot in the last quarter. Did you mention that for the year, the operating net Nettoaufwand will go down? Just at the run rate will still further go down from the EUR 52 million further down?
My comment which I made, Miro, was I compared the last year's number that we showed in operating expenses with what we expect for the full year. There we would expect a further decline in our model. If you now take the operating expenses that we've shown in the first quarter, which is the EUR 51 million, if you would extrapolate that would probably be a little bit too optimistic based on our current assumptions because we have certain cost items that we expect to come in over the year. Quick answer is, extrapolating Q1 in terms of cost base, in my view, would at this stage be too optimistic because we do expect some more business activity, some more revenue activity, and part of that has costs attached.
That's why we expect a little higher run rate for the remainder of the year. As I said before, if the revenue side doesn't come in, we also have some flexibility to react.
Okay.
Does that answer the question?
Absolutely. Thank you. The next one would be again on the Dawonia news flow, which you announced basically in December. I have one clarification question. Basically, you agreed that you would get around EUR 49 million every year from 2026 to 2029. Then you said that under certain circumstances, there is the possibility that you would get another EUR 49 million in the year 2031. That's what I read from the press release. My question is, what happened to the year 2030?
Yeah. No, I think numbers, no, is in line. I do think, again, don't forget, as we also announced with the whole investor community and the Dawonia, we agreed a five-year contract. That is the reason, I do think, the payouts of that, not only also independent of that, but because of also reasonable liquidity we want to keep in the Dawonia fund itself. I do think that is one of the reasons for the pause of the year. Nevertheless, your statement, no, completely valid. That's a little bit the explanation.
I think I didn't really get the answer. Sorry. The question was what will happen in the year 2030 after you have received four times EUR 49 million?
That's right. Then, you know, we get, again, 31, but that due to the, no negotiations and agreement, because that is a manifestation of all the, you know, discussion what we had in the early, you know, early years. I do think this is exactly the realization as, that's, you know, what we agreed and negotiated, end of the day.
Both Miro just take this as the year in which we will sit together with the investors again in the fund and then decide on a further prolongation or strategy for the fund.
Okay. Basically there's just no payment in 2030. If you have disclosed that, the entitlement is EUR 308.8 million in total.
Correct.
If I take the 5x EUR 49 million, I get to EUR 245.
That's correct.
What happens to the remainder?
We are still exposed like our clients to the Dawonia development, Miro. That's the then the remainder will be discussed once either the mandate will be prolonged or exited.
Okay. It is still there as a crystallized performance fee and an entitlement. It's not that you had to lower the amount as a basically way to speed up the payout. It's the entire amount which eventually will be paid out, the EUR 308 million. It's not going to be less.
I do think, let us, I do think all these payments what you mentioned earlier is something, looks certain. All other outcome is due to the outcome of the real exit of Dawonia, what is completely, in my opinion, aligned with the all investor, with the all investor interests. I think we want to have the skin in the game, not only through our direct investments, what, you know, Martin alluded to, also in the agreement, we have an open position, what will be then, you know, will be all, you know, let me say, recalibrated, then end of the exit. That is the theory behind. Again, your thoughts are completely right.
We have with the five payments, no quite certainty, we have a certainty. The rest is due to the market up or down. I do think because you can see we have a skin in the game, we have increased it. We have a very high confidence and confidence that PATRIZIA will be a great investment and we want to be, you know, committed to our investors because we want to partnering up. That's also our really important clients in Germany and elsewhere.
To add to that, Miro, I think that is, I think a well-balanced structure, which combines a certain security on cash flows for PATRIZIA and its shareholders, and at the same time, a very good alignment of interest with our clients in the fund because we're also still exposed and motivated to increase the value of Dawonia going forward.
Okay. The last one, sorry if I have missed that in the last couple of months, but you have this, you have now the nice problem to get EUR 200 million in payouts and let's say fresh liquidity. You have this slide in your presentation where you basically show that your balance sheet is worth more than your market capitalization, so your net asset value is worth more than the market capitalization. You have different options. You can buy more Dawonia, you can buy your own shares, or you can pay out a dividend, or you can do other stuff. What's your strategy and what have you communicated regarding this strategy? What you're going to do with this excess capital?
Sure, Miro. Indeed, I mentioned that before. First of all, the rule how we run the company is that we want to continue to have an investment grade rating style balance sheet that we want to run. This limits a certain debt level we want to have on group balance sheet. We will check whether we can or have investments that have an expected return above our cost of capital. Then we'll make the decision, also taking into account how the debt maturities look like for us as a group. Then also as a further element, discuss the dividend policy or potential cash return.
It's kind of a staggered approach that we have here for our capital allocation. We are continuously discussing this, also taking into account the changes in the market environment. Also, I'm, as a CFO, certainly looking at the debt maturities of PATRIZIA. You might know we have a bonded loan that matures in 2027 with around EUR 70 million. I have that also on my list that we want to redeem that.
Thank you and all the best.
Thank you so much, Miro.
Thanks.
Thank you. In the meantime, we have received no further virtual hands. Everything seems to be answered by now. Should further questions arise later, please feel invited to get in touch with Janina and her team at any time. Thank you very much. With this, I hand back to Martin for some final remarks, which concludes our call for today.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sarah, and thank you everyone for dialing in. Again, the investor relations team is more than happy to take any follow-up question, and Janina is available for that. We very much look forward meeting many of you on our upcoming road shows and conferences. Stay healthy and speak soon. Bye-bye.
Thanks.