Good afternoon and welcome to the City of London Investment Group PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded meeting, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just click Q&A, type your question and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Tom Griffith, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Yeah. Thank you, Paul, and welcome to everyone, and thank you for taking the time to join us today to hear a little bit about City of London Investment Group. If you could turn the slide, Paul. So, we have a table of contents, which is just an overview of what we're gonna cover today. For those who aren't familiar with CLIG, we are gonna cover some of the background. Deep will cover some of the results, and Carlos is gonna talk about the growth opportunities that we have. Next slide. This is a little bit of background. Myself and Carlos have been with the firm since 2000. Carlos is the head of business development, and I am the CEO of CLIG.
Deep Agrawal is the CFO and has been with the firm since 2020, and was previously the auditor of the company. A little bit of background on who we are. The company was founded in London in 1991 and listed in 2006 on the London Stock Exchange. We have a long history of managing through multiple market cycles, a mix of institutional and high net worth clients. Basically, to understand that, we're a U.S. company in a U.K. wrapper. We are an active investment management firm. We don't do anything else. We have no ancillary services like financial planning, for instance. We do one thing, and we do it well. Our focus is on the exploitation of discount volatility and closed-end funds, and that's how we make our clients money.
Through our two subsidiaries, we cover equity, fixed income, and alternative investing. We operate in teams both at the business level and at the investment level, investment management or strategy level. We have no star managers. We have an experienced team both managing the business and managing the assets. We have two operating subsidiaries, the City of London Investment Management, with offices in Singapore, London, and Philadelphia, where we trade in real-time around the clock, and Karpus Investment Management, based in Rochester, New York. Next slide. This is a timeline of the history of City of London. As you see, we are an emerging market specialist where we launched our first U.K. unit trust in 1991. Through good performance, we enabled marketing into the U.S. in 1995.
In order to be near clients, service those clients, and trade in real-time in the U.S. time zone, we opened an office in 1995 in the U.S., in Philadelphia, or just outside of Philadelphia in the United States. While the early 2000s were difficult for the EM asset class, by 2006, emerging had rebounded, and CLIG listed on AIM. Volatility of emerging markets and the fee income came under pressure as a listed company. We began to diversify the offerings to clients beginning in 2009 with the developed strategy, opportunistic value, and then listed private equity.
CLIG diversification or the merger with Karpus happened in 2020 of this year, which was the last major diversification prior to launching the global strategy for U.S. clients, incorporating the U.S. into the international strategy. Next slide, please. This slide really provides you with some of the background as to why the merger with Karpus made sense. It's we're both investment management firms focusing on closed-end funds using a team-based approach with top performing results across the strategies offered. What Karpus brought to the table to complement CLIM was high net worth clients and trading domestically as opposed to internationally, and primarily income versus equity on the CLIM side. Next slide. This slide really provides you with an overview of the strategies that we offer to clients.
As you can see under the CLIM strategies, it's primarily equity, whereas on the Karpus side, it's primarily fixed income. But they also offer a little bit of the equity strategy and balance mandates as well. I'd also point out the listed private equity strategy, which is a strategy which has gained some assets recently and is becoming one of our core strategies that we'll be reporting on going forward, and that Carlos will talk about some of the growth opportunities that we see. Next slide. This is really how we run the business based on the objectives we're trying to achieve and the drivers which start with investment performance.
Which really is how we get in the hunt for clients and is actually where we get to finals and are able to, number one, gain new clients, but also maintain our existing clients. What we're trying to achieve through growing our funds under management is to increase our fees while also diversifying the revenue stream and the client base, whilst we're also focusing on the profits, margins, and costs. We have, as I said earlier, an experienced team managing the business and, you know, the diversification also helps us with that retention, in that we have places for our professionals to grow internally within the firm. Next slide. As we're balancing those objectives, we need to achieve those objectives while keeping our three constituents in balance.
Our shareholders who own the business, the employees who manage the business, and our clients who pay the bills. Next slide. Why is CLIG something that would be a good investment within your portfolio? Well, I think the number one thing for me at the moment is growth opportunities. When we look at the way that the investment management business has gone recently over the last few years, and as I've said in both my interim and annual reports, it's been tough going. Active managers have been out of favor and with the U.S. really going strong in equities, foreign investments and international strategies as well as income strategies have been mostly out of favor. In 2024, we've seen a significant uptick in interest in international strategies, particularly emerging.
We feel as if we're in a good place for that to grow considerably. In addition, we feel that with the closed-end fund strategy that we have, there's considerable discounts out there which over time tend to come back to the normal range. As we grow those assets, the technology that we have in place allows us to add those assets with low incremental costs. As a shareholder, while you wait for that growth, we pay a very good income yield. I think it's around 8%-9%. We don't have any debt on our balance sheet, even though I am aware that we have a question already relative to Morningstar having something out there, but unfortunately, we don't control what they put out there. We actually have no debt.
We have a strong cash position, and we have a diverse revenue stream across complementary client segments in the U.S. Next slide. This provides sort of the overview of our competitive advantages over our competitors. We have an experienced talent pool. Most of the people that work at City of London in senior positions have started out at City of London and been here for a long period of time. They understand not just the investment management business, but more specifically, the closed-end fund business and trading closed-end funds globally. Our culture is a team-based approach. We don't have any star managers, so we don't have the risk of departures or people lifting out our team.
We focus on closed-end fund discounts, which I said at the moment are at considerable discounts, but we capture that volatility and generate a differentiated alpha for clients in the U.S. who normally don't get that type of alpha. Active outperformance of the benchmark allows us to stay in the mix relative to our existing clients, but also when new mandates come up. We have a proprietary research and trading database for closed-end funds. Unlike a lot of U.K.-listed funds, we have a primarily U.S. client base, which is a mix of, as I said earlier, institutional and high-net-worth clients. It's not as if we are new to this business. We've been doing this for over 30 years. Next slide. With that, I'll pass it over to Deep to cover some of the results, information, and then we'll move on to Carlos talking about growth. Over to you, Deep.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom. This slide shows some of the highlights for our 30th June year-end and 30th September. That's the last reported announcement we made. Our AUM at the end of June 2024 was $10.2 billion. With the markets doing well, our AUM grew to $10.7 billion as of September. PBT for the year June 2024 was slightly higher than last year. We have a healthy cash position, as Tom mentioned. We had about $34 million at the end of June. In addition to that, we had about $6 million in seed capital as well, invested. Since the year-end for us, June, we have recently paid out dividend of about $14 million.
Still, after paying dividend for the year, we still have a healthy cash balance at the end of the year. We had announced some cost reductions in January 2024, and we are working towards achieving that in the whole financial year of 2025. Next slide, please. These are the financial highlights which we had included in our annual report as well. The most important thing for year ended June 2024 was we've changed our reporting currency to US dollars. As a result, you'll see our results are shown in dollars. However, CLIG is still listed in GBP and our dividends are paid in pence. Thus the dividend per share and earnings are shown in pence here. The underlying profit was just very similar to previous year.
Our EPS was. Even though it was a bit lower, we were able to maintain our dividend at GBP 0.33, supported by our strong balance sheet. Next slide, please. This is our dividend policy. Our policy is to do 1.2 times cover. This slide shows the history of our dividend cover over the last five years. It can be seen that we have been able to maintain a healthy dividend cover over 1.2 times in the last four of the five years, and we were just shy of 1.2 times in 2024. Again, we were still able to maintain our dividend at GBP 0.33. Next slide, please. This is our dividend history since listing. Tom mentioned that we listed on AIM in 2006.
You can see that we have grown our dividend consistently from low single digits to double digits up to GBP 0.33 in recent years. On the right-hand side, you'll also see the special dividends. The company has given special dividends twice, depending on the build-up of distributable reserves. The total dividend over the period has been more than GBP 4.50 , and the annualized total return since listing has been 11.8%. Next slide, please. I'm gonna hand over to Carlos now to talk about growth, please.
Thank you, Deep. If we go to slide 19, please. Just one more please, to 19. Great. Thank you. I think the key thing, by way of really understanding CLIG is that we are an investment-led organization. Everything we do, and Tom mentioned this earlier, is really with regard to good investment performance for our clients, whether they be institutional or retail. In order to do that, you need to outperform benchmarks, and you need to do it consistently. You need to have a process that allows you to replicate, you know, solid investment performance year in and year out. If you do that puts you in the hunt for investment mandates. We're pleased that in the last fiscal year, investment performance was ahead of the benchmark for almost all of the group's main strategies.
The second thing is that, you know, from a competitive perspective, the active management space is incredibly competitive. We're competing with other active managers, but also with passive strategies. We've seen what's happened in the industry over the last 15 or 20 years. Passive strategies have taken on a much bigger piece of the investment management business globally. They tend to have lower fees, and so active managers have really had to work much harder to remain relevant and to win mandates. Our approach using closed-end funds to exploit discount volatility so we can trade the discount of closed-end funds around the world, that is really for us, the secret sauce. That means that our approach is complementary.
In many cases, when we go into an investment mandate, whether it's a search through an RFP, a finals presentation, we can be paired with a straight equity manager or a straight fixed income manager, who are buying directly the underlying securities. We can buy the same securities effectively at a discount. That is really where we can be complementary for that plan sponsor or that consultant or that ultimate institutional or retail client. What happens is that we get paired with another manager, usually a much larger manager, and that gives us an opportunity to really provide that niche approach which you can't just find everywhere. That's really where we focus our marketing activities.
The last piece is that from a marketing perspective, we have seen some new wins in emerging markets and also in listed private equity strategies. That's very positive because in the last few years, as Tom mentioned, it's been a very difficult marketplace. To win some of those strategies, you know, to win with some of those strategies has been something that really has helped us move forward in terms of our growth plans. Next slide, please. Within the closed-end fund market itself, you know, the investment trust market as it's known in the U.K., there has been really a number of sort of changes over the last couple of years that have really brought a return to what we'd call sort of more stable valuations.
There's been some underperformance of some of the active managers. Valuations are much more in line with the underlying asset classes. There are some key trends that have been responsible for this. One is that capital is now being retired after a 10-15-year issuance cycle. Take-privates, wind-downs, M&A activity, all that's accelerating. What that does is that removes capital out of the sector. You begin to see wider discounts. Next slide, please. Now, that for City of London and for Karpus are incredibly positive and happy hunting ground scenarios. If you look at this slide, it shows you the discounts, average discounts over time, and this is actually the U.K. market. It's that volatility, that sort of life cycle of closed-end funds. Generally, closed-end funds, investment trusts are issued to retail investors.
They're issued usually at a premium. They then trade at a discount. Retail investors become demotivated. They're unhappy. Obviously, what they were promised by the brokers doesn't come to pass, certainly not in the immediate term. They begin to sell. Both Karpus and City of London are on the other side of that retail emotional response. If you see those peaks and troughs, that's where we can be buying at those troughs and then selling at those peaks. It's that volatility that allows us to add alpha. Again, complementary to a manager that's buying the real thing directly. For us, very wide discounts at this point in time. Tom mentioned earlier that, you know, active management and certainly emerging markets, international equity management has been out of favor for the last decade. The U.S. market has powered ahead.
You have seen the discounts on a number of these trusts around the world gap out. They've widened significantly. That's our entry point, and that's why we're very you know, confident that going forward, you know, those going forward returns will be quite good. Next slide, please. You now have the background for the marketing that we have started to do in a very focused way. I think that, you know, one of the things when we talk about marketing is we talk about marketing in terms of capacity. What we don't do is say we're gonna raise X number of dollars and then try to flood the market selling whatever we can. You know, we used to talk about selling umbrellas and sunglasses to people. That's not what we do.
We're going out into the market with a very focused approach, which is to go through third parties. Rather than having a massive marketing team across the United States, it's very expensive, and that for different points in the cycle will have nothing to do because no one will pick up the phone. What we do is we focus on those third parties. That's the consultant channel. If you look at the institutional marketplace in the United States, the consultant channel, they are the gatekeepers for those investors. They're constantly monitoring managers, providing updates, meeting with them, undertaking due diligence. Ultimately, when a client needs a particular manager for a particular strategy, they will pull those managers into a finals presentation.
Subject to that presentation, they'll choose one, two, three, or more managers depending on what their needs are. That's a very efficient way to market because you have a one-to-many relationship. You're going through one consultant, and you're being opened up once you're on their approved list to all of those underlying clients. Same thing with other RIAs. If you think about the RIA market, the Registered Investment Adviser market in the United States, there are about 13,000 advisors. At least half of them don't actually manage money. They're simply selling you someone else's product. Well, both City of London and Karpus manage money. As Tom said, that's the only thing we focus on. We manage that money in-house. We're constantly making investment decisions 24/7 through those two firms.
For us, if we can go through and provide to another RIA that investment management capability and fee share with them, again, that's a very efficient way to market because it's a one-to-many relationship. We're providing back to the point about being complementary and using closed-end funds. We're providing something different to that RIA, something that they can't just get online and something that they can't just go and do themselves. For us, again, it's another way for us to add value and to put ourselves into a position where we can market in an efficient way. The capacity currently is about $6 billion. That's spread on the CLIM side across international equity, opportunistic value, which is a combination of fixed income and equity, and alternative assets. Our listed private equity CEF strategies, and those strategies have about $4 billion in capacity.
If we turn to the Karpus side, the KIM side has both municipal bond CEF strategies of about $1 billion capacity, and then U.S. fixed income and U.S. equity strategies of another $1 billion. With the performance that we've seen, which is good, very long-term, you know, first or second quartile performance, that's what the consultants and third parties are looking for. Ultimately, if you can keep that performance going, if you can keep your investment team together and motivated and focused on, you know, adding alpha, you're gonna raise money over time. I think that we have set the stage with regard to ensuring that both sides, both the Karpus side and the City of London side, are very focused on raising assets through this year.
We feel that with the wide discounts and the good performance and the investor interest, because we're beginning to see, you know, investor interest in top slicing some of their U.S. exposure and putting it outside the U.S. Excuse me. That's where we really feel positive in terms of the marketing efforts going forward. I think that one of the key things for us is that we're constantly creating new products. Tom had mentioned the global strategy. This is really an extension of what we did with the international equity strategy, which is ex-U.S. It has no U.S. exposure or very little U.S. exposure in it. The global strategy has a significant amount of U.S. exposure in it.
It will have a three-year track record after being seeded by the firm at the end of December, and it's after those three years that we can then begin in the new year, the new calendar year, to start marketing it to the third parties. For us, it really is a question of never experimenting with client assets, but always looking at ways to seed new strategies and get those strategies out into the marketplace once they've proven themselves after three years. We're very excited on the listed private equity side. It is an area where there's a lot of interest from investors. Obviously the private equity industry has been under a little bit of pressure lately because of higher rates and issues with marking some of their underlying holdings to market.
This is a listed way to do that. It's a liquid way to do that, and we think that that's something that really resonates with investors. Next slide, please. This gives you a breakdown of the funds that are managed by the line of business, broken down by both CLIM and KIM. I think one of the key things is, you know, as Tom mentioned, if you go all the way back to 2007, 2008, City of London had circa $6 billion in AUM, but it was 100% in emerging markets. It was pretty clear to us after the great financial crisis that the business needed to be diversified, and we needed to move into other asset classes.
We extended that closed-end fund expertise into other asset classes. Where we are today is that you've got a situation where emerging markets is only 36% of the total group assets. International is now 22%, and Karpus is 38%. It really gives you a sense of the rationale, as Tom said earlier, for the merger and the fact that we've attracted more stable assets, and that you've got ultimately earnings that are less volatile than the earnings that the firm was getting back in 2007 from the emerging markets. Next slide, please. This gives you a sense of the flows by fiscal year.
You know, it has been a tough couple of years, and so we're really looking forward to net, you know, positive flows at the firm. There's been a lot of underlying movement in the composition of the assets under management. There's been a fair amount of money moving out of emerging markets, you know, emerging markets that have had a terrible decade, about 4% in returns annualized. You've seen a lot of money move out of the emerging markets into the United States, into Europe. What we're seeing based on the last year, where emerging markets had a good year, good returns, there's now renewed interest in emerging markets, and so we're hoping for some of those flows now to ultimately, you know, revert. Next slide, please.
We talked earlier about being in the first or second quartile, and this gives you the sense of a peer universe chart. This is the type of chart. It's from eVestment, which is the largest sort of data provider for institutional investors in the United States, where they provide all the information on managers and both from a performance standpoint as well as from a risk standpoint. You can see on the first, you know, the KIM conservative balance, that's a balance mandate, equity and fixed income. You know, their performance is off the chart over 10 years. They're the black dot at the top. The EM performance in the next peer universe is for the emerging markets. That's in the second quartile. That's the red dot. The next universe is the international closed-end fund universe.
That's in the first quartile, the blue dot. Then the opportunistic value performance, which is again in the first, you know, again, the light blue dot, which is in the first quartile. That's where the performances have to be showing up over long periods of time in order to get onto an approved list with a third party. It's really that work that has been undertaken by the marketing team, the client servicing teams, the relationship managers, et cetera, at both firms to continue to market these products to third parties. We can go one more slide I think. Yeah, this is financials. I think maybe we'll stop there and maybe take some questions.
Fantastic. Thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, do please continue to submit questions just using that Q&A tab situated in the right-hand corner of the screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you the recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. We've received a number of questions, and thank you to all the investors for submitting those, both pre-submit and throughout today's presentation. I'd now like to hand you over to Jonathan Patterson at Harbor Access Investor Relations to host the Q&A. Jonathan, if I could just ask you to read out the question where appropriate to do so, direct it to a member of the team, and they'll pick up from you at the end.
Thank you, Paul. Okay, first question: Can you talk about the discount volatility strategy for closed-end funds? Do you actively seek to press the manager, and how do you see activists consuming this market? I guess probably I'll hand that over to Carlos.
Great. Thank you, Jonathan. One of the things that's quite interesting when you think about the life cycle of closed-end funds you said earlier is that, as discounts narrow, you begin to see a lot of issuance, because clearly there's an imbalance in the demand and supply. As discounts widen, the opposite happens, which is that you begin to see much more activism, corporate governance.
I think, you know, one of the interesting things is that these, you know, decades-wide discounts have attracted a number of activists, and I think it's important to distinguish, certainly from our perspective, those investors who have been in the space for a long period of time and care about shareholder value for all investors, from potentially some activists, not all, but some that are coming in for a quick buck and then will exit. You know, I think from our standpoint, we would like to see the closed-end fund investment trust sector grow over time.
Returns have to be there and discounts have to narrow, and part of that has to come from both the boards and, you know, the investment managers, those managers who have these investment contracts to manage these trusts. I think the key thing to keep an eye on is, you know, when you start seeing some of the corporate activity, you start seeing some of the buybacks and tenders and other things that companies are starting to do in order to try to narrow some of these discounts. All of that's very positive. I think we just wanna make sure that when that's happening, that it's happening in an orderly fashion and that you don't have situations where you create additional instability in the trust sector.
Thank you, Carlos. I think the next question perhaps, Deep, I'll hand to you is roughly what percentage of your total fees are performance related, and do you expect to see that percentage to grow as you increase AUM?
Sure. Thanks, Jonathan. Actually we do not have any performance related fees, so our fee is purely management fee, so it's a fixed percentage. Yeah, we don't have any performance related fee. As regards the fee percentage increase, it depends on the strategy where the money is coming in. Our old emerging market strategy had higher fee percentage. However, the newer strategies have a lower fee. Yeah, it depends on which strategy the money is coming in with market. That's purely management fee we earn.
Great. Thank you, Deep. The next question I think probably goes to Tom and Carlos, so I'll let you decide who goes first. With substantial funds under management, what opportunities do you see to cross-sell increased revenues, and would you look at M&A towards smaller players, the sort of struggling smaller players with the increased regulatory cost burden?
Yeah. I think it's a good question. I'll start this off, and maybe Carlos can finish it off. You know, we historically have looked at other opportunities that are out there, particularly smaller shops with complementary investment strategies to our own. Having done this for quite some time and found one in Karpus that actually was pretty close in how we run our business. The Karpus business started in 1986 and took a more of a retail route, where City of London was started in 1991 and took more of an institutional route. As I explained earlier, that balance was really good because we were both in the closed-end fund business, we were both team driven and performance driven. That was a really good mix of two companies coming together.
There are gaps in our lineup, and we would continue to look at alternative smaller shops. We just aren't gonna jump at every opportunity that's out there. At the moment, you may be aware that in the U.S., the wealth management business is sort of being rolled up and therefore very high multiples on smaller businesses that are being gobbled up by bigger players. It's really looking for a niche player that can add to our existing lineup and fit in with our culture. Because I think we all are aware that there's a number of mergers that have happened over the years that don't work out so well, and I think culture is a big part of that.
I think the culture aspect of doing any sort of acquisition or merger or even just bringing in a team is really important to the future of the business. I don't know, Carlos, if you got anything to add to that.
I would just add a slightly more marketing take, I guess, on cross-selling, which is that, you know, one of the things that the two founders, Barry Olliff, and George Karpus, you know, as Tom said, there was a very strong cultures in both firms and complementary cultures. I think, you know, if you spoke to them at the point of the merger, they would've said that there was an opportunity to actually cross-sell products to the two client bases, right? Because the two client bases are very complementary. There's an institutional client base in the U.S., because of the PFIC, the IRS rules. A taxable investor, it's not efficient for them effectively to buy trusts outside the U.S.
If you look at the Karpus business, which has a significant taxable client base, they only buy and sell securities trading in the U.S., whereas on the City of London side, we can buy securities around the world because our client base is predominantly tax-exempt. Having said that, a lot of those taxable individual investors have tax-exempt accounts. I know that one of the things that Mr. Karpus told his clients at the point of the merger was that there was gonna be an opportunity for them ultimately to invest in these closed-end funds trading outside the United States, and be able to have access to that larger, you know, sort of sandbox, if you will, of closed-end funds.
That is something that we continue to work on and that we would like to see happen, which is to put in place a few vehicles that would allow those clients on the Karpus side or on the City of London side to ultimately be able to buy, you know, the other firm's product. Because I think it's an opportunity set that they haven't been able to have.
Thank you, Carlos. The next question is a sort of two-part question that came in. It's often the case that premiums discounts are driven by investment NAV performance. To what extent does CLIM and KIM try and address the investment performance of the funds themselves? A change in strategy or manager as opposed to activism that is more financial engineering driven, buybacks, tenders, consolidation. Probably start with Tom and then maybe hand over to Carlos for that.
Yeah. I think we're the unibrain here on these questions, so we generally complement each other on our answers and get the whole answer right at the end of the day. The investment team has a proprietary database, as I mentioned earlier, where we will track all of the investable closed-end funds within our universe. We'll look at that historically as well as the most recent trends and look at the discount volatility within the securities in each of the strategies and portfolios. Trading is a main component where we're buying discounts, wide discounts, and then selling those discounts when they move within a range, and then reinvesting those dollars into wider discounts again. It's a process that happens over and over again.
Where we look at any sort of activism is where we feel that the manager or the board itself is not managing the discount effectively. That can happen for a variety of reasons, but that's really where we would get involved as far as activism goes, is when we don't feel as if that discount is being managed. The question itself provides some of the ways that we would look at addressing those persistent discounts over time.
Carlos?
The only thing I'd add is that, and just to be clear, and we said this at the AGM, neither Karpus nor City of London buys managers. That's not the approach. What we're buying are discounts. You know, Karpus is a little more opportunistic insofar as Dan Lippincott, the CIO and President, mentioned this during the AGM to one of the questions from the floor, that they are able to buy widely discounted closed-end funds in any particular asset class, and then they're able to, as those discounts narrow, sell out completely and buy ETFs, mutual funds or other securities.
That is a little different from what Tom was explaining, which is what happens in the CLIM side, because institutional investors generally still want the beta, and they still want their asset allocation to remain in place. You can't completely sell out, but you can begin to move the money from areas where the discounts are narrow to areas where the discounts are wide. Just to be clear, NAV or N-A-V is important because you can lose what you gain on the discount narrowing, if you have poor NAV performance. One of the things we've done historically though is we love index trackers from a closed-end fund perspective because then you know you're gonna get the NAV.
We want the manager to focus on keeping up with the benchmark. That then gets rid of that NAV risk and allows ultimately the you know the discount volatility of City of London, whether it's Karpus or City of London, to trade that discount volatility. That's just an important distinction.
Thanks, Carlos. That brings us. We've answered all the questions. With that, I'm gonna hand back over to Paul. Over to you, Paul.
Fantastic, Jonathan. Thank you indeed. Look, thank you guys for covering off all those questions from investors. Of course, any further questions come through, you will have the ability to review those, and we'll publish responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to the team, Tom, could I just ask you for a few closing comments, please?
Sure. Just a, I guess, a quick recap would be that, you know, we are a patient and conservatively managed business. We manage in teams, so no one individual is vitally important to the continuation of the business. Those teams are very experienced and have grown up within this business and know the closed-end fund business and how to manage assets on behalf of clients. I would say the big topic at the moment that we feel is relevant to this presentation is growth. We feel that we have the capacity for additional growth going forward. On top of that, the discounts within the closed-end fund industry are historically wide, whether it's on the Karpus side and the income portion of the business or it's on the equity side at City of London.
As Carlos mentioned in answering one of the questions, you know, there is the ability ultimately to be able to cross-sell products between Karpus clients and City of London clients. While that happens over time, we pay a very good dividend that is historically consistent. If you look at the slide that Deep presented on our historical dividend chart, you'll see that the only time that we reduced the dividend was after the great financial crisis, so in 2009. There are two instances in 2014 and 2016 where we didn't cover the dividend, but because of our strong financials and our cash balances with no debt on the balance sheet, we're able to continue to pay that full dividend at a relatively high yield. I would say that's really what we wanna get across today.
That's fantastic, Tom. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you to the team for updating investors today. May I please ask investors not to close the session. You should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and it is greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team at the City of London Investment Group PLC, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.
Thank you.