Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Partners Group's interim financial results as of June 30, 2026. I would like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Dave Layton. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for the 2026 interim results. I am Dave, the CEO of Partners Group. Joris, our CFO, and Steffen, our Chairman, will also present during the prepared portion of this call. I am hosting this call from our London office, and I invited some select investors and analysts for this call. We also have executives from the firm, including our incoming co-CEOs, and there could not be a more capable and ready set of executives than the two of them, and they will be available for the Q&A portion if needed. Let me start here with the headlines and the key business updates. This was a strong first half. Fundraising was solid. $16 billion of new assets, that is up 31% year- on- year.
We have been raising private capital now for 30 years, and this was the best H1 raise that we have ever seen with record client demand. On that basis, and on the pipeline we currently see from across our increasingly diversified client segments, we are reconfirming our full- year fundraising guidance. Management income came in at CHF 905 million. That is growing 12% in constant currency. Solid, 23%. EBITDA was CHF 706 million. On the portfolio, our more recent vintages in particular, show strong momentum, which is the basis for value creation and performance in years to come. Speaking of years, I think it is notable that we raised $80 billion since 2023, and again, with a record first half in 2026.
Looking at the bigger picture on the left side, we see that the overall industry fundraising is down about 15% since 2023, and we are up roughly 50%. That is market share that we have gained during a difficult environment. On the right, you can see what drove it. Those share gains are diversified across asset classes. Private equity has raised $28 billion during this time period and is ramping up its next flagship fund raise. Credit has been strong. Most recently, we had record closing for our direct infrastructure fund, which closed about 50% higher than its predecessor. Across these more recent fundraisers, we have been particularly pleased with the healthy mix of new and existing clients. Again, this is market share that we have taken during challenging fundraising years for the industry, and these have potential to be some strong vintage years.
At least they are off to a very strong start. On the next slide. As we mentioned on our last call, H1 was a highly selective period for us for new investments. Deployment has accelerated into the second half. We have signed CHF 5 billion of additional investments during July and August. Our core investment strategy remains unchanged. We deliver value to clients by identifying assets where we have deep thematic conviction and implement the value creation plan to drive transformation. Last year, our private equity team screened over 2,000 assets and only transacted on about 1%. We remain highly selective but are increasingly excited about the opportunities that we are finding. Five asset classes, five distinct strategies, and a dynamic set of investment engines supplying content for our clients. Next slide.
This slide highlights some of the reasons why we believe that these more recent investment years, again, where we have been taking share with CHF 80 billion raised and a material amount already invested, they have the potential to be strong vintage years. The operational performance of our direct equity portfolio from 2023 onwards is back to double-digit growth. Recent infrastructure and real estate KPIs are also solid. This is value creation and operational success, which ultimately lays the foundation for future performance for our clients. Next slide. Among our clients, we are known for delivering consistent returns throughout cycles. We had a handful of idiosyncratic topics in the portfolio this period, coming out of the 2021 and 2022 time period in particular. But we believe that we are on track to achieve a net TVPI of over 2x in five of the last six vintage pools.
Returns alone are not the only factor that is important for clients. As an industry, we have been through several periods of limited distributions, and we have received good feedback from clients on our consistency of our distributions. We are proud levels of private investors have typically seen during the last five years. Next slide. It is a similar story for infrastructure, but with even stronger recent vintage performance. Top- quartile performance across a number of key vintage years. Again, here, our net DPI runs ahead of the market for that 2018-2020 vintage pool in particular. These results helped support the recent close of our largest ever direct equity or our direct infrastructure strategy. Next slide. We remain highly confident in our ability to deliver on our full-year fundraising target, which we established at the start of this year.
Interestingly, our growth is coming from a much broader base of clients and investment strategies than in the past. Looking at these client segments on the left side, we are more diversified today in our fundraising than we have ever been. We have many different cylinders helping us to drive our client solutions engine. Zooming in on just a couple of areas here, looking at consultants, for example. We have really invested into that channel, into those relationships, and this has been important to some of our recent successes. If I look at one of our recent flagship fundraisers, for example, we saw an increase of 3x in the number of consultants that advise clients to invest with us, and that helped to drive a very healthy level of demand from new clients into that strategy. Asia and the Middle East, we have seen a pickup in activity here.
In the last two periods, we've closed more than five Asian mandates. We're able to construct tailored mandates with a specific geographical allocation for each client. That's a really appreciated feature of our mandates in particular. On the next slide, we've worked to broaden our mandates over the last couple of years and to make customized mandates available. Insurance clients are some of the most complex in terms of regulation and capital requirements, and traditional fund structures have not been particularly helpful in addressing their needs. We've seen opportunity across segments to provide easy solutions. Near-term efficiency relief. We see many. We have the ambition to quadruple our insurance AUM to EUR 100 billion. That's an incremental EUR 75 billion by 2033, and that'll be an increasingly relevant building block to help us achieve our EUR 450 billion AUM target.
With that, let's shift our focus to the financial update. Joris?
Thanks, Dave. Let me now connect the strategic progress you outlined with the financial performance that we delivered in H1 2026. The key message from this slide is that our financial profile remains strong. We showed double-digit management income growth in constant currency. We improved the profitability in our management income. Management income EBITDA grew by 15% year-on-year in constant currency, with the margin rising to 63%. Our overall EBITDA margin remained in line with our historical average at 63%. Taking together, our half- year results show resilient and high-quality earnings profile, continued growth in management income and profitability, and stable overall margins, even with lower contribution from performance income and adverse FX impacts. I will now go through the key drivers in more details, starting with the revenues on the next slide. Management income represented 81% of our revenues in half year one 2026.
It grew by 12% at constant currency in H1 2026 and 6% as reported, in line with the average AUM growth. Thanks to the successful final closes of our direct infrastructure program and private equity secondaries program in H1, late management fees, which is part of other operating income, came in very strongly and contributed positively to our management income growth. Let me talk about our management income margin on the next slide. We are a diversified platform. Our management income margin has shown resilience over time in changing markets and despite FX conditions, evolving within our historical bandwidth of 1.18% and 1.33% since the IPO. Slight variances between years may be driven by the timing of when fees are activated in an investment program or when we realize transactional fees and how our mix in product and asset classes is influencing our recurring management fee.
In H1, we again demonstrated that we are within the bandwidth with a stable management income margin at 1.24%. Let me briefly speak about the FX impact on the next page. As I told you before, we grew our management income by 12% in half year one 2026 on a constant currency basis. Looking back further, this is in line with the growth rate we have achieved over the last five full years, removing the FX effects. This highlights the consistent growth of our platform's recurring revenue base. A double-digit management income growth rate at constant currency has been and will be our continued goal for the mid and long term, even though there may be temporary deviations in periods from time to time. Let me turn to the performance income on the next slide.
With the mandatory adoption of the new IFRS 18 standard, the performance income is a combination of performance fees, the main driver, and other performance-oriented income on our assets on the balance sheet that are directly attributable to our private markets business. In H1 2026, we generated CHF 233 million in performance fees, highly diversified across asset classes and strategy, leading to a performance income representing 19% of our overall revenues. Private equity, as our largest asset class, continued to contribute the most at 48%, while infrastructure accounted for 40%, reflecting the increasing share of infrastructure AUM of our platform. Across both asset classes, performance fees were mainly driven by direct exits from our pipeline. This clearly demonstrates that our own realizations are above the industry overall. We are currently in the sales process of a number of direct assets, with some being quite sizable investments.
While we expect attractive outcomes for our clients and shareholders, the actual closing of the realizations may slip into next year for some of them. This brings us to guide towards a range of around 20%-25% for 2026. Looking at our current exit pipeline of roughly $75 billion that we are actively working on, we are confident to generate performance income of 25%-40% of our revenue over the next three years and beyond. Let me now move to operating costs on the next slide. One of the points that as the CFO I am most happy about, was the solid growth of our management income, EBITDA and margin. This is a direct result of cost discipline in our management income funded expenses, which are fully in our control.
Our performance income related expenses are variable and are a direct reflection of performance fees during the period, with up to 40% of performance fees allocated to employees. This resulted in CHF 706 million of EBITDA for H1 2026 at a margin of 63%, as shown on the next slide. Our profitability remains strong and best- in- class across the industry. Over the last five years, our EBITDA margin has been always above 60%. This is a range I am also very comfortable with going forward. Let us have a look at our profits and balance sheet on my final slide. In H1 2026, we generated a net profit of CHF 502 million, which was flat year-on-year on a constant currency basis. This translates into a return on equity of 55%.
As you have seen, we have generated strong operating cash flows in H1 2026, adding to our overall liquidity of CHF 2.9 billion. Given our financial profile, we remain confident in our ability to paying dividends that are stable or growing year by year. This brings me to the end of the financial update. Let me now hand over to Steffen.
Thank you, David and Joris. Good morning, everybody also from my side. Let me finish this presentational part of the session this morning with a couple of high-level perspectives, and let me start maybe with some thoughts on the H1 financials and the short mid-term outlook. Maybe moving to the next slide, please. I think it's important to recognize that the environment still is not straightforward. We have political uncertainty, geopolitical, macro uncertainty, big parts of public markets. As you will recognize, they are priced imperfection, which is a little bit hard to reconcile with the environment, to be honest. Against that backdrop, I think we can only conclude that the first six months financials show that our business has just become extremely resilient over the last few years. Maybe more important, if I look at the four, I would say, key operational dimensions of our business.
That gives us a lot of confidence for the midterm. These are, one, the operational growth in our portfolio, and Dave talked about that. We see for a very big part of our portfolio, especially the younger vintages, we see extremely good growth rates that will produce very good outcomes for clients in the mid to long term. The second one is the investment pipeline. There wasn't a shortage of investment pipeline for the last 12, 24 months, you know this. But we were clearly cautious in the last six to nine months, specifically at a time when we had these uncertainties and valuations were high, bid-offer spreads were high. Here we clearly see some normalization, some more realism coming in. We've signed only just $5 billion in the last few weeks. We have a good pipeline for the next few quarters.
We're quite hopeful to realize on these investment opportunities. These are great businesses. At reasonable, they're not cheap. They're at reasonable prices, but it's businesses we really want to own. We know exactly how we want to develop these businesses. The third one is the exit side of things. Again, here, there's no shortage of successful business that we can sell. But also here we clearly see a environment which makes it easier to advance in these exit processes, and we should see a number of really nice exits in the next six to 12 months. As Joris said, if you sign contracts in September, October, there's a good chance that they slip into next year. We'll figure out.
But for us, the client results is our first priority, so we will optimize these exits in a way to optimize the results for clients, and that will certainly be beneficial for shareholders in the long term. Then maybe as a fourth point, I really want to stress that it is not just about good fundraising or record fundraising, it is about market share that we win in a very deliberate way, in segments that we decided in the last two, three years to strengthen. This is our teams in Asia, in India, for instance, in particular.
It is in the Middle East, not only in the client side, also in the investment side that we build up there. I would say broadly speaking, with some sovereign wealth fund coverage, it is on the insurance side, and Dave did a little bit of a deep dive there, and on the consultant side.
These are the segments that we expect to grow faster than, I would say, the more traditional pension fund sectors in Europe and U.S. in the next few years, and this is where we think we are really well-positioned. So if I look at the short to midterm outlook, overall, it is fair to say that the activity in our industry is far away from the peak levels that we have seen maybe a number of years ago. We are not back there. Everybody in the industry has their share of topics to work on, including Partners Group, and we have been very transparent about that in our July update.
But clearly, if I look at the four dimensions here, we have all the confidence that in the midterm, we actually gain speed, and we really are on our track to achieve our 2033 vision that we have laid out to you one or two years ago. So moving a bit from the short to midterm to maybe the mid to long-term outlook. If I maybe can ask you to maybe change the next slide. Let me talk a bit about investment strategy and give an update here. So why is it important to talk about that investment strategy and that outlook? This is, again, I want to reiterate that very strongly, because our industry will see fundamental changes. We will have a profound economic transformation ahead of us the next 10 years. There is no doubt about that.
No one knows exactly how the industry and how the world looks like in 10 years. I do not think we ever had that actually in history, that looking 10 years ahead, there is such a lack of certainty in the outlook, maybe except for periods of war. But we have a pretty good hypothesis how we should think about this unfolding of that economic transformation to happen and how we should react to it in different asset classes. So I do not want to dwell on that too long. We spoke about that on a Corporate Day, but just to recall, we see there is three waves here, that will bring this transformation. We are in the middle of the first wave. That is the one which is actually the most irrelevant one. It is about using some of these new technologies to just become more effective.
The second wave is about to happen for a number of sectors. In some sectors, this will probably be out there three, four years from now. This is when we go from support systems to much more autonomous systems and agents, have a much, much more fundamental impact on the businesses. Then we shouldn't forget that there will be a third wave. There has always been a third wave in business model transformation through economic transformation periods. The third wave is really about these new scientific methods, complete reconfiguration of ecosystems and business models. That's, in most cases, only starting in the 2030s, but that's still within that 10-year period. So think about these three waves a bit like the, I would say, intense period of industrialization, the 100 years, but essentially happening in 10 years.
We believe that these three waves will give us enormous opportunities, and we have clearly defined key focus areas across the asset classes, and I want to give a little bit of an update of what we're doing here and how we're preparing for that. If you can maybe move to the next slide here. If I say these are the immediate focus areas, important to acknowledge that this is not the only thing we're doing in these areas. I mean, this may be defining 50%, 60%, 70% of the focus. We are nimble, we are opportunistic, so there will be certainly interesting areas also around them. Clearly, the private equity, the main story is that there will be hardly any business that can succeed without business transformation.
It's very different from the private equity industry in the last 20 years when I would argue that 90% of the investors, they were looking actually to buy businesses, do more of the same, slightly more efficient, scale it up, and financing it in an attractive way. This is a very different business going forward. How do we respond to that? We have built, over the last few quarters, a team of about 150 AI experts internally and externally. We have our existing, about similar sized bench of operators internally, externally. What the next few years is about is really marrying the digital transformation capabilities with the operational transformation capabilities. The big difference is, going forward, there isn't anything like a digital transformation that is separate from operational value creation. This is one and the same across the different verticals and dimensions. This is what we're working towards.
We have now started to give regular updates on what we do on the portfolio company side, and we'll continue to do so to give you a bit of a sense and make this more tangible. I believe that we will create absolutely a leading effort in that space. On the infrastructure side, if, again, we look a little bit at the future, of course, we'll still have roads and bridges, and I would say the more traditional kind of. But a big part of infrastructure investing is not going to happen in these areas. It's going to happen in, I would say, a very interconnected play between power, data, mobility, logistics. It's this interconnection that is needed because it's the efficiencies that you need to create between those, A.
B, it's the advanced technologies that change year by year that to use actually to build the best next generation utilities. Therefore, the next generation infrastructure is really a combination of, I would say, traditional project finance, it's private equity, it's infra asset management, and it's sort of business development. This is exactly the team we have built up. We've built several of these platforms. We're in the process of buying two, three additional platforms just in the next six months. We believe that we have built a team here that is second to none in building these next generation utilities. We talked about private credit at our Capital Markets Day, and actually for quite some time before that, and we forecasted for a while that we will see a major transformation in credit.
I think one of the key statements we made about three, four years ago, the first time, is large end of the private credit space is actually not going to be real private credit anymore. It's much more a public market style activity that might still happen in a private credit format. You see this with the forecast in data centers and ships next year. That's not traditional private credit. So what we are focusing on in this world of bifurcation that's coming with this transformation to economy is really PE style, entrepreneurial style of credit underwriting. We have building it up. We have these adjacent relative value strategies around it. That's our focus, and that's why we're growing quite heavily also in private credit. In real estate, I think we see a similar transformation, as in infrastructure. It's also real asset class.
Now, in real estate historically, I guess we had a kind of a horizontal layering of the value creation between the planning and engineering and the development and the real estate services. The future will be a complete vertical integration between exactly all these aspects. Why is that? A lot has, again, to do with data, with technology, with a very dynamic behavior of tenants and buyers of these assets, where the time when you build something, it is final. These times are completely over. This is where we decided to buy Empira, our first large M&A transaction, which is very successful. It was a modest-sized business, but with an incredible technology platform. This is now really bearing fruit. This is what we're expanding, we're leveraging. That's where the growth is coming from in real estate that we've seen in the last six to 12 months.
We have a similar effort going on in the industrial sector's platform. On the royalties side, we have also mentioned that for a while. Royalties is a financing tool first and foremost, like private credit. I think what we see is similar to private credit 20 years ago, we see that royalties will expand beyond the more traditional areas of focus, like IP ownership in pharmaceuticals or in exploration and things like that. Like in private credit, we expect royalties to have applications across all private equity sectors, but also across infrastructure and other real asset sectors. We're building up this heavily, and we clearly want to be a leading institution when it comes to royalties financing. So in the mid to long-term, I think the world in private markets, the industry will look very different.
And clearly, there's a lot of uncertainty how that world exactly looks like. But I think we have a very clear hypothesis. We have a clear focus area. We know what assets we want to buy. We have a very clear conviction how we want to develop these assets, and I think we have a real good team to do that. And maybe that team is the keyword and the segue here to talk about the last topic. This is our leadership rotation. Now, whenever I use that word "rotation," I know the reaction sometimes is, rotation is a strange term when it comes to a successful CEO that is stepping down and not continuing that function. Because most companies, if that happens, the CEO would, I don't know, go on retirement or competition or whatever. That's not PG style.
We have much more as a tradition, more rule than the exception that successful key leaders in the firm, when they step back from their functions, they usually continue in other functions, other key roles actually in the firm. I am very happy to announce this kind of rotation again today. So Dave Layton, after nearly eight years now, as a great CEO, successful CEO, you built with your team that resilience in our business, is going to transition in another role back into the investment side of things and becoming the, well, I guess, most senior person on the investment side of things as the CIO and Chair of the Investment Committee. Now, many of you will know that Dave, before he became Co-CEO in 2019, was actually instrumental in building up our private equity franchise over many years.
He led it over many years, so that's why I am very excited, actually, the board is very excited to have Dave in that new role from January 2027. Now, importantly, Stephan Schäli, our CIO today, René Biner, our Chairman of the Investment Committee, again, rotate. So they are not leaving the Investment Committee. They stay in very important key roles in the investment side, spend more time also on the portfolio side, on boards, and on sourcing of assets. I am also very happy to announce that we have great talent to succeed Dave with Juri and Roberto stepping into the role as Co-CEOs. Juri, Roberto, you both joined us more than two decades ago. Maybe starting with Juri. Juri, you started in the credit team. You were very quickly identified as a key talent there, and you were actually very instrumental in building that credit team.
You eventually led that credit team for a number of years before we asked you to take over the infrastructure business. You built that to a very decent size, very successful. You headed that for a while. And when Dave started to spend a little more time in 2024 on investment side, on M&A, we asked you to become President of the firm and become the wingman of Dave and help on business development side, on some of the corporate operational areas. And now you are stepping from that President role in a Co-CEO role. And your new wingman is then Roberto. Roberto, you have spent your time at PG, I guess always a bit at the intersection between portfolios, investments, and clients. You were very instrumental in building up our portfolio solutions efforts, the team. You eventually led that team for a number of years.
You are certainly one of the key architects of our mandates and evergreen franchise, structured products franchise, which is probably one of the key distinguishing areas of the firm. Both of you have been very successful leaders. You have demonstrated great entrepreneurial leadership. You carry really the PG DNA. With that, we are super happy as a board to have you as partners of us as co-CEOs in the years to come. To conclude that presentational part, we feel very good about the resilience of the business, A. B, we feel very good about the midterm outlook. Yes, we have signaled softer growth in this year or next year, in July in the update. But we are very, very confident for the midterm outlook and for the 2033 goals.
We are very confident about the investment strategy and how we build our teams and the assets we look for and how we build them. And we are very confident that with this trio at the helm in this new constellation, we have a great setup in the next years to come. With that, I conclude this formal part, and I guess we will open for some questions.
We will start with the guests that are here in the room with us in our London office. Should we start with you?
Thanks, Dave. l shall start with a question for you, if that is okay. I guess, well, congrats on a good stint and also to Roberto and Juri on the new roles. This business has made strong progress strategically in the last years, and that is evidenced by the share gains that you showed. Is there anything you would have done differently? And what do you think Roberto and Juri will benefit from most that is currently not, I guess, not visible and that you and the team have laid the groundwork on? That is the first one. Secondly, for Steffen, on capital management. On the AUM call in mid-July, you were very clear that buybacks are being debated. How do you and the board weigh the use of cash for capital return versus M&A to support growth, particularly with, I guess, net debt now being at about CHF 1.2 billion?
And then finally, just a question for Dave and Joris on margins. You continue to show very strong cost control. I guess presumably a low single-digit cost growth rate on fixed costs is below meeting some expectations. I guess, well, relatedly, your EBITDA margin has dropped despite clearly very strong late management fees. So excluding those late fees, EBITDA margin seems to be around 61%. So should we be thinking about the EBITDA margin going forward at around that 61%-62% level going forward, please? Thank you.
Well, I'll start. If I look at the last number of years, I think one thing that we have been focused on and will continue to be focused on, one thing we would've done differently is probably expand the breadth of our investment engines. If you think about the nature of how investment vehicles are evolving, not just for individual investors, but also for institutional investors, they're moving into formats that are more perpetual in nature. If I look back over that 2021, 2022 time period, we're coming off of years where we had huge levels of realizations during those years that needed to be redeployed. You'll see that again in the future, right? Where you have very large levels of realizations that need to be redeployed.
We're very focused today on expanding the breadth of our investment engine, adding more strategies that we can pull from to add more diversification into the investment platform. That's certainly something we would've, in hindsight, we were too concentrated, and certainly are working to build that diversification. I'll continue that work in the new role as Chairman of the Global Investment Committee, as well as work with Roberto and Juri on expanding that. Yep.
So on the capital management side, I don't think there has been any change over the years or now or the future. So number one, we want to pay a stable or growing dividend. That's the first priority. That can mean in some years that maybe we go slightly above 100%, we feel absolutely confident to do so. Number two, if there is an M&A transaction that is of interest, I don't think that will by any means impair the dividend policy. That's certainly not our mind. Now maybe one point, number three, to clarify this discussion about share buybacks. This is a discussion that is really centered around the question that in years where we see, and this is upcoming, where we see a lot of carry again.
The question is whether maybe the additional carry beyond, I would say, what's like the average levels, whether that is carry we want to use if it's not used for business purposes, whether we want to use that carry for share buybacks. That's not a discussion for this year, probably not next year, but this is something that is a little bit on our minds. But what we are not suggesting, just to be very clear here, we're not suggesting to replace a dividend payment by a share buyback.
I think one more question to Joris.
Yes. I think if we look at the way that we run our platform, we continue to run it with the same cost management approach going forward as we scale the platform. So with the range that we're currently running in, that's also what we see in the short term ahead.
Hi, it's Hubert Lam from Bank of America. Firstly, again, I'd like to congratulate Dave and wish him all the best in the future. Three questions. Firstly, on the recurring fee margin, I think it fell to about 109 basis points for the first half. Can you talk about how you think about this margin going forward, and what's driven the lower margin that we saw in the first half? Second question is on, I guess, the fundraising guidance you've given for the year is CHF 26 billion-CHF 32 billion. You had a strong first half of CHF 16 billion. Now we're almost halfway through the second half of the year. How should we think about where you can end up within that range?
And lastly, on private credit, Steffen, I was intrigued by what you said about how you think the. Within private credit, I know you're relatively small compared to other peers out there. Do you need to bulk up more in that space? And how do you think about going about that? Thank you.
So maybe I'll start on the recurring fee margin. We have had a very successful period for fundraising, and you saw us particularly successful in infrastructure and in private credit. Sometimes you'll see a mix shift vary based on what the big fundraising periods were, what the big tail down areas were in a period. We have an upcoming private equity fundraise on the horizon that we're ramping up for. That'll shift the mix back in due course. But it is mix related as opposed to business related, right? Sometimes it can be mix by asset class, sometimes it's mix of product within that asset class, but it's a mix-related change. Joris, anything you'd add to that?
Yeah, I think that, we've seen this in half year one, and at the same time, we're still well within our bandwidth of the management income margin of 1.18%-1.33%, and we've demonstrated that we continue to run the firm with above 60% of operating leverage. We can, of course, as I mentioned before, we continue with our cost management and scaling approach that we have in protecting also the overall margin of the firm.
I think there's two more questions by Hubert. Well, maybe I quickly take those. Yes, we are well into the second half. I would also argue that there have been vacation time, weeks actually. Maybe that's true what you're saying, but actually the real business probably starts pretty much now actually. That's why I would be a bit hesitant to give any further guidance here. Listen, on your question on private credit, it's a very good question. First, I would tell you that if you look at the large credit players, they will probably have today 90% in investment grade, what they call investment grade private credit in sort of high yield equivalents in large cap credit. It's a very different business unit. It's not a bad business, it's just a beta business, a scaled business like public market credit.
In the middle market credit space, I would say in Europe we are clearly one of the top three parties or so. I think also in the U.S. we have come up through the ranks here. I do not know that we need actually a much larger team here. I would say with the exception maybe of the newer regions where we had a smaller team, for instance Asia, we are clearly building up Asia here. That is very interesting to us. We have incredible track record in Asia in credit. I think in the U.S., to be honest, it is a little bit more becoming more active with clients. We have, I would say many years back, used credit in many instances as an additional allocation for mandates, for the more cash flow-oriented mandates, income-oriented, some of the evergreen funds.
I am not sure whether in the last years we made enough of an effort to really tackle large individual accounts on the credit side. This will not happen overnight, but this is clearly on our plan actually in the next few years that we become much, much more active to gain market share there.
Hi there. Ian White, Autonomous. Thanks for taking my questions. Two from my side please. First of all, I noticed the disclosures for PGPE with their 1H update last week, and particularly the portfolio disclosures. So last 12 month, EBITDA growth a bit less than 5%, net debt to EBITDA nearly 7x . Are those metrics representative of the dynamics in the private equity funds more broadly? If so, why has indebtedness risen so significantly in the last couple of years? Again, PGPE, it looks like it has gone from five times net debt to EBITDA to about seven in the last two years. Has there been a significant increase in debt moving to payment in kind structures, for example? That is question one.
Secondly, you talked quite a bit in this presentation about the diversification, maybe a slight shift in strategy from where the business has been previously, from wealth management evergreens towards insurance funding, for example. Can you say a bit about how that transition looks internally? I am thinking about staffing, resourcing. Is there scope for outright cost reduction in areas that maybe now are not going to be as big as we thought they were going to be a couple of years ago? Or maybe some churn within the business where you need to pivot to other areas maybe that, like I say, were less prominent a couple of years ago.
Maybe I will take the PGPE question. PGPE is similar to what we have outlined back in the July AUM announcement. Has an elevated exposure to vintages 2020, 2021, 2022, driven by the distributions that have to be reinvested in such a vehicle. As such, I would say the broader private equity platform is much more diversified across vintages.
Well, on diversification side, it is funny that you are one of the few people that ask us to be more effective on cost. I felt actually that the team is doing a pretty good job on the margin side. Well, listen, this is a constant, I would say, topic where we see certain areas of the firm growing faster than others, that we will have people relocating from one to another. That is, of course, happening all the time. But I would not expect now a big additional, I would say, saving or so because of maybe some of these rotations. Assume that the rate, the EBITDA rate at which we run the business is probably also good forecast for the future.
Yeah. The needs of some of these client segments become more specific. For example, our insurance team needs specialists that understand the insurance clients' needs, and we have had to build up a team of specialists. So you might have fewer generalists, right? But you end up with more specialists. I think we have been able to maintain our cost structure, and that continues to be our ambition.
Thanks.
Good morning. It is Arnaud Giblat from BNP Paribas. I have got three questions, please. My first question is on the value creation and the topic we were talking about a minute ago. On the slide, you were showing that vintages 2020 to 2021/2022 were having 5% EBITDA growth, if I remember well, whereas the next vintages are growing EBITDA at more than 15%. Could you expand a bit more on that, sort of give us a bit more flavor in terms of industry exposure? Or what is it that is affecting those earlier vintages? My second question is on the evergreen redemptions. I am just wondering, given, well, you are probably seeing redemptions at a 5% rate per quarter, how this is impacting performance. I assume if you have got these large redemptions, your incentive is probably to put the marks at the lower end of the potential range.
Does that affect performance across other vehicles? I assume you have to have the same mark for every asset in every vehicle you are holding. My third question is, what struck me a lot at your investor day 18 months ago was, I felt a big shift in terms of willingness to do M&A. Over the last 18 months, I know that there has been a significant pickup in M&A in the environment, and you have not partaken. I am just wondering why that is. Is it just a case of you being more prudent or not seeing the right opportunities? Do you still have that strong appetite to increase M&A? Thank you.
I will take maybe the first one with regards to the different vintage years and why vintage year has an impact. Part of it has to do with, I think, some evolution. We have really invested significantly into our operational capabilities, into our boards, into our transformation experts that have been working with us on this most recent set of portfolio companies in particular. But it was also just a less competitive environment. If I look back over the last couple of years, we had the ability to pick and choose as a firm that is able to take market share and raise capital in a difficult environment. We have been able to invest consistently over the last couple of years, whereas other people have taken maybe more of a pause, and we found it less competitive in certain segments.
We had a lot of thematic research, identifying specific assets, going hard after it, a little bit less competition, broader bench of operators. I think all of those things contribute to the strong growth that you are seeing in the most recent vintage in particular. Roberto, do you want to talk a little bit about the evergreen redemption dynamic?
Well, with regards to evergreen redemptions, we have outlined very transparently last July what our expectations there are. There is no change since then. I think very importantly, though, the way how valuations are performed is in accordance with IFRS and is done as an independent process. So it has nothing to do with whether what flows on the evergreen side to whether marks on the assets come out. Yes, you are correct, typically, there would be one price for the same asset across the platform.
Maybe just to add here that we have mentioned that consistently, and I think it is true also for the last six months, that in average, we sold our assets at about 10% above our marks. Of course, in ideal world, you would sell at the marks, but that is very hard to achieve, right? There is still a bit of a market element when you sell the assets, but just to mention that. On the M&A side, look, I do not think anything has changed. We absolutely look at opportunities. Have we been less courageous, as you, I guess, imply in your question? Yes, I think that is true. I think we have been less courageous. We see the right price, the right culture, and then, of course, the complementarity in what M&A offers to us as extremely relevant.
Just a third point, we have a pretty wide offering in the different asset classes. A number of players out there that have changed hands that, for instance, a pure private equity player that wants to add some private credit or a pure private equity player that wants to add some real estate, that is just for us, maybe not necessarily as intriguing because we might already have some of that. So we are probably a little bit more nuanced in the way we think about adding these. But look, let me just repeat one thing that I said before, and I think it is really key. Yes, there has been activity, but I guess what you always see in consolidation, you see these waves.
You see a first wave where some people that are, maybe desperate in quotes is a bit strong, but a little bit more convinced that they need to do something, they do something. That might work out, it might not work out, we will figure out. But there is often a period where you see less activity, and then consolidation, the organic consolidation, starts to impact the market, and that is what you see. Now we just talked actually in a small round today before we started here at coffee about, mark share gains by listed private market firms, which is phenomenal. This is why you see some GPs will find it much more difficult the next three, four years. So our opinion is that maybe the most interesting opportunities, especially when you want to emulate in a more nuanced way, they are probably just to come.
Good morning. Sharath Kumar from Deutsche Bank. Good morning, all. Congratulations to Dave, Juri, and Roberto for your new role. Three, please. Firstly, given IRR yields have been the flavor of the week or so, it's been the dominant theme. How do you view the refinancing environment? What proportion of portfolio comes from meaningful debt maturities in the next one to two years? Is this something that we need to be worried about? That's first. Second, I need a bit of help in forecasting the investment income component within your performance fees. It was negative in the first half, so when do you see a turnaround? Similar guidance or any help for forecasting the net financial income would also be helpful. Lastly, sorry if I've missed this. I just wanted to understand where we are in terms of redemption requests in the third quarter so far.
In mid-July, you had said something around CHF 2 billion or sort of a run rate per quarter would be reasonable expectation for the next several quarters. Any change to this view? Thank you.
Yep. Maybe on the first, we do have an active capital markets team that is engaged with our portfolio companies and constantly looking to put the most efficient and up-to-date capital structures on our businesses. We have probably six or seven companies at the current point in time that are going through some sort of a process to refinance. That's pretty consistent with what we've had over the last couple of years. No significant change in the dynamic there. A very active capital markets team that's helping us put the right capital structures in place for each of our portfolio companies. On investment income, Joris, do you want to address that?
Yes, of course. I think when we look into the second half of the year, our base case assumes a positive income, investment income contribution in the second half of the years, which will also have an impact on the performance income. Maybe let me also give the second answer to the net financial income. I think in half year one, we made the conscious decision to decrease the FX risk on our balance sheet and also on equity. When we look at this approach, we will continue to run this approach also in the full year of 2026. You can assume that there is some impact from the hedging cost, but also from the mark- to- market, which we will not know till the very end, of course, of the year, which is then impacting it. But overall, I think a slight improvement is possible.
Regarding your third question, no change with regards to redemption dynamics on the mature evergreen strategies with the private equity focus, but also no change with regards to all the good things happening across the broader evergreen platform, which we mentioned last time.
Just one additional word on the performance of the balance sheet positions, I guess also connected to your question around PGPE. Now, in the second quarter, we had clearly a couple of idiosyncratic situations in the portfolio, like I think everybody has in the industry. They were actually also in the public. I think there were also financing questions around that. It is all the same pool of assets. So this was, in our opinion, one-off. So I do not think that is a good guidance for second half. So I think second half should be just more business as normal.
Good morning. Michael Sanderson, Barclays here. Just a couple from me, please. First of all, obviously you are giving second half guidance around performance fees and into the future as well. Just interested, the exit environment, the messaging around this is always very hard to read from the outside. When you are talking about pieces being delayed, et cetera, I understand the long term. But I guess what I am trying to understand is who are the buyers out there at the moment? Because obviously rates look like they are going up. There is a lot of people stuck with capital that are struggling to deploy, et cetera, and are they going to get the returns they expect? So interested to know when you are looking at your exit pipeline, where is the real demand coming from that?
Second piece, I guess slightly more positively, thinking about the partnership side of things, obviously you spent a lot of time talking about those in March, and obviously the BlackRock tie-up and the products there. Be really interested to get some updates around those. Obviously in your reiterated guidance then you are making clear messages about developments, but yeah, some detail around what is going well in those and where you are seeing the most positive piece. I guess sort of a bit of add on, it would not be a results presentation if we did not ask about the U.S. and
The DC/401(k) opportunity and how that is evolving and speed of evolution.
I will take the first topic on exits and the environment. If I look out over the exit paths that we have been successful in completing the last number of years, as well as our ongoing processes, it is unbelievably balanced. We have had some IPOs, some exits to strategics. Some of our biggest exits have been actually exits to strategics, and then we have had some sales to financial buyers. If I look at the current pipeline, we see actually pretty good dynamics across each one of those channels. Sometimes it can be a little bit more complex today, and things can get dragged out a little bit. I would not read too much into the delay.
We have a handful, one in particular, but a handful of processes that we are just not sure if we will end up closing and getting the cash this year or if it is going to be pushed to next year. At this point in the year, if you are not already signed and marching towards exit, there is just uncertainty there. We have just given ourselves a little bit of a hedge on the guidance there, not being able to predict the specific timing of that one exit. I would not read much into that. The exit environment we have found to be quite reasonable, actually. On the partnerships and JVs, we had about CHF 1 billion of contribution from partnerships last year, and told you in March that we anticipated potentially up to 100% growth in that this year.
I am not sure if we will get quite to 100% growth in some of those JVs. They are built up of, in some cases, building blocks of some of these mature evergreens and some of the slowness that has impacted that has caused for maybe some reformulation or complicated the story in certain cases. You might see a little bit more slowness there, but you will certainly see good growth in that. Whether that is 100% or not, it does not look likely at this point in time that we will see quite a 2x in that business, but it will be, I think, a strong showing nonetheless. Those are going really well for the most part. Maybe Steffen, do you want to talk about DC?
Yeah, sure.
You spent a lot of time on that.
Yeah. Look, the reality is there have been big announcements coming out of U.S. In detail, a little bit more tricky. There's very different ideas between different, I would say, parties here at the table, how that is implemented. The reality is, I don't think we have, as of today, we have a clear framework that would allow us to essentially grow massively these 401(k) plans or private market allocations to these plans. As you can probably relate to, it's a little bit hard sometimes to predict exactly what's the course of political action, including in the U.S., and that's why I would be a little bit careful with my forecast. I would, though, tell you that the long-term trend that there is a clear conviction by literally all the parties in the meantime that defined contribution investors should have the same rights as DB plan investors.
I think that's pretty much undisputed. I think it's a bit more a question of time, and I don't think it's a question of if that happens.
Thank you. Nicolas Payen from Kepler Cheuvreux. Three questions, please. The first one we discussed quite a lot, insurance-related AUM. You want to credit them by 2033. I just wanted to know if we can expect any margin evolution from that, especially that it seems that insurance AUM are quite non-that year. That's the first question. The second one is coming back just on the hedging cost quickly. Could we expect maybe less FX headwinds going forward because of your hedging strategy, which has been ramped up potentially? The third one, I think you discussed AI-driven productivity gains within your portfolio companies. I am just curious about your own tech stack and how actually AI is potentially helping you within your investment process and whether or not that has impact on your cost base. Thank you.
So with regards to the insurance opportunity, one of the reasons why we, in that slide, showed you that we have crafted solutions across the different asset classes for our insurance partners is because we think that we can be a more comprehensive partner with a reasonably balanced margin profile within this insurance segment. But it is probably naturally weighted more towards credit and infrastructure, as we indicate, than some of the other asset classes. The fee base will follow the appropriate mix that comes from that segment. But we have shied away from doing the pure- play credit mandates oftentimes, and we'll oftentimes blend together multiple asset classes in order to keep a reasonable margin there.
I would probably also add here that there is overall, at least as of today, and if that changes, we'll tell you, as of today, I don't think there's a bias towards a change. I would agree with Dave that on the insurance side, probably that's more infra credit, and we are certainly trying to do a lot of infra there. I would say with the larger business with some wealth funds, it's probably more equity related. We hardly do any credit business with some wealth funds. There's usually not that much appetite there anyway for that type of business.
With the JV partners, especially when we do joint products, Dave talked about a very small category of clients where maybe we have one or the other, or just evergreen building blocks. I guess very often the product JVs are essentially new products where we bring together the expertise of our JV partners and of our firm. We announced a few of those in the past, like for instance, PJM. This is where often we bring much more the equity side of things than fixed income. I would say overall, as of today, I don't see a bias here. If we see suddenly such a phenomenal growth on credit, that's good news anyway then, but that could lead. If you see very disproportionate growth there in infrastructure and credit, that could lead actually to a more permanent change. So we'll certainly update you if that's happening.
Hedging costs, Joris?
Yeah. Maybe to give you the background there, I think we are now more prudent in how we run the expected volatility on our equity, and we are protecting the equity much more by doing these hedging efforts.
I am not sure whether I should clarify this. It was a question of whether we see more robustness on the FX side. I guess what we are talking about is hedging balance sheet positions.
Yes.
Okay? We are not talking about hedging revenues. Just if you try to make a picture of this, if we want to hedge the, for instance, U.S. dollar exposure, your exposure on the revenue side, and we talk about billions of dollars on five, 10, 15 years contracts, okay? You would not like that, I am sure. We will always have this situation that as long as we show Swiss franc as our main currency, and there is no plan to change that, we will have inherently, like other Swiss-based firms, or at least firms reporting Swiss francs, that kind of bias. That is why I think with actually a lot of your inputs, I guess, in the last two, three years, we make it more of a habit to always show the constant currency next to it, just that you get a little bit more an apples to apples.
This is not something we can easily change as long as we report in Swiss francs.
With regard to AI transformation, we do have a dedicated effort between business and technology, probably more to come from our side. I think it will help us to make us better investors, service our clients better, and Partners Group, with its vast array of private markets data, documentation, I think we are uniquely positioned and at a fantastic starting point to benefit from it.
Maybe just quickly adding to that. If you think about what AI will do to the investment process, there is one element where I think you have a level playing field because everybody will do about the same, which is essentially, let us say, using an agent to go to a data room to do financial due diligence, operational due diligence, all of that. You can do this today. We do this today, right? That is not a big deal actually. It is just helping you. That in itself, I think is saving time, but I am not sure whether it is actually super creative. What we are in the process of doing, and we should be pretty close to final product by the end of this year, we build what we call the PGAI Fab. We will use the data.
We do secondary business, primary business, co-investment, next to our direct control franchise now for 25 years. We have all this data. Now we have millions of documents, and probably arguably more extensive investment documents. I am not sure whether it is ever seen a PIR, a so-called preliminary investment recommendation Partners Group, right? We talk about 200 pages. There is about 20 pages of Q&A in there. This is, in our view, super valuable. Not only valuable to build the context for the agent approach to actually have the right context to go into these data rooms, to look at new transactions, to look at peers and all of that.
But very importantly, that's maybe the key differentiator, I will talk about this relevance of transformation, it is for the transformation to understand how historically what worked on the transformation side, what does not work so well, how we should look at different sub-sectors, all these different dynamics. This is literally impossible to do this by hand. You cannot try to use in a smart way 30 million documents, I do not know how many million numbers, and try to conclude on a value creation plan. This is where the models are really good at. This is where I think we have a real unique advantage actually with the data we have collected over time.
I think there is probably time next March or so, maybe in the annual numbers, when we have a little more time, maybe we should give you a little bit of an update what we are doing there. I think it is pretty exciting.
Any other questions?
We are going to take the first question on audio line. Just give us a moment. The question comes line of Mate Nemes from UBS. Your line is open, please ask your question.
Yes, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I have three of them, please. The first one would be a follow-up on the margin discussion. We've clearly seen a bit of a recurring management fee margin erosion. I think, Dave, you clearly said that this is dependent on the mix. I was just wondering, with the ongoing shift from seasoned evergreen products towards the next gen, perhaps somewhat smaller products, what is the expected margin impact here? Where do you think that recurring fee margin stabilize, in your view, in the next couple of years? Are there any other forces in play apart from that evergreen transition? That's the first one. The second one would be on financing conditions. I was just wondering, with clearly some upward pressure on rates, how do you see financing conditions affecting transaction activity in the second half of the year?
To what extent is that a concern? Could we see perhaps a bit of a rerun of what we saw in 2022, 2023? The last one would be on performance fees. I was wondering, what needs to happen in the second half of the year for performance fees to hit the low end of the 20%-25% contribution range? Is it really about just an additional small number of exits materializing, or do we need to see a more meaningful pickup in exits? Thank you.
Good. On the margin discussion, the transition of mature evergreens transitioning to younger evergreen, that is one of a dozen factors that play into where the management fee margin comes out at any particular point in time. Again, in the first half of this year, we were particularly successful raising capital within infrastructure and within private credit. Those bring their own contributions. In the past, I've tried to give you guys guidance on where the management fee is going, and even told you we foresee it going down by a basis point or two in this period, and it actually ended up being up at the end of that period. It's very hard to foresee where it comes out, because there are a dozen factors that come into play here, but the most significant is mix.
That's the one that we watch most closely, trying to project where management fee margin is coming out. With regards to financing conditions, yeah, it's always a reality that whenever the financing environment changes, you see transaction activity change for a period of time as the market digests those new rates, and because there is pricing implications that get factored into a new rate environment. At the same time, the transformation case is as important as the financing case today. What you can actually do with the business once you get your hands on it. We don't tend to put as much leverage on our transactions as some of our peers. At least we try and stay a notch below the market with regards to how we finance our businesses oftentimes, and put extra emphasis on the transformation case that we bring to the table.
Yes, it could impact things, but hopefully we are less impacted than others and can still close on our pipeline. Then performance fees, Joris, do you want to cover that?
Yes. We have given you a range of around 20%-25%, and that range is really driven by the slices of revenues that we will see as soon as we realize the exits. That is again, whether they will be closed in 2026 or shifting into Q1. So there are slices, elements of these several exits that we currently have in the pipeline, which will make the difference in the range.
Mm-hmm. The biggest is actually one exit where we are close to coming to an agreement on, but we just are a little bit uncertain with regards to when that particular transaction closes. So it is more concentrated and less broad.
Thank you. Now we are going to take our next question. The next question comes from the line of Daniel Regli from Zürcher Kantonalbank. Your line is open. Please ask the question.
Yes. Good morning from my side. Thanks a lot for taking my questions. I have mainly two follow-up questions. One is just on what we just discussed. Your performance fee guidance, in my view, has been reduced by about 5 percentage points for 2026. This is mainly due to this uncertainty about the exit timeline you just mentioned. Is the conclusion correct that we can expect that the expectations for performance fees in 2027 have basically increased by about the same amount, which now the expectations for 2026 have been lowered? The second question is again on the kind of dynamics in the evergreen platform in Q3.
I know you said there weren't many changes, but can you just give us maybe a little bit more color on what is going on on both sides, the demand side and the redemptions side? What is the status on the gatings with your more mature evergreen strategies? How many funds have now been gated by now, and what is your expectations for how long these gates will remain in place? Thanks.
Let me give you the first answer on the performance fees. Yes, you're absolutely right. I think if we have a timing shift, those will then, of course, be realized in the course of half year one 2027, as soon as they close. Looking into 2027 and 2028, I think we gave you the overall topic that we are looking at CHF 75 billion of realizations that we're working on. How then they will, of course, translate into the full year 2027 or 2028, I think that's a topic as we go into next year, we will also have more clarity on, I think. But the positive message clearly is, yes, it's feeding into 2027 of what we see shifted from this period.
Okay, thanks. Very clear.
I think when it comes to Evergreens, I mentioned before that there is no change to what we have said back in July. The mature Evergreens is a dynamic that we will deal with over the next 12 to 18 months, but on the other hand, we have also outlined that we expect Evergreen growth with CHF 20 billion- CHF 30 billion expected from the broader platform and the JVs, as David has been mentioning before in the presentation.
Okay. But what is exactly the status? How many funds of your mature Evergreen strategies have been gates applied now, and what is your expectations for further funds of these mature Evergreens, which will have to apply gates?
We do not comment on specific funds. I can only point to the guidance we have given last time.
Okay. Thanks.
Just on your question on the liquidity limitations that are enacted by our, I guess the three mature strategies that are enacted by many other large funds in the industry, by many people, especially on the credit side. I think what's just important to note is here that we often talk about the sizes a little bit being a challenge here. There have been a lot of investors that made a lot of money in these funds. Okay? The early investors, they made five times. That's not like a normal fund where you're happy to make two, 2.5 times. They made five times. And clearly at the time, when there's questions around the outlook, some people maybe like to buy some of the sort of a little more fancy public stocks, some people might have this effect in the more thematic investments.
There's all kind of reasons why people try to harvest some of their returns. And given the sizes of these funds and the fact that we have a little bit more quiet environment otherwise on the evergreen side, you will see these limitations on liquidity being enacted for a few quarters, as we pointed out in July. There's no update on the numbers. We've given pretty precise numbers here and figures, but it's just important to see a little bit that context. And that's why it's not an issue here on the smaller funds, because this is where people have maybe invested three years ago, four years ago. They're compounding. They're ramping up, right? But that is really for the mature funds. This is a little bit a topic because we have been so early.
Many of these funds they're out there for 15, 20 years, and with all that compounded upside, there's clearly much more inclination than elsewhere in the industry to harvest some of these returns.
Okay, thanks a lot for this additional color.
Thank you. With that, I think we will wrap up this call. Thank you guys for your continued interest in the company. With that, we will end the call. Thank you very much.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect. Have a nice day.