Forty thousand operating employees that help us deliver returns to our investors at the high end of what we promise them, and that's really all we try to do on a day-to-day basis. What brought us here was a long history of a company, but the most the current business we launched in 1995 . It's been a methodical building of the business over that time, and in a minute, Connor's gonna tell you about what we're planning on for the next 25 years. The past twenty years, on a macro basis for this sector, leaving aside the things in the current environment, but the macro basis has been extremely positive. Essentially, when we started out, there was $2 trillion in alternatives, and today that's $25 trillion.
And what's happened is the wealth in the world has been pushing money into alternatives because of the returns you can get and the resiliency of many of these products. And it's as simple as that, so we've had a very good environment, and we're gonna tell you about why it should continue. Within that environment, our heritage has been that we always try to build businesses and run these operations as good as one possibly can run. And I think one of the messages we'd like to leave you with is that that's now more important than ever, operating these businesses well. But it's pretty simple what we try to do. We try to pick relatively good sectors which have trends with them.
We raise capital, we invest the money, we try to operate the businesses well, and by and large, we can then earn returns which exceed what we promise people for the risk that we take. And it's as simple as that. And maybe just taking them in order. When we're picking the sectors and we look at them, over the years, there has been many things that we've invested in, and we always, the tagline that we've always operated with is, "We run, we operate, we build, we buy the backbone of the global economy." But when we look back over the 25 years, the backbone of the global economy continuously evolves, and we have to evolve with it.
So years ago, and it still is, but years ago, most of our money went into railroads and ports and hydro and pipelines, and today it's going into telecom, towers and data centers and solar and batteries and nuclear and logistics and housing and hospitality. And most of those things, on the right-hand side, most of those things actually didn't exist 25 years ago as an investment asset class for private investors, and that's what's changed over the years, and we continue to have to evolve with the investment environment. So we always invest in the backbone of the global economy, but I think the most important thing to note is that it always changes. Second, we raise capital, and our access to capital is almost unparalleled in the world. We have access to many different forms.
We've spent a lot of time over the years being methodical about it, but we have very large, long-standing relationships with institutional clients around the world. It's very diverse and global, and that proved its worth over the last 24 months, and our access to the capital that Brookfield Corporation has gives us a special advantage versus many of our peers. On the investment side, what we're always trying to do is to identify businesses with secular trends, assess an opportunity, do we buy or do we build? Leverage our ecosystem to give us information that most others don't have, and then over time, scale by buying or building businesses. Sometimes we build the businesses within our enterprise.
On this slide, you can see our renewables business over the last many years. We've built a business. We created a flagship transition fund that came out of infrastructure. We've now tacked on an emerging markets catalytic transition fund. We've built out a renewables sidecar on a global basis. We continue to push into credit opportunities around renewables. So we're taking the expertise we have and continuously diversifying the investment products we have for clients. On the other hand, sometimes we buy, and we decided early on in credit that our credit business wasn't scalable. It wasn't big enough for our clients that need large-scale products around the world. So we partnered with Oaktree. We now own just under 75% of the business.
It's fed an insurance platform, private wealth, and a number of other partnerships that we've built within the business. But one must always. Some people can buy businesses, some people can leverage businesses, but one, the real value that gets created is to operate businesses well, and our DNA in the organization has been as an owner, operator, and a builder of these businesses. It gives, with our bottom-up intelligence, that gives us knowledge that most organizations don't have, and it's enabled by a structure of decentralized teams and an organization that's allowed us to do that. That really has been one of the differentiators of Brookfield over the years.
Our operating culture has allowed that to succeed, and our values, and many of you know this, but are to be very disciplined, to be entrepreneurial, but to be very collaborative across the organization, and our approach as owner-operators with a long-term view and a focus on operational excellence has allowed those things to succeed over the years, and we want to continue to do that. What that's allowed us to do is to achieve returns which are at the upper end of most similar investors like us in the industry, and you can see on this slide the gross and the net IRRs in our flagship strategies over decades.
Our clients come to us because we take care of them, and we offer them things, and we bring them big products, and we have diverse businesses, and we offer them lots of different things within our structure. But most of the reason they come to us is because they earn high returns for the risk that we take within the business, and that's the lifeblood of any investment firm. And over time, what happens is that as you raise money, and as you operate the business as well, and as you deliver high returns, and as you return capital to investors, they come back for more. And it's a circular exercise, and therefore, the repeat customers, and David Levi is gonna talk later about our fundraising efforts, but the repeat customers coming back, they come back because of success.
It's a virtuous circle, and that's one of the moats that we have within this franchise. So before I turn it over to Connor, I just leave you really with three takeaways up front, and then the team's gonna talk about the business. But we have a long history of operating businesses, and that sets us apart from many similar groups like us. We have a growth model, which should continue well into the future, and there are tremendous opportunities for us to expand the franchise, grow the moat, build other businesses, tack on things adjacent to our strategies, and we think we're really just getting started.
With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Connor, and he's gonna talk about how we double the size of the business over the next while.
Good morning. Now, the best part about what Bruce just said is not the success that's been delivered over the last 25 years, but rather how it positions us for the future. Most importantly, we have a business model that allows us to consistently deliver very attractive risk-adjusted returns for our LP partners. But equally importantly, we have a leadership position in the most important and fastest-growing sectors of the alternatives market, and we have a business model that allows us to access the largest pools of capital being allocated to alternatives, and turn around and deploy that capital into the largest investment trends on a global basis. And because of that, we expect to double the size of our business in less than five years.
Said another way, everything we've built in the last 25 years, we expect to build again in less than five years going forward. And on the slide, you can see we define building our business in terms of the quantum of assets that we invest in and manage on behalf of our LP partners, but if we can double the size of the business in that aspect, we should more than double our cash flows and profits due to the inherent operating leverage in our business model. And the path to doing this is simple. It's laid out in front of us. About half that growth will come from our most established and most mature strategies. The other half will come from newer sources of growth that already exist within our business but are currently scaling rapidly off a lower base.
Now, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that the first bucket is about execution and the second bucket is a bit more speculative, but the reality is, we have been delivering growth in both these avenues for more than 20 years, and that is what gives us confidence about our forecast. And the market opportunity is certainly there to support that growth ambition. The alternatives market is gonna grow two and a half times in the next 10 years, or said another way, over the next decade, the alternatives market is gonna grow more than it has in the past 20 years combined. And that's all fine and good, but it's particularly important through the eyes of Brookfield Asset Management that has a leadership position in the fast, in the fastest-growing, largest, and most important sectors in that alternatives market.
We have an undisputed leadership position in infrastructure, renewables, and transition. We have leading global platforms in credit and real estate, and we have one of, if not the, highest performing track record among flagship PE funds in the industry. We are as well-positioned as anyone to capture that upcoming industry growth. While each of these individual levers will grow in a somewhat linear fashion, when compounding together, they have a multiplier effect that should allow us to grow our business at something along the lines of a 20% CAGR going forward. This brings us to what we feel is an underappreciated aspect of our business, which is that we have a business model that is not only well set up to support this growth, but actually enable it going forward.
Our business model has evolved over the last twenty years, always adapting to the market opportunity in front of it. But that evolution has always been guided with the view of raising and deploying capital effectively at scale. Our asset management business started by looking to source institutional capital that could be invested alongside Brookfield's own money, but has since expanded to include accessing all the largest and deepest pools of capital that are now being allocated to alternatives, and not only the ones that are the largest pools of capital today, but ones that will become increasingly important as we go forward. What this ensures is that on a continuous basis, and as we have just done, we are positioning the business for yet another step change in terms of organic growth, and today, we're well-positioned in three different ways.
We have one of the largest and most diverse institutional fundraising capabilities, which ensures we can raise capital across economic cycles. Secondly, through our public affiliates, we have turned the public markets into a true perpetual capital LP in our private funds. And three, we have built out leading platforms to access both the retail wealth investor as well as the insurance channel. In fact, we've built out these platforms in just the last three to four years, and today they represent over $100 billion of our capital. And all that fundraising capability needs to be matched by a deployment capability, but again, here we are well-positioned with a leadership position in the fastest-growing portions of the alternatives markets, the ones that have the greatest need for private capital and are generating the most significant amount of interest from investors.
All these growth levers are things that we've been consistently doing for years. In fact, we believe we are at the early stage in the infancy of capturing some of these market opportunities, and in the case of things like retail and insurance, we've only recently put those dollars in the ground to invest in platforms that will now pay large and growing dividends going forward. It can't be understated how much easier it is to grow, scale, diversify your platform going forward if you already have a base from which to grow from and a leadership position to leverage. It's easier to grow in retail or insurance if you already have the platform in place.
It's easier to launch a new product if you already have a track record of successfully investing in that theme or that trend, even before it was large enough to warrant a dedicated strategy. And our history and background of growing through both organic growth, building things within our business, or selectively buying, ensures that as we look to capture these new growth opportunities, we can always do it in the most cost-effective manner. So, as mentioned, we expect about half the doubling to come from our most established strategies, in particular from institutional capital and the public markets through our listed affiliates. The other half is going to come from newer sources of growth, but the important thing to reiterate here is in all those cases, those platforms already exist today within the business, and they are rapidly scaling at increasingly productive marginal returns.
But before we get into some of those newer growth opportunities, it's important to reiterate what continues to be the largest driver of our business, institutional fundraising. Has been that way in the past, will continue to be that way in the future, and there's two things to highlight here. Our business, while market leading and very mature, is still in the early to mid-innings of its growth profile in even its most prominent strategies. This is derived from the fact that our asset management business has really only been scaling rapidly over the last 10 years to 15 years, and versus our peers, we are actually a bit younger. An example of this is our flagship infrastructure fund. We are currently in the process of monetizing the final few investments in our first-ever flagship infrastructure fund.
At the same time, we've recently just raised and are now deploying the on-the-run version of that fund that is ten times bigger than the fund we are monetizing. What this means is, even if our fund sizes were to plateau, which they are not going to do, we have over a decade of embedded growth within our business, as the newer funds we raise are larger than the ones we monetize. And again, that assumes we don't increase the size of our funds, and we don't raise new products, neither of which is gonna happen. The other important thing about our institutional fundraising capability is its scale, but more importantly, its diversity across both geographies and products... It's not lost upon us that from time to time, there are dynamics that in certain markets create headwinds in certain regions or for certain asset classes.
We are deeply aware of those dynamics, but in a way, somewhat insulated from them, because we can offset any of those headwinds by raising more capital in a different region or a different asset class, therefore, allowing us to raise significant sums of capital regardless of market conditions. And perhaps it's that strength in institutional fundraising that maybe has caused us not to explain the efforts we have made to access the retail wealth investor. Starting in 2021, in partnership with Oaktree, we created a platform with the sole purpose of growing our access to capital from the retail wealth channel, and the results have been tremendous, and we're really only scratching the surface. In fact, in 2023, more than 15% of our fund capital came from the retail wealth channel, and we expect that number to only increase going forward.
The access to fundraising and the efforts there has been equally matched by development of products that are specifically designed for the retail investor. In fact, in particular, in our credit and infrastructure asset classes, our retail products are so successful that they are being restricted only by our level of deployment, where we continue to be disciplined, and we are, in fact, restraining capital inflows. We believe that this business can grow at a CAGR of 30%-50% in the coming years, driven by not only increasing our fundraising, but the development of new products, and in fact, putting entirely new verticals onto our private wealth channel, capturing what is a growing allocation from retail wealth into alternatives. Our growth in insurance has been perhaps a little bit more obvious.
For years now, we have been a large deployer of capital on behalf of insurance institutions, and it's logical. Our focus on long-duration, highly contracted, inflation-linked real assets has always paired very well with long-duration insurance liabilities. This obviously took a step change higher with the build-out of our credit platform, punctuated by our partnership with Oaktree in 2019. But again, while our product focus alignment with insurance is obvious, what may not be so forthcoming is how our business model is prepared to support that growth. Through our agreement with Brookfield's related party insurance company, Brookfield Wealth Solutions, that business is writing $15 billion-$20 billion of new products every year that we manage on their behalf. What's great is we do not need to incrementally fundraise to secure that capital, and we don't need to make a GP-like balance sheet commitment alongside of it.
This is high-value, sticky, asset-like capital for our business. Going forward, we expect this to grow, enhanced even further by our insurance SMA program that really only started in the last 12 months, but is off to a very strong start. And then the last thing about our structure is our publicly listed affiliates. Through these businesses that together have a market cap of almost $60 billion, we have made the public markets via public securities, LP investors into our private funds, and this is true perpetual capital. It is not subject to a redemption of any kind, and it continues to grow as we scale our business. And the ownership of these vehicles creates an unprecedented level of alignment between ourselves as the manager, our private fund LPs, and our shareholders. But switching gears, turning to deployment, the benefits of our business model continue.
We have been saying for years that the biggest investment trends around the world are those of digitalization, decarbonization, and deglobalization. Put very simply, it is because the capital needs and growth opportunities in these trends are so significant that they outstrip what is available from both public markets and from governments, creating a large and attractive opportunity for private capital. And while that opportunity is available to some, where it is particularly attractive is for those that can operate at scale at the intersection of one or multiple of these themes, and that is exactly where we play. Our scale and flexibility of capital allows us to be the go-to investor or the partner of choice for leading corporates around the world. We have the ability to play at scale, not only in North America and Europe, but the fastest-growing markets in the Middle East and Asia.
Our global presence allows us to partner with leading global corporates around the world, helping them to debottleneck key critical path growth items wherever they do business. And lastly, our operating approach, our partnership approach, and the fact that we have multiple pools of capital that are all uniquely designed for different situations ensures that we can always provide a capital solution that meets our counterparty needs, as well as delivers attractive returns for our LP partners. Nowhere is this more obvious than how we are today investing in the AI revolution. We are one of the largest owner, operator, developers, acquirers of data centers with six independent platforms on five continents. We are the single largest provider of green power to the large tech companies around the world, supporting their increasing energy demands to support AI.
Within our real estate business, we've made a concerted growth effort into science and innovation, often housing the users and developers of new AI applications. This doesn't even get into our private equity business that is making investments like nVent, that provides critical goods and services to the assets across these segments. Our knowledge of the value chain, the growth opportunities, the capital requirements in this sector, positions us well to continue to be one of the largest investors targeting the most attractive returns in what is one of the largest growth opportunities of this generation. But in terms of broadening out our product pipeline, we're really just getting started. Go back 10 years, our product offering was a little bit more narrow. It consisted primarily of global opportunistic equity control funds, but from there, the tangential growth opportunities are obvious.
In each vertical, we want a core fund, a debt fund, and a retail-specific product as a next step, and from there, we will grow into niche products, geographic-specific products, or structured investment solutions. And that's-- this is not uncharted territory. In fact, in the last twelve months, we have launched new products across every single one of our verticals, always with the same criteria: Is it a large and attractive investment opportunity? Is it something where Brookfield is well-positioned to be a market leader? And is it complementary to our existing fund offering? And given some of the key investment trends that we have a front-row seat to around the world, we will continue to expand that offering, leveraging our existing base to create new growth foundations for the future.
Everything we have discussed to date has been all about how we can organically grow our existing business. But as discussed, from time to time, we will choose to inorganically grow either via partnerships or through M&A when we feel that is more timely and more effective to capture a market opportunity. We will continue to be very selective in this regard, only partnering with the best-in-class managers and those that we feel can grow much more quickly when incorporated into the Brookfield ecosystem. We started this presentation by saying, if we can double the size of our business, we should more than double our cash flows and profits in the next five years, doubling what we have done in the last twenty-five.
We think that is both achievable and within our grasp to actually exceed, because, one, we have a market opportunity that supports that growth ambition. We have a leadership position in the fastest-growing and most important components of the alternative landscape. We have a business model that allows us to access the largest, fastest-growing, and deepest pools of capital being allocated to alternatives, and then a leadership position in terms of investing into the fastest-growing investment themes on a global basis. If we do what's in front of us, we should not only meet but exceed those targets, and none of this includes no doubt some opportunities that will come to us unexpectedly over the next five years. With that, I will hand it over to David Levi.
Hi there. Welcome. I am gonna take the next bit of time here and really talk about the client perspective, of the growth that you heard from Connor and Bruce, which is appropriate because my job is basically to spend my days talking to clients, so, I hope to bring them into this room a bit. I'm gonna really do three things. The first is I'm gonna describe how we at Brookfield are set to meet the needs of our clients. Second, I'm gonna talk about what sets us apart, which is our platform, which you've heard a bit about, and our very unique approach to partnership, which we continue to evolve. And third, I'm gonna spend some time talking about a handful of very targeted strategies that are gonna get us to that $1.1 trillion that you've heard about.
There are several key themes that are driving fundraising here at Brookfield. One, of course, is that the demand for alternatives is massive, but I would say beyond that, which maybe is the obvious, the demand is actually coming in different ways. It's coming from a different risk-return perspective. It's coming from different sectors. It's coming from private credit. It's coming from the extensions that you heard about over the last two presenters. Investors also are seeking to consolidate their relationship with GPs. They're looking for their managers to do more, and that means to be able to do that, we have to do more, and we have to do it really, really well. Third, the wealth channel, which I'll talk about in a bit more detail, is absolutely growing.
The press and the pundits' statements about this are certainly true, but we really believe it's only the beginning, and I'm gonna share some research that would support that. So how do we differentiate? One is our breadth, and at the same time, our specialization. I'll talk about our platform in a bit more detail in a few minutes. But the fact that we're as broad and big as we are, yet we're specialized in the things we do, is a real differentiator. The second is our operational approach. We are operational experts. That is how we drive value. We're not financial engineers; we drive value through operating the assets. We have what we like to think of as global capabilities, but a very local mindset. We are on the ground, living, working, breathing in local markets.
We also have a partnership mentality. We don't think of our investors as limited partners. We think of them as partners. We think about their businesses. We think about how we can help them. And we are willing to, and have the scale and ability to, customize investment solutions to meet investor demands. That product evolution has already started. Just in the last three years, we've launched 10 new strategies, and those new strategies have contributed 20% of our AUM. These aren't things where we're dabbling. These are things that drive scale. And interestingly, we've also built 8 new products in partnership with investors, where we and they have talked about an idea, a need, a market opportunity, and we've actually built a product with them that then we've broadened out to the broader market. That's really, really differentiated. Our Middle East private equity fund is a great example.
Catalytic Transition Fund is a great example. But there's more to come. Certainly, successor funds, the next vintage, is what we do, and as Connor described, they get bigger and bigger and bigger. The pressure is on for the fundraising organization. There are new business lines. Today, we're in the venture business, thanks to our partnership with Sequoia Heritage. That's bringing new capabilities to investors. That is, as they consolidate their relationships, being able to deliver even more. We have adjacent strategies. Opportunistic real estate used to be a global strategy only. Today, we have a European version, we have an APAC version. Very differentiated. And in terms of our platform, we have, as I've mentioned, the investment capabilities that are in most demand for investors around the world.
We have this broad sector expertise that really has the scale to actually drive value, and we deliver very meaningful co-invest opportunities for our investors. That platform, it is massive. 240,000 operating employees, 2,400 investment professionals operating in 30 countries around the world. I described the idea of being global with a local mindset. This is that, and this is exactly what investors want. But not just from an investment perspective, I would say from a client perspective as well, we're local. We live, work in the markets that our clients live in. We speak their languages, we understand what they need, and that's really important. And as I said before, we like to think of our investors as more than just an LP. We think of them as a partner. First hallmark of partnership is we invest alongside of them.
Our interests are aligned, and I will say, when I talk to clients, that fact is so incredibly important and so incredibly, incredibly differentiated. It drives and starts that partnership mentality. We also share investments with them. Co-invests are incredibly important, increasingly important, and over the last 10 years, we've delivered roughly $40 billion in co-invest to our investors. That's thanks to the scale, the size of the transactions that we do. It's very unique, and as I alluded to before, we don't think of our investors as just investors. We understand their businesses. We partner with them. We take our 240,000 operating employees, and we share insights that we have in running our businesses, in running our assets, to help our investors run their own.
Because in many ways, Brookfield is very, very similar to many of the entities for whom we manage money. And that, again, is a very differentiated perspective, a very, very differentiated capability. So Connor talked about this slide in describing our asset management business. I'm gonna spend a few minutes talking about the fundraising channels we have. They're very diverse. It's very unique in the industry to have this level of diversification in terms of sources of capital for Brookfield. So first, institutional. Our institutional business is what many of you would know us for. It is what we've been doing the longest. It is what our focus has been. We have over three hundred client-facing people in our institutional business, roughly 2,200 relationships.
We operate in 12 markets around the world, and do that, importantly, in a very targeted, very customized way, engaging with clients the way they want to be engaged with, as I described. The second is our insurance business. As I mentioned, or as Connor mentioned, Brookfield Wealth Solutions is writing roughly $15 billion of new policies a year, which we are managing. And separate from that, we have other third-party relationships with roughly 150 insurance companies with whom we can do more. Third, our private wealth business is at scale and growing. 150 dedicated people focused just on private wealth, 160 wealth management platform relationships and growing. We have people today in 10 markets around the world dedicated to private wealth.
And finally, which Connor spoke to, our public markets, public affiliates are a really unique way to source capital for our private funds from the public markets. 2,500 institutional investors, $10 billion of retail shareholder capital, incredibly unique. So to spend a few minutes on each one of these, institutionally, we are, as I described, a trusted partner already. We manage capital for 39 of the largest 50 institutional investors in the world. And what's really interesting about this is they actually need us as much as we need them. They need to deploy massive amounts of capital. And because of our scale, because of our scope, we can do that for them. So it's not that this is all about us, them serving us by giving us capital, it's actually us helping them solve deployment challenges.
Those top investors represent roughly 39%, uh, 35% of our fundraising. But we can do more. Those same investors, in their alternatives allocations, we represent only 2% of their alternative allocations. So as we cross-sell those investors, deepen our partnerships with them, we believe we can meaningfully increase that percentage. So investing across the things we do, doing more with us in the things they already do, and as our product platform expands, bringing new strategies to them that are appropriate. So doing more with the biggest is an important part of our strategy, and we believe that as we do that, over the next several years, that can contribute $25 billion a year to our annual fundraising. In addition to the biggest of the big, we also have several underpenetrated segments. Middle market institutions is an underpenetrated segment, family offices, and insurance companies.
Today, only 3% of our fundraising is sourced from family offices. Only 9% of our fundraising is sourced from middle-market institutions. These are institutions with capital between $2 billion and $15 billion. And only 10% of our fundraising is sourced from insurance companies. Our approach here is specialization. Our approach here is dedicated teams focused on these markets, dedicated products focused on these markets, understanding the needs of these investors and building for them. And we believe as we do this, this will contribute roughly $20 billion of annual incremental fundraising to what we do. So in addition to these very specific initiatives to expand our footprint, we also have these secular tailwinds. Allocations to alternatives are increasing, people want differentiated strategies, and we are in a leadership position across everything that all the asset classes where we focus.
Turning to insurance for a minute, we do continue to grow our partnership with Brookfield Wealth Solutions. Today, we manage roughly $88 billion, which we believe over time will grow by roughly $200 billion, an amazing source of capital, but what's also really interesting is in addition to what we can do for Brookfield Wealth Solutions, we can bring those same insights, those same capabilities, those same perspectives, those same products, to the rest of the insurance community, and as I mentioned before, we do have relationships with insurers. We have roughly 150 relationships with insurance companies globally, but we haven't had the breadth of investment capability, the credit platform, the structuring expertise, to do what we'll do in the future.
So whether that's tailored, separately managed account programs for insurance companies that are bespoke for them, leveraging things like music royalties or aviation finance, investment-grade credit, et cetera, or it's our private funds structured in an insurance-friendly way, we believe we can bring solutions to the insurance market that we simply couldn't before. And as we do that, that will contribute roughly $50 billion capital. Private wealth. I have the benefit, for some of you who were here, I'd be flattered if you remember this, but maybe you might. I was up on stage last year representing our private wealth business, which we call Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions.
I have the benefit of being on the team that built that business over the last several years, so I get a little revved up when we talk about private wealth here. We have built this business for scale. As I mentioned before, we have 150 professionals dedicated to private wealth. That's what they wake up thinking about. That's all they do, is think about private wealth and what advisors need, what investors need in local markets. What we do in private wealth is we bring the capabilities of both Brookfield and of Oaktree to the wealth market. When we started three years ago, what that meant was we brought closed-ended, drawdown funds in general to that market, and we still do that.
But what we've added to that are capabilities that are bespoke for the private wealth segment, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And as I described before, one of the things that we're very proud of is that over just the last three years, we have brought those capabilities to our wealth partners around the world in scale. Pretty unprecedented, actually, to be able to, over such a short period of time, bring our products to over one hundred and sixty wealth management platforms around the world. And those products that we brought, as I said, started as our traditional, institutionally focused, closed-ended funds. And while we still do that, we now also bring the strategies that were designed for wealth. Oaktree Strategic Credit, private lending in a structure that's friendly for wealth.
Brookfield Infrastructure Income, infrastructure strategy, investing across the totality of what Brookfield does, all designed for wealth and all resonating in the market. I mentioned before that there's a broad belief that the wealth segment, alternative investment in the wealth segment is growing in a really significant way, and we certainly would agree with that. But one of the things that we thought was important was to really delve into the attitudes of investors and financial advisors around the world, and build a program to help each group educate each other about alternatives and increase the pie, if you will. Over the last year, we surveyed roughly 2,000 investors and financial advisors in Hong Kong and Singapore, the US, Canada, to understand what they think.
We will be launching a program that will share a lot of this insight, but just to give you a little sneak peek here, 70% of investors who today are not using alternatives say that they would if their financial advisor recommended it. It's pretty amazing. It's kind of an assumption out there that most people who are investing in alternatives are the people that are investing in alternatives, and they'll invest more. 70% of people who don't invest in alternatives would, if simply their financial advisor suggested it. The financial advisor side, 72% view alternatives as a key driver for their business. It's massive. So if those 72% of advisors recommended to the 70% of investors that they invest in alternatives, can't do the math, but that's pretty, that's pretty impressive.
91% of financial advisors feel that spending the time to understand alternatives is worth it. Everybody knows that the education component is a big hurdle, and having them view the fact that it's worth it is a great place to start. So what are we doing going forward? From a wealth perspective, number one is we're going deeper in certain markets. We're localizing our strategies. Example there would be, we've just launched a private credit strategy in Australia, built a product dedicated to the Japanese market, and we are tailoring our private equity capabilities for wealth. This is something we're super, super excited about. We did it in credit, we did it in real estate, we did it in infrastructure, and now we're doing it in private equity. So you'll be hearing much more about this.
Last year, I suggested everybody follow Brookfield Oaktree Wealth Solutions on LinkedIn or web or whatever. If you do that, you'll hear more about this. And as I say, we are supporting the demand for education. We continue to scale the business. We started in 2021. This year, we'll raise about $7 billion, and that is growing at roughly 30% CAGR. Just to wrap up and bring it all together, as I said, and as you heard from Bruce and Connor, the objective is, over the next five years, we will reach $1.1 trillion in fee-bearing capital.
And from a client perspective, we will get there by doing more with our existing partners, deepening those relationships with those partners, penetrating under-penetrated segments like insurance, the middle market, family offices, broadening our product offering to meet the needs of those investors, big and small, and continuing to grow in private wealth. And all of that supported by this amazing organization dedicated to the needs of our clients. So with that, I'm going to introduce Hadley, our CFO.
Thank you, everyone. You've heard from Bruce, Connor, and David just now about how we're going to double our business. So I want to spend a little time talking about the details behind it, specifically in four areas. One is the characteristics of our earnings profile: stability, predictability, those types of characteristics. The second is our balance sheet and how that supports our growth. The third is the feedback that we've been receiving from our shareholders and some initiatives we're thinking about doing around that. And fourth is, of course, the five-year plan and getting into the weeds around the numbers that will lead us to one point one trillion of fee-bearing capital. It's important to recognize that our earnings profile, it really benefits from stability, predictability, and strong growth. The nature of our capital is resoundingly based on permanency.
87% of our capital is classified as either long-term or permanent in nature. And what's interesting about that number is that 87% contributes 95% of our base management fees, hence the stability of our business. Now, as a pure play asset manager, we operate with an asset-light model, no debt, and limited realized carry for the next years. Now, we're growing into our carry over the years, and I'll talk more about that later. But what that means is 100% of our fee-related earnings translates into distributable earnings, hence the predictability of our business. And now we're on to growth. This is repetitive, but it's worth saying again, we have a leadership position in the fastest-growing areas of alternatives. You've heard from David around our fundraising channels and how we are able to access them in such a material way.
We've got a broad base of product offering that fits the investment themes that our clients value, and in addition, we have a successful track record of executing expansion, whether it's buying or building, and all of that will help us double our earnings, and in fact, if you look back over the past five years, you can see the characteristics of these earnings, the stability, the predictability, the strong growth, and that's what led us to over $500 billion in fee-bearing capital at a 15% CAGR, so when you take that performance, that track record, and then these characteristics, that gives us the confidence that we can deliver a 15%+ long-term annual dividend growth rate. Now, I'm going to spend a little time talking about the balance sheet as the source of strength that I mentioned early on.
We have a bulletproof balance sheet in which strong liquidity is a top priority. We have about $1.9 billion of cash on hand, no debt, and the capacity to put in place over $5 billion of debt at high grade ratings, so call that A, A minus, and that will all support our growth. Now, the balance sheet will be relevant in two material ways. One is, of course, building businesses, expanding our product set and our capabilities, and then two is supporting strategic partnerships. Now, you kind of talked a little bit about this, but when we're thinking about building businesses, and I'll talk more about this as well later on, it's important to understand the criteria that we use and how we select which businesses we're going to grow internally. First, it's got to have strong client demand.
Second, it's got to be where we can add value and become a market leader. Third, scalable with a large opportunity set. And fourth, where we're aligned with our clients. Now, this last one is actually very important. It's a competitive advantage of ours for two reasons: one, this sets us in a different scheme than our competitors, and two, it makes us a partner of choice. Clients value that we put sizable commitments into our fund for two reasons. One, it shows that we have confidence in our ability to deliver on the mandate, and also achieve those risk-adjusted returns that we promise against the strategy. Now, you can see that we've actually committed about $13 billion, over $13 billion, in the past year since our spin-off to our funds.
But about more than 85% has been committed through the broader Brookfield family, with only 1.6 the responsibility of Brookfield Asset Management, and that'll be over the next 2 years -3 years. So our structure allows us to continue to be asset light, but still have that competitive advantage, that alignment with our clients. Now, the other way that our balance sheet is very supportive to our growth is, of course, through strategic partnerships. And when we think about those strategic partnerships, we wanna make sure that it's additive to our business, complementary, whether that's from an LP or geographic perspective, again, scalable, and then cultural alignment. And this is very important. Actually, it's binary for us. And we've got two of our partners who are gonna speak on the credit panel, Oaktree and Castlelake, and they'll spend a little bit more time talking about this.
We've executed six strategic transactions over the past five years. The first one being Oaktree, of course, in which we bought 60%, and that's grown to 73%. In this example, we used a new and innovative structure that's been quite successful, and we've continued to carry that forward as we've entered into other partnerships, and as you can also see, we've expanded our capabilities. I mean, Oaktree was tremendous in further building out our credit business, and then since then, we've got LCM and 17Capital, which is part of Oaktree, our fund finance business. We're now in the music royalty business with Primary Wave, our venture capital endeavor with Pinegrove partnering with Sequoia Heritage, and then finally, Castlelake Asset-Backed Finance, which we hope to close in the next few days.
But what isn't well known is that when we built this innovative structure, we built in the options over the next five years to acquire up to two hundred and fifty million of fee-related earnings, and that's not built into our business plan. Now, I talked and referenced earlier about some of the feedback that we've been receiving from our shareholders, besides just the break, and we've been listening, and we're trying to address it. So when you think about our spin-off of BAM, it helped simplify the story, it made us a pure-play asset manager, and it expanded our shareholder base. But there is more that we can do. We want to continue to broaden that base into the deepest pools of capital. And specifically, when we think about the feedback that we've received, it's around further increasing the liquidity of BAM stock.
Then, as we've shifted more to a balanced U.S. and the rest of the world, from a shareholder holdings perspective, some of the feedback's been around inclusion into other stock indices on the global and the U.S. side. A few of the steps that we're contemplating taking are, the first one is moving our headquarters to New York. This one makes sense just because we have the largest percentage of our employees, our revenues, and our asset management located in the U.S. The second step is around exchanging shares. Let me take you a step back. When we spun out BAM, we listed 25%, with Brookfield Corporation owning 75% through an unlisted holding company. That's why our market cap only represents 25% of the true value. As a footnote, we've grown that to 27%.
So what we're contemplating is Brookfield Corporation taking its interest and exchanging it into BAM shares, and that will do two things: One, it'll make 100% of BAM publicly owned, and two, it will reflect the appropriate true value of our market cap at almost $70 billion. Now, what will not change is BN's ownership at 73%, our Canadian incorporation, our dividend treatment, 'cause this is a non-event for our shareholders, and there'll be no changes to how we operate and run our business. Now, on to the five-year plan. We have broad-based growth backed by our flagship funds, our complementary strategies, and our credit business. The flagship funds have been and will continue to be the backbone to our growth of our business.
In fact, if you look at the current round, we've got about $90 billion right now, and it will grow over the next five years by 15% to $105 billion. All total, bringing in $125 billion over the next five years. But it does more than just that. It actually serves as, as the mechanisms to further grow our complementary strategies on a compounding way. So let me give you an example. We launched our infrastructure flagship fund, BIF, back in 2008 at $2.7 billion, and since then, we've expanded in geographies that we find attractive and into sectors that we see value, and through that as well, we're able to build up further capabilities on the operating side and expertise on the asset knowledge perspective. So that led to launching our first complementary strategy, BID.
And as many of you know, this is close to my heart since this is where I came from, and I kind of call it the best. But BID is our high-yield infrastructure debt fund that we launched back in 2015. Since then, a few years thereafter, we launched a super core, open-ended strategy, BSIP, and then most recently, our structured solution strategy, BISS. But BISS did more than just that. It actually was the catalyst for launching BGTF, our Global Transition Fund, and day one, that was a flagship at $15 billion. And we further expanded into our Catalytic Transition Fund and our Asia Renewable Fund.
Now, because we've been able to be successful across all of these strategies, we were able to, last year, and you heard a little bit about this, launch our Private Wealth Infrastructure Income strategy, in which it invests alongside our other complementary strategies and some of our, in our flagships. So now you can see in totality how our flagships can really further expand our capabilities, our product set, and build that growth on a compounded basis. And to give you some numbers, of the existing strategies, we've raised $100 billion, and we've got about $30 billion in the market today. So now, if you look back at 2019, just to put some additional numbers against this, we had five strategies that raised about $5 billion. Today, 50 strategies that raised $50 billion.
And so over the next five years, we anticipate $260 billion coming in with 80 strategies. Credit is worth spending some time on because there's just tremendous growth that we see in the business. We're already quite large at $238 billion, and we plan to grow that to almost $600 billion. You've heard about the $90 billion because I just talked about as part of our flagship and our complementary strategies. And then through our partnership with Brookfield Wealth Solutions, we continue to see growth from that perspective, up to $200 billion, and you hear more about that in today's afternoon session. Finally, David summarized how we're expanding into third-party SMAs, especially around insurance companies, and that should generate another $50 billion. Now, one thing to point out is the makeup of our credit business.
Right now, we're about 30% private credit, and that will continue to expand to 50%. And just as a reminder, around that long-term and permanent nature, 85% hits that classification. Now, in total, we should generate about $350 billion of capital coming in over the next five years related to credit. So here's in totality. I've talked about the $125 that's coming in from our flagships, and it will support the growth of $260 billion coming in from our complementary strategies, and then insurance, which I just discussed, at $250 billion, and then we've got about $85 billion coming in from affiliates, co-investments, et cetera, all while returning $160 billion of capital back to our clients.
That's super important to our clients because they value that, especially in today's environment, and that's the largest number that we've ever projected. So we get to the $1.1 trillion that you keep hearing about through those different vehicles. I want to take you back to an earlier part of my presentation when I discussed that long-term and permanent nature, 87% of our capital. That's going to grow to 92%. So you see the growth of our business, but you also see the growth in our stability. Later on, we're going to have the various business groups come up and talk about the growth, but here you can see the actual numbers, and we see growth across all of our businesses. Renewables, infrastructure, and credit will be leaders, with renewables and credit doubling, more than doubling.
Infrastructure will benefit from the growing aspects of the asset classes. Private equity will see growth in its complementary strategies around BISS, our structured solution strategy, and our Middle Eastern fund, and then real estate, given the distress in the industry we recently have seen, has created opportunities around bad balance sheet, maturity walls that will create tailwinds to further growth of that business, all with a 16% CAGR, and that will drive our revenues to almost $9 billion and a fee-related basis to BAM, $5 billion at a 17% CAGR, so per share basis, a little over $3, but what's also interesting, and I really want to point out, is our direct costs. You can see they're not growing as fast as our revenue. That's the operating leverage that's going to further expand our margins to over 60%.
But there is further upside to our business. There's the second leg of growth. We don't have much carry today, but that's growing to $2 billion by 2029 and then $7 billion by 2034. So that will continue to drive our business, and you can see it here with our distributable earnings. Before taxes, we're going to reach about $6 billion at a 19% growth, and then post-taxes, about more than $5 billion with an 18% growth level. So that we, on a per-share basis, will earn about $3.12. Now, that will support a payout ratio of 95% and that long-term dividend growth rate of over 15% that I mentioned. So now you can see why we're so excited about our business.
We're in a great position to take advantage of our strong balance sheet, our leadership position, the growth that we see in all of our businesses, including renewables, infrastructure, and credit. And for that, we should earn above 15% attached to our fee-bearing capital, our fee-related earnings, and our distributable earnings, while returning most of that back to you. But all we have to do is execute our existing business plan. And there is upside to this business, as I've pointed out. So that's why we think the best is yet to come. So now I get the pleasure of announcing the break, and so if we could have everyone back here at 11:30 A.M. After the break, we'll have the business groups present their growth prospects, and then a credit panel that will talk about our capabilities and the growth attached to that business.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. My name is Anuj Ranjan. I am the CEO of our private equity group at Brookfield, and after all the build-up for that break, I feel a bit bad that I have to pull you all back, so whatever I say, it better be good. Thankfully, we've got... You've heard a little bit today about our business model, which is simple and effective, as Connor said earlier. And David Levi then expanded on how we raise all of this capital, all of our different fundraising channels. I'm very pleased today to be here with many senior leaders from our organization to talk about how we spend that money, how we deploy that capital, and invest it and earn superior returns. But before we dive straight in, I thought I'd highlight a few of our competitive advantages that are actually unique to Brookfield.
They differentiate us as an asset manager, and they're shared by all of our businesses. If you think about our scale, for example, we've been talking a lot about $1 trillion of AUM, but what does $1 trillion of AUM really mean? It's a big number. It's a huge number, but what it means is 300 businesses that employ 240,000 people all over the world. It includes 90 million sq ft of logistics. It includes over 200 GW of renewable power. It includes enough fiber optic cable to circle the world one and a half times. It also includes a manufacturer of a third of the world's car batteries. What we get from that is an immense amount of data, real-time insights, learning, and knowledge that the entire business can access. That helps us make better decisions.
It brings clarity to situations that may seem uncertain, and frankly, it makes us better investors. When you take that and you combine it with our deep local relationships from our boots on the ground in the thirty countries where we have offices, the relationships we've built with entrepreneurs and industrialists and companies, and also the four hundred banks with whom we work with, many of whom are in this room, in many cases, where we are often their largest lending relationship. All of that, combined with these insights, allows us to be a partner of choice in many situations. As a result of all this, about two-thirds of all the transactions we have done to date have been sourced on a proprietary basis and executed bilaterally.
I'm gonna come back to speak a little bit more about how this all relates to private equity in a moment, but for now, I'm pleased to call on my colleague, Sikander Rashid, to talk to you about infrastructure.
Thank you, Anuj, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today. It's great to be back in New York City after three years. In the next ten minutes, I wanna leave you with three key takeaways. First, Brookfield Infrastructure is a global leader across sectors, geographies, and products. Two, the infrastructure super cycle is creating an unprecedented demand for private capital. And third, because of these tailwinds and our market position, we are really well positioned to continue to grow the business in line with what you just heard from Bruce, Connor, and Hadley. Our track record is unmatched. It is second to none. In 2010, we had $13 billion in AUM. Fast-forward to today, we've got $191 billion in assets under management, a global diversified business across geographies and sectors, as you can see on the slide.
In addition to our track record, there's two key differentiators of our business I would like to highlight. The first one is the diversity of our products. Hadley talked about this. We have the ability, through our infrastructure business, to invest up and down the capital stack for the benefit of our investors and for our counterparties. We have the ability to offer bespoke solutions that cater to the needs of our counterparties. Secondly, our operations-oriented approach differentiates us from our peers, and there's four key tenets of this approach I would like to highlight today: enhanced contracting profile of our businesses, optimization of capital structures, investments in accretive growth projects, and lastly, thoughtful exits. Now, let me provide a few examples that illustrate our approach.
In 2022, we acquired a $20 billion business in Germany, which forms the backbone of the German cellular system, a company called Deutsche Funkturm. We were successful in acquiring this business, not only because of our access to large-scale capital, but also our operating capabilities. Fast forward to today, within the last 24 months, we've effectively de-risked 80% of the growth, third-party growth in the business, which is a huge outcome for the business and our partner. Another example, Compass Datacenters. This is a large-scale, marquee, hyperscale data center business based in North America. We acquired the company last year, and we were successful, again, not only because of our access to large-scale capital, but because we had built a strong relationship with the management team, thanks to our credit business.
Since our acquisition of Compass, we've committed an incremental $10 billion of CapEx at accretive returns to the business. Moving on to another example, Nordicus. This was effectively a carve-out of social infrastructure from a distressed seller last year. Since our acquisition, we've optimized the capital structure. We've put in investment-grade project finance debt. There's more leverage, better credit rating, and lower duration adjusted cost of capital. This effectively optimizes the cost of capital of the business, and as a result, improves the intrinsic value of the company. Fourth example on thoughtful exits. TDF is our large digital infrastructure business in France. The last 12 months, we carved out the fiber business from TDF and sold it at an 18% IRR and two times MOIC.
That divestment is accretive for our TDF investment, but more importantly, what that divestment leaves behind is a pure-play tower business, highly contracted, extremely well-positioned to be acquired by either a strategic investor or a financial partner. And these are just four examples of many initiatives we've got going on around the world, across our businesses, enhancing value. Looking ahead, the market opportunity has never been stronger. The need for capital has never been higher for infrastructure. The punchline is the world needs $94 trillion of capital in the next 15 years alone. On one hand, we need capital to maintain and upgrade legacy infrastructure, including water pipes that bring water to your homes, gas pipelines, electricity wires that move electrons around the world, airports, toll roads.
But on the other hand, there's need for greenfield or new, fresh infrastructure projects, including data centers and a few other areas I'll touch on shortly. Legacy, historically, a lot of this capital was provided by governments or publicly listed entities who today have several impediments, for example, market volatility or stretched balance sheet, that impede their ability to continue to fund or subsidize this build-out. And that creates a unique opportunity for large-scale private capital providers such as Brookfield. So now the question is: What does that mean for our clients, and what are some of the key areas we're focused on to grow the business? I'll provide a few examples of areas we're really excited about. Pharmaceuticals is the first one. Since the onset of COVID, the importance of securing medical supply chains has never been greater.
In the next five years alone, incremental capital requirements for contracted pharmaceutical manufacturing and dedicated pharmaceutical logistics in the U.S. and Europe alone is $100 billion. Similarly, the need for industrial gas infrastructure, which is critical for semiconductor manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, hydrogen production, has never been greater. The four largest industrial gas companies in the world are forecasting $75 billion of CapEx needs in the next five years alone. That's a 50% increase compared to the last CapEx cycle. Electricity grids, that's another example. This has been in the news quite frequently over the last few months. Electric grids in the U.S. and Europe are ill-equipped to facilitate net zero, to feed artificial intelligence infrastructure or data centers, and third, to secure the energy supply chains.
For context, because of the geopolitical crisis in Germany, the CapEx needs for transmission lines, these are not distribution lines, this is not electricity generation, this is just the transportation of electrons from renewable power sources to the end users. That capital need, post the geopolitical crisis, has increased from $100 billion to $600 billion. And Germany, because of its constitution, doesn't have the ability to subsidize this by just borrowing more. And for the first time in their history, they're contemplating private capital solutions. Now, moving on to artificial intelligence. Has anyone heard the phrase artificial intelligence in the last 18 months? It's everywhere! Yesterday, I picked up a hard copy of The Wall Street Journal at the hotel. It had 4 headlines on the front page. First, NVIDIA's antitrust probe because they got 80% market share of AI chips.
Second, Apple's need to integrate AI into its products to compete with Samsung. Third, xAI and Tesla's rev share model. And four, in case you missed it, Jannik Sinner won the U.S. Open in straight sets. So what does that mean? 75% of the headlines on one of the best newspaper in the world yesterday morning talked about AI, and there's a reason for that. AI is primed to be the most impactful general-purpose technology in modern history. There's three other similar technologies so impactful we've seen in the last three to four decades. It was computers, semiconductors, and the internet. AI has the potential to be the next. Total economic productivity improvement from artificial intelligence is expected to be $18 trillion. That's an enormous number. But for us to get there, more importantly, total capital required is $8 trillion.
This capital will be spent on data centers and renewable power, an area Natalie will touch on shortly. But there's a lot more to the AI value chain than just data centers and power. There's graphics processing units, which are four times more expensive than CPUs or central processing units, so these graphics processing units are much needed for AI. Artificial intelligence chips are much needed. 95% of these chips are produced in Taiwan today, and that production needs to be extrapolated across the world. One of these fabrication facilities costs up to $30 billion. And lastly, robotics. With the advancement of deep learning and combination of deep learning, with accelerated compute, we finally have the ability to get closer to autonomous transportation and robotics, and that is another huge area of growth for artificial intelligence.
But the punchline is, there's a lot of physical infrastructure required for us to get to that $18 trillion outcome, and that's a huge opportunity for Brookfield. As Connor explained earlier, we are the largest private data center owners in the world, one of the largest renewable power owners. And that is what makes infrastructure really exciting. So in summary, three things. First, we're really pleased with where we are today as a business, but there's a lot more to do. Tailwinds for infrastructure have never been stronger. The market opportunity has never been better. And because of this, we're really excited and really well positioned to continue to grow the business across products, geographies, and sectors. This concludes my presentation. Thank you for your time, and I'll hand the mic over to Natalie Adomait.
All right. Good morning. I'm excited to be here today to talk about one of the fastest growing areas in our business, and that's renewables and transition. Last year was a record year for the transition sector. We saw $1.8 trillion of capital flow into this space. It's a space that's seen strong historic growth over the last decade of roughly 25% year over year. But despite that strong historic growth, more capital is still needed to be invested. Estimates place this at about $5 trillion of capital that needs to flow into renewables and transition every single year from now until 2030, and that number actually goes up in the years after that. That means by the time we reach 2050, renewables and transition will be well over a $100 trillion investment opportunity.
Now, a lot of that capital is gonna flow into renewables, and that's because at the same time that we're seeing our existing thermal fleet taken offline and being replaced by cleaner sources of power, at that same time, electricity demand is expected to double. That means we're gonna have to add eight terawatts of renewable capacity. That's a tripling of our current installed capacity base. This creates a massive investment opportunity. And what I wanna do today is talk about three of the key tailwinds that we're really seeing that are driving the demand and the investment need in this sector. And then at the end, I'm gonna come back to talk both about the investor demand and three of the exciting investment opportunities that we're specifically spending time on in the space. But let's get right into it, and I'll start with the first key driver.
That is the increasing demand for net zero solutions that we're seeing come from both corporates and from governments. For corporates, the opportunity to invest in decarbonization is a business opportunity. We are seeing corporates invest in decarbonization because their end customers demand lower carbon and greener products, so moving into this space presents an opportunity to gain market share if they move faster. Within our business today, we're seeing that corporate demand flow through. To give you an example, in our renewables portfolio, 90% of the contracts that we executed last year were with corporates, not governments, and we're seeing those same conversations filter through also on the carbon capture side and the biofuel side as well. But it's for some of those newer decarbonization technologies where we're really seeing government step up.
Since twenty twenty-one, when governments around the world set aggressive net zero targets, well, those net zero targets have since been translated into attractive subsidy programs like the IRA in the U.S. and the Green Deal in Europe. And those subsidy programs help, help newer technologies become economically viable, but they also help existing viable technologies today, like renewables, build out more projects faster because more of those pipelines are actually able to meet the target hurdle returns that investors like us require. The second major driver is electrification, and specifically AI, and the increase in data centers. Cyrus already mentioned how AI is driving a step change in data consumption and in data center development. But on the power side, what this is doing is translating into an expected 15 times increase in the need for power from the technology sector alone through twenty thirty.
In the U.S., in some areas of the U.S. where we've already seen a lot of data center build-out, grid constraints are starting to be observed. And in some conversations that we've had with data center developers, they're telling us that they might not be able to achieve permits to build new data centers if they don't have the new incremental power supply identified and secured. This creates a great opportunity for someone like us, that has both the infrastructure capabilities and the power capabilities, to really partner with these data center developers to provide whole-scale solutions and help them build out their business. Of course, the last driver I have to mention is the competitive cost of renewables. Renewable power is the lowest cost source of bulk power, representing a roughly 50% decrease in cost from thermal sources.
As manufacturing capacity continues to scale in this space, we'll see costs continue to come down, further enhancing and establishing the position that renewables has today. All of these tailwinds that I just mentioned are long-term, they're structural in nature, and will create a massive opportunity for investment. At Brookfield, we are best positioned to be able to execute in this space. That's because if you've heard as you've heard a few times already today, we have the largest transition platform globally, with over a $100 billion of AUM, 34 GW of operational capacity, and a 200 GW pipeline. Our portfolio is diversified both geographically and across all core renewable technologies. It's really our 100- year history of being owner-operators that leaves us better placed than our peers to drive value through our active asset management and operational approach.
In addition to over 100 investment employees, we have over 5,000 operating employees in our business, covering everything from grid management to procurement to contracting and development. Having that internal skill set has never been more important than it is today. Because in transition, you cannot just write a check to become the leader, you have to build it. That's why Brookfield's approach of maintaining lean, centralized teams to work with our local development platforms leaves us best placed to be able to allocate capital to where we see the best risk-adjusted returns around the world, and never compromising on our disciplined approach to investment. Now, switching to talk about three of the key investment opportunities that we're spending the most time on in our business today.
The first one I want to talk about actually comes from one of the drivers I mentioned just a few moments ago, and that's corporate-backed renewables. Perhaps the best way to talk about how that demand has flown through into investment opportunity is to highlight a deal we announced earlier this year. In June, we signed an agreement with Microsoft to deliver for them 10.5 GW of renewable capacity through 2030. For us, we've secured a triple-A rated PPA counterpart who's committed to execute with us at market prices. We will be able to accelerate our project pipelines, and furthermore, expand our investment opportunities, knowing that we have the conviction and the commitment of this partner behind us. So more capital out the door faster, at lower risk, and all without compromising our target hurdle returns. This is a great example of our platform in action.
Microsoft chose us because we are a credible and an experienced developer who has, time and time again, worked with them and delivered projects on our committed timelines, and what's more, our global platform and our access to capital mean that we can be a partner to them in accomplishing their renewable objectives, not just in one region, but across the globe. The second investment opportunity we're spending a lot of time on is batteries, and let me start with the conclusion. We think this sector alone will represent a $3 trillion investment opportunity. The commercial case for this technology is quite simple. Costs, as the costs of the technology have come down, the revenue arbitrage opportunity and the commercial need for these assets has really been increasing, and that's ultimately being driven by the increasing proliferation of renewables on the grid.
At Brookfield, we've been making a number of investments into this sector to further establish ourselves as a leader in the space. One deal, which we announced earlier this year, is an investment into Neoen, a leading global battery storage developer. With that acquisition, we took our already very significant portfolio in batteries to two gigawatts of operating and under construction capacity, and with that business and our broader pipelines, we see line of sight to add over eight gigawatts of capacity over the next five years. The final investment theme that I wanna talk about is sustainable solutions, and these are really the other low-carbon solutions, which are required to be scaled as they become proven technologies. An example of one of these would be sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.
In fact, just this morning, we announced our first investment into the SAF space with a commitment to spend to invest over $1 billion over the coming years. Our first operational facility will be in Texas, and once complete, will sell its output to American Airlines and another airline that we'll announce soon. We're very excited about this space. We think SAF alone could represent a $50 billion market opportunity through 2030. And SAF is just one of the many technologies that we are spending time on in Brookfield. We also are looking at hydrogen, carbon capture, recycling solutions, to name a few, and today, across our business, have a pipeline of over $20 billion of different opportunities at varying stages that we're evaluating. Now, let me switch from the investment opportunities to the investor demand really quickly.
As a reminder, we launched our first private fund, BGTF, in 2022 at $15 billion. This was a record-setting, first-time fund for our franchise, and with the launch of that fund, established us as a leader in the impact space. We didn't stop there. Over the last four years, we have expanded our AUM within our funds to over $40 billion through four different funds. That's through the launch of the second opportunistic fund, our Catalytic Transition Fund, and our Asia Renewable Fund. And because each of these funds and each of these products has been tailored to meet that sweet spot between investor demand, investment opportunity, and our unique skill set, we've been able to bring in 45 new LP relationships to the franchise through each of these different fund launches. And we don't see that investor demand slowing.
In fact, we expect that the capital raised and the capital under management within the renewables and transition business to only continue to grow. And so we'll look to continue to bring additional funds to market over the coming years, both within our existing fund series as well as in new products. In conclusion, the market investment opportunity in renewables and transition is massive, and the investor demand is there and growing, and as the undisputed leader in the transition space, we will be the best positioned to capitalize on this opportunity. Thank you. I'll pass it over to Brian to talk about real estate.
Thank you, Natalie. Good afternoon. I'm gonna spend the next few minutes talking about our global real estate business. I'll tell you about how we see the market currently, which is clearly evolving. I'll touch on our track record, competitive advantages and some of our recent activity, highlight a few of the themes and sectors where we're focused, and then briefly touch on our recent fundraising. But I'll start with our core principle and conviction that high-quality assets can weather market cycles and deliver long-term value. We've seen this play out over many decades and many cycles, and we continue to believe in it today. Where are we today in the real estate cycle? And I'd say it's a pretty unique moment.
We certainly see a lot of capital stress, given the high interest rate environment over the last couple of years, and many owners which are over-leveraged and undercapitalized. However, the macro picture's been, surprisingly resilient, and GDP has not contracted. Therefore, demand has remained pretty healthy for real estate, and importantly, we're seeing very low levels of supply. Certainly, over the last two years, there's been very little new construction, but really going back to the pandemic over the last 4 years or 5 years, so it's very much in balance, producing strong fundamentals, yet stressed owners, and that's a pretty unique point in the cycle, which is quite different. The last 2 years, we all know have been volatile, they've been uncertain.
We've had many headwinds in the real estate sector with high inflation, high rates, uncertainty, persistent fears around recession, and that's really essentially froze the transaction market for a good part of the last two years. But in our view, that's in the rearview mirror, and we believe we're already operating in the next phase of the cycle in real estate. Inflation's come down to within target range or thereabouts. Central banks have commenced the rate-cutting cycle. Debt markets are open for good credit, strong borrowers, such as ourselves. The persistent fears of recession have yet to materialize, and while economies are slowing, there's still positive growth in most places. Therefore, cap rates are stabilizing, and activity is picking back up.
But the hangover is still there from higher rates and capital stress, and we're seeing it play out in a few different outlets where we're most active. The wall of maturities that's occurring over a three-year period, nearly 3 trillion of maturing debt in the U.S. and Europe alone. That's creating opportunities, whether it's distressed loans and non-performing loans from creditors, whether it's forced sellers because they can't refinance their debt at par, or opportunities for us to provide structured capital to mitigate the gap in financing. Private funds. In the U.S. alone, we've seen over 50 billion of open-end fund redemptions, forcing owners to sell assets, oftentimes their highest quality and most liquid assets, and they're looking to us as a trusted partner, where we've acquired a number of assets.
Closed-end funds, which are reaching the end of their fund life. In public real estate companies, which have rebounded broadly over the last several quarters, but there's still many examples of public companies that have challenged or broken capital structures with an inability to access public debt and equity markets, and that's producing M&A opportunities. But at Brookfield, we acquire, we operate, we sell throughout the cycle, and we've been doing it for a long time. An example of this is our U.S. multifamily business, where we've been active for the last 25 years. Several years ago, we saw an insatiable demand from investors to acquire multifamily assets in the U.S.
We took that opportunity to sell out of most of our portfolios and our closed-end funds, with over $10 billion of sales during that period, at average cap rates of 3.7% in place. Fast-forward to today, many of the same buyers three years ago are now forced to sell, and year to date, we've acquired or have under offer $3.7 billion of multifamily assets at an average cap rate almost 200 basis points higher in place, and importantly, value-add opportunities through our active asset management and our operating platforms to take our stabilized cap rates north of 7%. As I said, we've been doing this for a very long time. We're very proud of our track record.
Over the last 20 years in our opportunistic strategies, we've invested $44 billion of equity and have current returns of 21%, 17% net to our investors. This is ahead of our target returns. We expect this to continue. How do we drive value? It's really the competitive advantages Anuj mentioned earlier. At over $270 billion of assets under management, we're one of the largest owner-operators of real estate in the world. The access to capital we have is unparalleled. Our strategies are among the largest of their kind. In our private funds, we have some of the largest clients in the world who wanna co-invest alongside of us, and we have access to the corporation balance sheet. We can simply do things that others can't.
The relationships we have with our investment professionals in thirty countries around the world that are sourcing opportunities each and every day, majority of which are bilateral, off-market , and direct. Nearly 30,000 operating employees that feed us real-time information to make our investment decisions and then execute our value add business plans in the Brookfield ecosystem. You just heard about the explosive growth of AI being led by the most valuable companies in the world. Those same companies are tenants in our premier office buildings around the world. They're in our warehouses, they're in our retail assets, and they're in our science parks. That really creates a differentiated position as their partner of choice. Over the last twelve months, we've been active. We've steadily seen our activity pick up. We've acquired $6 billion of assets in over 100 transactions.
Two examples here of a multifamily portfolio in the U.S. and a logistics portfolio in the U.S., both of which were north of $1 billion in asset value. We believe we acquired these at roughly 30% discount to their peak valuation, and importantly, we're using our operating platforms to drive additional value through active asset management. We're also taking the opportunity to sell assets that are stabilized and core, as investor demand comes back, for that stable income. We've sold $3.7 billion in the last twelve months. Two examples here: ICD Brookfield Place in Dubai, widely regarded as the best office building in the Gulf region. We sold a 50% interest earlier this year at a record-breaking price in that market.
A building in central Paris that we sold at the end of last year for EUR 1 billion to a strategic investor, primarily a retail and mixed-use asset, which we had only owned for a year and a half and generated excellent returns for our fund. We expect our monetizations to steadily ramp up through the rest of this year as our business plans complete from prior investments. We really start with the themes, many of which you've just heard about. They play out in real estate as well. We're not macro top-down investors. We're still using our teams to source the opportunities for stressed, undervalued, mispriced, and undermanaged investments. We really look at these themes to see where is demand going. Demographics is an important one. We follow each of the age cohorts and where they're driving demand.
Gen Z, the focus really on student housing, on urban co-living, and on flexible and affordable hospitality. Millennials in the family formation years that are looking for single-family rental, multifamily rental, family leisure, affordable housing, and the aging baby boomers that are living longer, they need senior housing, they need healthcare, increasing spend on R&D, driving life science demand, and the accumulated wealth, which is really driving luxury hospitality. When it comes to digitalization and decarbonization, we see this transforming both demand and operations for logistics, with the growth of e-commerce and mobile commerce in many markets which still are under-penetrated, increasing the need for logistics assets, technologies improving the operations of hotels, and frankly, people blending business and leisure travel more, driving demand for extended stay.
Decarbonization, we think, is going to be an increasingly important part of our strategy, where we see many owners who don't have the capital or the expertise to improve their assets to decarbonize their footprint. Given our relationship with our renewable power business, we can acquire these assets to access renewable power and decarbonize in brown-to-green transition strategies. Lastly, deglobalization. You just heard about the onshoring of manufacturing. We're seeing that benefit the logistics sector as well, with decentralized supply chains and a growth in warehousing demand, as well as science and innovation, as governments around the world look to procure their own biotech, biomanufacturing, and really growth in the innovation economy and the knowledge-based sector, with tremendous support growing the need for life science assets. Overall, our real estate business is exceptionally well positioned for growth.
The recent fundraising we've done supports that as we see our clients and partners come back into the market, recognizing this is the cycle to be investing in and the right point in the cycle. So far to date, we've raised $9 billion for our fifth flagship fund, with a solid book build and momentum going into the final stages of closing that fund, having only started the first one twelve years ago. We've completed $3.4 billion for our Real Estate Solutions business, which is a new strategy that didn't exist a few years ago, and we've raised $3.6 billion from our clients and partners in separately managed accounts and co-investments, as we see huge demand for specific asset classes and specific geographies around the world.
So if I can leave you with one thought about the real estate sector, it's an incredibly unique time to be investing in it, given where we are. We're very excited about it. We've got the experience, we've got the expertise, the track record, and the capital to continue to gain market share in this sector, and continue our success. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Anuj on private equity.
So as Bruce spoke about earlier, we launched our private equity strategy about 25 years ago when we actually formed our asset manager with our first-time fund. And in that time, we've delivered an incredible, exceptional returns and built an incredible track record. This could literally be my only slide I show today, and I think it would be a presentation well spent. It is a 27% gross IRR over 25 years, returning almost $40 billion of capital to our LPs. And, I'm proud to say that for the private equity group, this is the highest returning and the best track record in the entire private equity industry. We, we've been able to do this, at a time when private equity has traditionally outperformed most private asset classes, including public markets, often with less volatility.
But I would say that private equity has benefited from 15 years of low interest rates, easing inflation, and the industry has probably been able to be a little bit lazy, generating most of its returns from revenue growth and multiple expansion, not really from margin expansion as an industry. That's all changing, and we think the future is going to be very, very different. In a normal rate environment and a normal inflation environment, we're going to have to go from roll-of-the-dice private equity to roll-up-your-sleeves private equity, where you actually generate returns by making your businesses better. This suits us very well because for 25 years, we have been doing exactly the same thing. We've been buying businesses for great value, improving their net margins and free cash flow margins, and generating exceptional returns, as you saw, for our partners.
By being focused on value and these operational capabilities, we've developed a playbook that is repeatable and applies to every business we own across the world, in every sector we invest in across the world, and we really just do a few things. We focus first on operational excellence. Think of this as the cost line in your P&L, where we focus on organizational design, on procurement, on supply chain, on really just running the business in a more efficient manner. We also focus on commercial execution. Think of that as your top-line revenue, growing that organically through pricing actions, renegotiating contract terms, bringing new products to market, cross-selling initiatives.
In addition, there's strategic positioning, which is prioritizing the business lines within a business that are often the most profitable and ensuring that you position that business for the future so that you can generate better returns through an ultimate exit. The last component is digitalization. This deserves a component on its own. As you've heard, Cyrus speak about earlier, AI, and not only AI, but also automation, is going to bring substantial efficiency and productivity gains to all the businesses that we own and invest in. Another key pillar of our strategy is not only operating the business better, which we've done very well for 25 years, it's also identifying great businesses. Now, I know that sounds a bit cliché.
No one would come up here and say, "We like to buy bad businesses." We buy good businesses, but it's not just what we buy, it's how do we define a good business? We define a good business, something that's really core to us, as things that form the backbone of the global economy, provide mission-critical and essential products and services, and as a result, are often market leaders that can dictate pricing and generate sustainable cash flow over the long term. Infrastructure-like characteristics in services or industrials is what we really focus on. I spoke earlier as well about the Brookfield economy or the whole Brookfield ecosystem, and we are huge beneficiaries of that $1 trillion of AUM and 300 companies around the world as private equity.
Those, differentiated insights and knowledge that I touched on help us to make decisions better in situations where we're looking at an investment, where we can sometimes have a unique point of view. So often, there'll be a situation where there's a business that's actually a great business. It's perhaps in an unloved sector, or it's misunderstood. We can take a contrarian approach, as we did with Westinghouse. Sometimes there are businesses that are very... in a very complicated holding structure, and you have to execute quite a unique carve-out, like we did with Clarios. And other times, you need to have the flexibility to play up and down the capital stack in order to partner and be a partner of choice to the original founder of a business, like we did with GEMS Education more recently.
A great example of this is Clarios, which is the leading global manufacturer of advanced automotive batteries for the world, with about one-third market share. One-third of every car on the road today has a Clarios battery, but actually, 50% of all the newer AGM or advanced glass mat batteries that are used in more complicated vehicles or electric vehicles have a Clarios battery. This business is an incredible business. It generates. It always generated substantial cash flow, but it was probably misunderstood within the conglomerate it was held, and we were able to execute a complicated carve-out. We were then able to implement a whole bunch of operational improvements, focusing on consolidating our manufacturing and recycling footprint and improving and optimizing our logistics to drive significant EBITDA and free cash flow generation, as you can see here.
We've been able to position the business now as quite a long-term cash generator that is a real market leader and a price setter, which sets us up great for a near-term monetization event. Now, if we step back, what we've built in private equity, this ability to source amazing opportunities, use the overall Brookfield ecosystem to underwrite opportunities that perhaps others couldn't, and use our operational capability to drive better returns. This platform, all the hard work that has gone into it over the past 25 years, has been really built out. It's 130 billion of AUM around the world, 190 investment professionals. We are already in every market that we want to operate in, and we already invest in every sector that we want to be in.
Through these established capabilities that we have, really, again, leaning on our operational capability, we've been able to develop a process that's repeatable, and we can keep doing this for the next 25 years and generate the same returns. But as Hadley touched on earlier, building this platform, doing this hard work, and creating our flagship strategy, allows us to have the foundation to launch new strategies and new streams of revenues for Brookfield Asset Management. As a result, we've been able to launch, very recently, a structured investments fund, providing hybrid capital solutions at all levels of the capital structure. If you think about it, if we can't buy a business, perhaps we can partner or finance the business.
We've been able to launch a financial infrastructure product focusing on, the financial backbone of the global economy, where we think there's a tremendous amount of investment required, and a regional fund in the Middle East that you've heard David talk about earlier, where we are truly the private equity leader in that market and, can bring specialized knowledge and specialized investment opportunities to our partners. Now, when you take all that together with the exceptional long-term track record that I outlined earlier, what it really means is we can scale dramatically in our flagship and in our new strategies, our fee-bearing capital. But the best part is, we can actually do this without necessarily needing any significant additional resource or cost, driving tremendous improvements to our margins and our fee-related earnings. Thank you.
And with that, I'll be turning it over shortly to Craig, who's going to speak about credit. Thank you.
Our credit business is large already today, $300 billion of assets under management. We've been investing in credit for multiple decades across all different economic cycles and macro environments. We've generated very strong risk-adjusted returns. Over time, as we've gained experience and gained scale, we've also broadened our investment capabilities. One of the ways that we've been growing is somewhat unique in that we've been partnering with established asset managers, providing us with incredible origination and incredible collaboration in very specific areas. What we're delivering to our investors is access to alternative credit across different types of investment, performing credit, opportunistic, structured products, asset-backed financing.
Credit's attractive because it's a great portfolio diversifier. It gives our clients the opportunity to access investment opportunities that have really attractive risk-adjusted returns.
In terms of making us stand apart, I think that first of all, our unexcelled experience and longevity. I mean, nobody's been doing this longer. We've seen many ups and downs, and I think I would say have really perfected our approach to how to produce success.
There are three things that illustrate Brookfield's capability in private credit. The first is the depth and experience of our private credit team. The second is the way we've integrated with the equity teams. And the third is, given Brookfield's large presence on the global scale, our relationships with the banks, with all the financial institutions, and all the intermediaries that operate in the private credit space.
We believe our ability to leverage the Brookfield ecosystem differentiates us from our competition. Both the vast size of our credit business and the vast size of our real estate business allows us to use operational leverage to inform our investment decisions, and to pursue transactions where we may have a unique opportunity to leverage those resources.
We have the largest credit strategy in the world in the infrastructure and renewable sectors, and that gives us access to very large scale opportunities with more attractive risk returns, simply because few others can provide that scale. Our decades of experience in infrastructure investing, our access to our existing infrastructure and renewable and transition investing platforms, give us the capability of providing differentiated solutions to our clients that meet their needs.
In our series of real estate debt funds, we've invested across the capital stack, and we've invested across market cycles, and we utilize our lessons learned to inform how we structure and identify investments for our portfolios. We focus on diversification, and we focus on being adaptable, so that as market conditions change, or as the real estate environment changes, that we're prepared to shift our focus on where we feel like there's high conviction in the investments that we look to lend on.
Think about Brookfield's advantage. It really comes from our intimate operating knowledge of assets and markets, and specific assets within their micro markets. It gives us such a competitive edge to take risks on assets where we really know the market, whereas other lenders may shy away.
We developed a motto, which is that, "If we avoid the losers, the winners take care of themselves". Credit is one of the fastest-growing areas within Brookfield. We're in the early innings of what will be a multi-decade trend of alternative credit, and lenders such as ourselves providing credit in creative solutions to clients. All right. Great. Hello, welcome to our credit panel. We've... You've heard a lot about credit today, a little bit about our partner managers. Our job is to bring to life some of the trends that are happening in the market, what we're seeing, and really how that's combined to... I'd say, quietly, over the last many years, we've built one of the largest private credit managers in the market, and as you also heard earlier, we think we're just getting started. We've done that a few different ways.
One is organically, over 25+ years, in real estate, infrastructure, renewable power, lending. Naila and Christina, from our real estate and infrastructure businesses, are gonna be talking about those strategies. And you've also heard about this concept of partner managers. You've heard from a Brookfield perspective, the strategy, the logic, and the benefits to our clients, but you'll hear directly from Jared and Isaiah, from Oaktree and Castlelake, as two of our manager partners. So with that, let's get into it, and we'll start big picture. We know that the private credit market is large. We know that it's growing. Investors are putting more capital into this space because they like the returns, and borrowers like the attributes as well. So if those are the headlines, we'll get into the details with this group.
Jared, you've been at Oaktree for...
Over a decade, yeah.
Over a decade. You've been working under Bruce Karsh and Howard Marks. What's it like working... Maybe you'll start big picture with working for two legends in the-
The people that started it, yeah.
The people that started it all. Maybe start with that, and then also maybe pivot into what, what's Oaktree's perspective, and what are you seeing in the markets today?
Okay, well, to answer your first question, working for Bruce and Howard is inspiring. So Bruce and Howard really were the architects, or some of the architects, of the entire sub-investment credit Investment landscape for institutional investors. And as you heard Howard say in the video, you know, he's been doing this a long time, and he feels that Oaktree's perfected the art of of credit investing, private credit, as well as, you know, we do public credit at Oaktree as well. That's an inspirational bar to set for those of us who work at Oaktree to work for the people who sort of invented the game and are still at the top of the game as leaders in this field. And so Howard, and you mentioned Bruce Karsh as well, who is his co-founder and partner, have been doing this together for 35 years.
We've been in all parts of the credit market for that entire span, and I think our brand at Oaktree is synonymous with how people think about credit and the asset class, and so being a part of that is a huge privilege, and it's also a huge inspiration.
And Oaktree's has a large, opportunistic, part of the business, but also a large and growing performing, segment of the business, which is where we're seeing a lot of growth. So maybe you can talk about, why investors are putting more capital into the space. What are the things that they're drawn to, as opposed to the liquid markets?
Sure. So if you just zoom out big picture and think about the state of private credit, and I'm talking mostly about corporate credit, I think some of the other panelists will talk about some more specialized areas within private credit. But this is a market which Oaktree's been in since 2001, which is a little unusual because the market really didn't take shape into its current form until post the global financial crisis, and since that time, the market's grown from about $300 billion in total assets to today, roughly about $1.5 trillion in total assets, so tremendous growth over a 15-year period, and by most expectations, that will double again by the end of this decade.
So about a $3 trillion asset class as we look forward through the sort of five-year plan, if you will, for Brookfield and for Oaktree. That's a lot of growth, and a lot of growth still to come, and I think what we believe is fueling that growth are some fundamentals. Number one, there's demand from issuers who are unable to satisfy their financing needs in the bank market. You mentioned the bank market, you know, has some regulatory hurdles. It's somewhat retrenched from the way the bank market used to operate in support of sub-investment grade issuers on the loan side. Number two, it's demand from private equity.
I can't remember if the last panel hit on this particular statistic, but in general, private equity is sitting on more dry powder today than at any point in history, and a lot of that capital, as it gets put to work, will be relying on private credit to help facilitate transactions. And then last but not least, it's demand from clients, clients of ours on the credit side, who see private credit as an opportunity to invest in the top of the balance sheet in high-quality businesses and earn a premium return over what's available in the syndicated markets, and usually, also do it with better lender protections. So we're seeing demand across the board, and so I think we're quite confident that that growth is going to materialize.
Great. Christina, infrastructure, we heard the word ecosystem a lot earlier in the day today. But maybe you can just describe a little bit what we're seeing in the infrastructure lending space and how that fits into the broader Brookfield infrastructure business.
Yeah, I mean, the infrastructure and renewable private credit market has just grown tremendously over the last 10 years. Yet what's really interesting, I think, about infrastructure private credit is that it's a new and growing asset class. So when we started our infrastructure and renewable private credit business back in 2015, it really came off the backs of, I think, similar themes, Jared, that we were seeing and will likely, I think, hear about on this panel, is that it was a pullback and market dislocation in the bank markets. So there's also tighter capital requirements as well as regulatory changes that pulled back traditional bank lending, particularly in project finance.
That created a significant gap in the market where we saw a really interesting opportunity set to step in and provide capital to meet the needs of a growing sector. Since then, the expansion has just been really tremendous, and we've been able to really step and provide flexible and longer-term capital, which is really valuable. As we think about making large-scale investments and initiatives within digitalization, decarbonization, and de-globalization, private credit will play just such a critical role in this expansion. I think we heard the statistic earlier that it is $94 trillion of a financing need just over the next two decades. It's pretty clear to me that infrastructure and renewable private credit will play a very significant role in that growth.
Naila, on the real estate side, I think some of the same trends are present, but Brian also went through some statistics and sort of a state of the market, which included some really compelling opportunities on the equity side, but also on the debt side.
Absolutely. I mean, Brookfield's been investing in real estate debt for over 20 years, and I personally have been in this business also for over 20 years. The macro backdrop for what we're seeing in terms of opportunities for real estate credit is really compelling, and we do think this is really gonna drive growth for Brookfield's real estate private credit business. The commercial real estate lending market's $6 trillion, and the banks and the theme that we're talking about in terms of bank retrenchment, we're seeing it live and in action today. Banks historically have about 50% of commercial real estate lending. In the first half of 2024, they're down 26% year over year, and alternative lenders are up 39%.
So this growth is real, and we're seeing it daily, and as we grow our buckets of capital within Brookfield's real estate credit business, our funds, our insurance clients are definitely gonna benefit from that growth.
And in some cases, it's the banks who are moving back, but in other cases, we're simply partnering with banks.
Absolutely
In order to provide capital.
Yes, I mean, we have over 300 capital markets and financial partners that we not only look to, to partner with, you know, in terms of doing transactions alongside of them, but now with this bank retrenchment, we're all getting more creative, and I think that is also gonna benefit us as well. So, again, going back to some of the things that Brian spoke about in his presentation, both a combination of, you know, the values resetting in real estate will present us an opportunity to invest up and down the capital stack at a more insulated basis. Then also that gap capital, he showed kind of those wall of maturities, and Jared also mentioned just the private equity capital that's sitting on the sidelines. We're gonna have a really great opportunity to put capital to work.
Isaiah, Castlelake.
Yeah.
Welcome to the Brookfield.
Great to be here. Thank you.
... family to the credit business. In fact, the transaction hasn't quite closed, still another six days-
Six days
I think, to go. But nonetheless, welcome to the stage and to Brookfield. Maybe you can describe a little bit what is Castlelake?
Sure.
Across your $25 billion of assets under management, what are the investment strategies? But then it'd be interesting to hear what you and your teams are seeing across asset-backed financing on the equipment side, and aviation, and financial.
Yeah, absolutely. So Castlelake, we are a pure-play, asset-based investor and private credit lender. We've been in the market since 2005, so we actually are one of the oldest brands within this dedicated market. And we cover the major food groups within the securitized asset-based opportunities, so aviation and equipment assets, as was mentioned, consumer finance, small business finance, mortgage finance. In terms of the opportunities we see today, I think it is thematically very similar to what my fellow panelists have talked about, but just simply newer. When we look at what's going on with Basel III, Basel IV, the new rules from the FDIC and the OCC in terms of bank capital requirements, that is driving banks away from doing their core business of lending capital in the way that they at least used to.
And so the asset classes that I mentioned are particularly hurt here in the States and in the European banking markets, and providing an enormous opportunity and vacuum of capital, where private capital is starting to form. I think unlike some of the other asset classes, being so new, penetration is really at its early stages. So we see an addressable universe of about $7 trillion of markets that we think is interesting, probably 4% penetration today from private capital solutions.
And let's stay on that theme. We know that there's capital coming into the credit space, private credit space. In the current environment, spreads have come in. Inflation is nicely coming down, which means base rates are coming down as well. Jared, Oaktree has invested across many cycles. Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh, really the philosophy at Oaktree is very focused on risk management. Describe a little bit at Oaktree, just the current environment and how you're thinking about managing capital for investors, but at the same time, growing and deploying capital because there are tremendous opportunities.
Yeah. I'm smiling because you mentioned the market cycle, and Howard, of course, literally wrote a book on the market cycle and mastering the market cycle, and so we feel like we're fairly well-equipped to navigate through whatever moment in the cycle we happen to be in. Howard mentioned one of his mottos, he graciously attributed to the firm, but it's really Howard's saying about avoiding the losers. He has another one, which is that, we don't know where we're going, but we ought to know where we are. We don't keep economists on staff at Oaktree. We're sort of famous for disavowing things like market timing or having predictions that are informed by economist forecasts. But we do spend a lot of time thinking about where we are in the current moment.
I think that's served us well. You know, in moments of dislocation, our opportunistic side has been foot forward. Moments recently, like in the beginning of COVID, when there was big dislocation, were very prolific for us on the opportunistic side. I think the way we would describe the market right now is, yes, base rates appear to be coming down. We'll learn more about that later this month. Yes, spreads appear to be tightening, but big picture, if you look at private credit right now, and you think about maybe an archetypal issuer of private credit, you're probably looking at 500 basis points over SOFR.
If you put a portfolio together of loans like that, you're probably looking at a 9%-10% unlevered return, maybe with fund leverage net of fees, that's probably a 12%-13% type portfolio. On a historic basis, that's quite attractive for first lien credit. If you think about the 35-year history under which Howard and Bruce have been investing, high yield has returned 7.5%. If you think about the 15 years where private equity has gone through this massive expansion, for most of that, most of those vintages, private credit was probably offering 5%-7% versus where we're at today. So I think there's still very good opportunities, where, as like I said earlier, we're seeing a lot of demand.
I would maybe just put one word of caution out there, which is this growth has happened basically unimpeded.
Mm.
for 15 years, and if we double again, as people are predicting, over the next five years, that would be, you know, growth on a historic basis without a credit event or a credit cycle, to come back to that word. And I think at Oaktree we feel like we also need to be prepared for some sort of event. You know, we're not predicting it, but we wanna... You know, it's another Howard expression, is, "We can't predict, but we can prepare." You can see we're full of expressions from Howard at Oaktree. And we wanna build portfolios that are prepared. So on the private credit side, what does that mean? I think that means looking for companies that will perform well and be defensive if there is a recession.
I think it means documentation, trying to document credit agreements in ways that have lender-friendly protections, and it means diversification, so building portfolios that will be resilient from diversification. It also means having opportunistic capital as well, so we're prepared to deploy into that environment.
Right. Yeah, I think that's helpful, and I... Within Brookfield, we often talk about the ecosystem and playing to our strengths, real estate and infrastructure and renewables being some of them. What does that mean in the real estate market today? Again, I like one of Brad's pages earlier that showed we're sort of turning the page on where we are in this part of the real estate cycle, but where are the opportunities but also some of the risks that we're thinking about today?
Yeah. Look, I guess I'm not good at taglines, but I'd say maybe being creative and being flexible.
They're not my taglines.
Again, I think one of the things we do well at Brookfield is we're creative and we're flexible, but we also understand what our advantages are. And so, you know, in this market environment, particularly in commercial real estate, where there's a lot of capital chasing transactions, it's very important that we leverage our operational expertise and our access to large-scale capital to identify opportunities that uniquely position us to limit the competition and, you know, seek transactions where we can get outsized returns. I think we do that pretty well.
There are a few examples in our that we're even working on now, where our ability to step up to speak for a billion-dollar transaction, that large access to capital, both in our funds and our insurance clients and our partners, that we can collaborate to do transactions with. And we're working on another deal now that I think is a perfect example of utilizing the Brookfield ecosystem, where we're currently close to signing up a new transaction. It's $500 million, science and innovation, and we are because we own a company who has great operational expertise in this area, we're able to leverage those boots on the ground and the years of experience they have building and operating those businesses in order to help inform not only how we identify those opportunities, but also how we structure them.
And I think better structuring is something that, you know, we get the benefit of because we have this operational expertise. So I think it's important that we focus on our operational advantages and our access to large-scale capital to find the unique opportunities that get us better returns.
Yeah, and Christina, on the infrastructure side, I know that's true as well.
Yeah, I mean, and I echo, I think, everything that's been said by my fellow panelists, but Naila, like, that type of collaboration that you're talking about is built into our underwriting process. We are just experts in, we have such a deep history of asset expertise, but owning and operating, and we're able to really use that as an advantage as lenders. So especially when we're thinking about technical due diligence, but really developing a view in terms of asset value, it's just critical to be able to really work with our colleagues in terms of thinking about what that is.
Our underwriting process is really focused on loan-to-value, and it makes us very distinct and very powerful, especially as we're leaning into credits, leaning into businesses, and able to really develop a view in terms of what that value is.
I'll shift gears here a little bit. We've heard about the partnership model earlier today, and how that's really turbocharged our credit business, our deployment, and really the growth that we're able to offer to our clients. So I wanna hear about it from the Oaktree and Castle Lake perspective, as two of our partners. Jared, we're five years into the partnership now with Oaktree. It's been a tremendous success by all measures. But describe a little bit about what it has been like from the inside of Oaktree as this partnership, we're now five years into it.
I'm relieved that you are describing it as a tremendous success. So that feels good from the Oaktree side. I'm sure Isaiah is on the edge of his seat, wanting to hear how we feel about it on the Oaktree side. You know, I will go back to what I was listening to Hadley's remarks earlier, and she talked about the criteria for a successful partnership. She mentioned she wants partners that would be Brookfield wants partners that would be additive, scalable, be aligned with Brookfield, and have good cultural fit. Those were all, you know, the exact same things that Bruce and Howard were thinking about in terms of forming a partnership, were they to form a partnership for the firm they founded.
And I think we would reciprocate and say all of those things have been. You know, we felt like we were additive. I think you're demonstrating that we have been. We were hoping that Brookfield would provide us with resources, which you have, capital and otherwise. And maybe as icing on the cake, we wanted to be plugged into that ecosystem that Naila and Christina have talked about. And I can say personally that I engage in calls with the representatives of Brookfield's big pillars in areas like real estate, in areas like infrastructure and energy transition, where Brookfield is the market leader on the equity side.
a nd as a credit investor, we get access to the thought leadership from Brookfield, which has been hugely, value additive. Plus, I learned how to wear a blue tie, with a white shirt. We'll get Isaiah geared up.
I'll mark it up.
He'll get there.
Yeah.
Six days.
Yeah, six days.
We'll take you shopping here at Brookfield Place.
And, Isaiah, given that the transaction between Brookfield and Castlelake is about to close-
Yep
I'll ask you a slightly different question. If Castle Lake could have partnered with any number of different firms, we're thrilled that you're gonna be part of the Brookfield family. Give us a little bit of insight into really two questions. One is, why did Castle Lake management team feel like something needed to be done?
Yep.
Secondly, just the thought process with Brookfield going forward.
Yeah, absolutely. As was mentioned, I think that within the asset-based markets, we are seeing a tremendous momentum change. The analogy I like to use is, we feel like we are the dog who caught the bus, but the bus is moving at 40 miles an hour. We quickly came to the realization that if we were gonna ride this wave of quickly scaling into this market, even though we've been doing it for 20 years, we needed to step into a different league. We needed a partner who was gonna open doors and provide multiple different types of capital, and so the time was now. As it relates to Brookfield specifically, there's really three things that I look to. The first is opening doors to the LP community.
Brookfield obviously has one of the deepest penetration with the 50 largest allocators in the world. We believe right now that this is a market that is going to scale and actually could become one of the main ways to bring stability to the non-bank lending market, and so the asset-based markets need that type of leadership, and I think Brookfield brings that door opening with the LP community. The second is insurance capital. With BNRE, insurance is particularly well-suited to finance the asset-based markets. If you look at the securitization technology, both private and public, insurance capital makes up the vast preponderance of the investment grade-rated stack, even down into the upper echelons of the high-yield market.
And so, we knew that actually having private market solutions with BNRE was going to drive ultimate success for Castlelake in some of the sub-asset classes that we've not been able to compete, not having insurance solutions historically. And then finally, it is the ecosystem. At Castlelake, we view ourselves as having our own mini ecosystem, and so being able to draw on those resources and find maximum value very much fits culturally with who we are.
I think we have been experiencing firsthand the benefits of the ecosystem and the collaboration, but also how insurance capital is valuable, and it drives growth and earnings, but it also can be very strategic-
Yeah
I n helping us to grow the business, and really has opened up a whole new area of growth for us in insurance solutions that I think we're just scratching the surface of today.
Absolutely.
Why don't we move to a fun one to end on? We talked about partner managers. One of our other partners is a company called Primary Wave, which is a music royalty business. They control 75,000 songs. Some amazing artists generate very stable cash flows over decades that are generally uncorrelated to the economic cycle. But then the Primary Wave team works to grow that revenue through getting movies made, commercials, social media, and a whole variety of areas to generate that growth. It's fun to scroll through and see the artists, certainly some recognizable names. So to end, the final question, I'm gonna put each of you on the spot a little bit, of: Who is your favorite Primary Wave artist, and why?
Wow! Wow.
You've got a lot to choose from.
All right, I'll say this: I can originate loans, but I cannot sing.
Okay.
However, I love karaoke, and I love singing Whitney Houston during karaoke.
Okay.
I'm gonna go with Whitney.
Whitney Houston, perfect.
The seating order really matters now, I realize, on panels. I am also a Whitney fan, but I love karaoke, Naila. But I'm gonna have to go with the artist where I can sing almost every word to every song, Boyz II Men.
Boyz II Men, solid. I'm looking forward to hearing Christina sing Boyz II Men. It sounds like we're probably all had our formative years around the same time, but I'll go a different direction, more to the alternative and indie rock scene of the same generation. I saw The Counting Crows flash by, so I'll go with The Counting Crows.
Last word? Minnesota-based firm, you have to say Prince. Prince, good.
And purple tie.
There you go. Good. Excellent. Okay, we'll end on that note. This concludes the credit discussion, and hopefully we've brought to life a little bit what we mean when we say we have a large-scale platform, several highly specialized and scalable investment strategies and teams within each of them, and why there's a lot of capital that continues to come into the private credit space, which really is gonna be driving our growth. So thank you. We'll wrap it up and hand it over to Connor to do a summary.
Great, so, in terms of wrap-up, first and foremost, we want to thank everyone for taking the time today and your ongoing interest and support of Brookfield, and before we get to Q&A, just recap some of the key takeaways from today's presentations. First and foremost, we are very excited about our business plan and the growth trajectory of our business. We feel we have a business model that is well-suited to not only support, but enable that growth, again, accessing the largest, fastest-growing, deepest pools of capital being allocated to alternatives, and turning around and investing that at scale into the largest and fastest-growing investment themes on a global basis. The market opportunity is there to support our growth ambition. We have at least a 10-year runway, probably many decades beyond that, in terms of market support for our business.
Secondly, we have a long-standing track record of consistently delivering very attractive risk-adjusted returns on behalf of our LP partners. This is the bedrock of our business. We will never compromise on this, and this is something that is very difficult to develop and almost impossible to replicate. Third, as David Levi spoke about, it's great to talk about growth and investments and exciting new trends, but this is really all about our clients. How do we deepen our existing relationships? How do we expand our client set? And how do we increasingly access those new and growing buckets of capital that have a long runway in terms of incremental allocation to our key segments?
We have a long and consistent track record of broadening our product base to capture new market opportunities and, importantly, leverage our existing leadership, and that drives not only growth in our business, but operating leverage as we expand going forward, and lastly, it seems to come up in every presentation, every discussion, the Brookfield ecosystem. Our visibility over capital flows, the interactions between our portfolio companies, allows us to identify key investment trends and dynamics within a market well before others, ensuring that we are always on the front foot in making the most attractive investments in the largest themes that are growing around the world, so with that, we would like to thank everyone for coming today, and we certainly have some time for Q&A. I will remind everyone, please wait until a microphone comes to you, such that everyone can hear your question.
Connor, thank you very much for hosting the Investor Day for us today. My question was on the positive commentary on the investing backdrop in real estate. I'm wondering, does this apply to all segments, including office and retail? And also, we're getting ready to enter a period of Fed rate cuts. How beneficial will this be for real estate overall, or should we be more focused on the ten-year?
Now is the time for opportunistic investment in real estate. You know, there's this rhetoric about, you know, the tale of a small portion of the market that is continuing to work through some small leverage struggles. But the reality is, the operating fundamentals are improving very dramatically. As Brian said, "Demand is improving, but there's no supply." That's pretty simple to understand. And then, perhaps less visible, is the financing markets for real estate have completely unlocked in the last two to three quarters. They are functioning, they are increasingly liquid, and that is creating a market for opportunity. But it lends particularly to those like us, who have the experience to move quickly and take advantage of situations where perhaps others have less access to capital or haven't positioned their portfolios as well.
In terms of your question, does it apply to specific asset classes? We would say this is very, very broad-based, but in fact, some of the asset classes that have been the poster children of recent struggle are perhaps the ones that are creating the greatest opportunity today. 'Cause with that bounce back in fundamentals, they are coming off the lowest base, and that's creating a lot of attractive opportunities. We would say it's very broad-based.
Hey, good morning. Thanks. Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. I had a question around insurance. It's a huge driver of growth for you guys for the next five years. I think $25 billion, I think 15-ish or so, you said third party, so that kinda leaves $200 billion from kinda captive insurance. That implies quite considerable amount of, I guess, acquisitions. So kinda how do you think about capacity to do deals, and given the fact that Brookfield's still relatively new to the insurance space against some of the larger competitors, what gives you guys kinda the right to win in the insurance space?
Certainly. So, the Brookfield Corporation team is coming on next, and they'll highlight some of the growth initiatives in insurance. But it, it's really two things, and, and then I'll leave it to them. One, there's an incredible organic growth engine through the three different businesses they have acquired in recent years that's writing 15 billion -20 billion of annuities on a run-rate basis. That's about half that number right there. And then secondly, there's the opportunities to keep doing bulk transactions of reinsurance blocks. So those are the two big ones, and then obviously, there, there's always opportunistic M&A upside, as they have demonstrated pretty actively over the last couple of years.
Thank you, Connor. Over here. Cherilyn Radbourne with TD Cowen. This question asks you to brag to some extent, but I was just wondering if there's any way to sort of quantify the lead and the first mover advantage that you have in renewables transition and infrastructure, and just how strategically that, you know, how strategically important that is when we think about where capital is gonna flow over the next ten years?
Phew! There's a few important ways to dissect that, but I would perhaps break it into three. Start with renewables. One thing that's important to recognize is we've mentioned many times today that our asset management business is only 25 years old, but if you go back beyond the originations of our asset management business, back to when we were a corporate simply investing our own balance sheet, go back to the 1980s, we had a very concentrated portion of our portfolio in hydroelectric power at that time. People didn't even call it renewables back then. You know, we've had a dedicated team focused on renewables for 40 years, that is unmatched. Where does this show up in our business today? We'll come at it from two perspectives.
The team did a great job explaining just the scale and the significant capital requirements in these themes of decarbonization, deglobalization, digitalization, and infrastructure and renewables. Scale is a huge competitive advantage in that space, but scale oversimplifies it. It's not just scale of capital. It needs to be matched by scale of operating expertise. These are the most critical inputs to the largest and fastest-growing companies around the world. They don't want to go to the lowest-cost provider. They want to go to the person who delivers on time, who meets their needs, who understands the dynamics of the business. So I would say that experience and that scale goes beyond just scale of capital, and that's the real differentiator in our business, and I would say that's the one that's tougher for others to replicate quickly.
The third point I would highlight is, when it comes to our asset management business, and apologies for being redundant here, but it is so much easier to grow, expand, diversify, scale your business when you already have a leadership position. It's easier to do a geographically focused strategy. It's easier to do a products-focused strategy, focused on a key investment theme if you already have market-leading expertise and experience in investing through that, through your flagship business. And that is really, as Hadley mentioned, what is driving a lot of our growth over the next five years, and in particular, a lot of our margin, as being able to step out into other complementary strategies is very beneficial to our profitability. There's one over there and one over there.
Hi, Connor, Mario Saric from Scotiabank. Thanks for taking the question. Just on the 16% five-year CAGR for fee-bearing capital, you had a couple of slides showing it broken down by product offering, whether it's insurance growth, flagship funds, complementary funds. If we think about the 16% from a regional perspective, and just coming back to what you just discussed on the previous question, do you anticipate outsized growth from countries or regions where you already have a dominant competitive advantage in that market? Or is the outsized growth coming from becoming a top one or three player in markets where you aren't that today? If it's the latter, can you share potentially where you see the greatest growth opportunities?
It's a great question, and I'll give a somewhat boring answer, but it's because there's two offsetting dynamics. Today, around the world, 75%-80% of our business is in the largest, most developed countries and regions around the world: North America, Western Europe, OECD countries. We would expect that, that ratio, 75%-80%, largely to stay consistent. And what drives that is, yes, there is probably faster relative growth in some of the newer markets, but the reality is, is that is coming off a lower base with smaller check sizes. You can have slower growth in those large, established markets, and on an absolute basis, that is just simply much bigger dollars.
I would say our breakdown of being 75%-80% in the largest markets around the world, the OECD developed countries. We don't see ourselves straying away from that in any material way.
Great. Thank you. Mike Cyprys from Morgan Stanley. Just a question: as you think about the moat that you have around the business today, how do you think about growing and expanding that moat as you look out over the next five to 10 years?
Certainly. David had a slide in his presentation where he said, "We service 80% of the largest institutional investors around the world." And one thing that's important to recognize about our business is we've never sought to grow for the sake of growth. We sought to grow to better service our clients, and in doing so, we grew ourselves. And that's because the largest portion of our business is servicing the largest institutional investors around the world. Their pools of capital are growing very, very rapidly, and increasingly, there are fewer GPs that can meet their needs around scale, diversification of strategies, and the ability to, as David so properly put it, be a partner to them in growing their own business. So scale, undoubtedly, I know it's a simple answer, that continues to be the biggest moat.
We service the biggest institutional investors around the world. They need to make bigger allocations to this space. There are few people who can meet those needs. We've scaled with them for twenty years, we're gonna keep scaling with them for the next twenty.
Hi, Brett Reiss, Janney Montgomery Scott. Hi. On an earlier slide, the IRR on the renewables business was lower than your other business segments, and I'm wondering, with the increased volumes you're expecting, do you think margins are going to expand? And could that be a reason why Brookfield Renewable, you know, has been a laggard stock market performer this last year?
So there's a little bit of a sensitivity there when we blend our returns across a number of different products to provide a gross and net across an entire platform. The most important thing to recognize when we publish those returns is across every single one of our asset classes, real estate, infrastructure, renewables, private equity, credit, we have delivered returns at or above the target returns of the funds we are offering to our LP partners. And the reality of it is, within infrastructure and renewables, the risk profile that a lot of that capital is being invested at is materially lower than, let's say, our opportunistic private equity fund or our opportunistic real estate fund, and therefore, is expected to generate a lower return, but equally attractive on a risk-adjusted basis.
So, the fact that renewables and infrastructure are slightly lower than some of the other platforms, I would say is very much a function of the products that we are offering to the market and the risk profile, that we are investing in within those strategies. To your question about with all the demand for these products and capital in these, in these investment themes, is there an opportunity to see margins expand? Let's leave no doubt, yes. Right now, around the world, whether it's in infrastructure that Cyrus talked about or renewables that Natalie talked about, there is a supply-demand imbalance, where there is more demand for the product than there are ready-to-build projects. And anytime there is a supply-demand imbalance, it creates an opportunity to generate incrementally higher returns. We maybe have time for one more question.
I know we're standing between this and lunch. Any more questions from the audience? Seeing nothing. We'd like to thank everyone for their time and their interest and their support. Please enjoy lunch, and we'll be back with Brookfield Corporation after the break.