ASM 2016

Jun 17, 2016

Slides

Morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is now 10:30 and time to begin our annual and special meeting of shareholders of Brookfield Asset Management. My name is Frank McKenna, and as Chair of the Board, it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's meeting. On behalf of the Board management, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who is here today, including those who are joining us through webcast. I will now call the meeting to order and ask CST Trust Company by its representatives, Tony Tacania and Kay Harrison, to act as scrutineers. I will also record our Corporate Secretary, A. J. Silber, to act as Secretary of today's meeting. Now my pleasure to introduce the members of management on the stage who will be participating with me in today's meeting: Bruce Slat, our Chief Executive Officer and Brian Lawson, our Chief Financial Officer. As outlined in the management information circular, there are 5 items of business to be considered today. First, to receive the consolidated financial statements of the corporation for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2015 secondly, to elect directors who will serve until the next Annual General Meeting 3rd, to appoint the external auditor and authorize the directors to set their remuneration 4th, to consider an advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation and 5th, to consider resolution approving the adoption of a new management share option plan. In connection with the business of the meeting that we're going to deal with today, unless a shareholder or proxy holder demands a ballot, all voting will be conducted by a show of hands. In order to expedite the formal part of today's meeting, I've asked certain shareholders to move and second various resolutions. Although the procedure will assist in the handling of formal matters, it's not intended to discourage anyone from speaking in reference to any resolution after it has been proposed and seconded. And as always, there will be time reserved afterwards for question and answer. Advised that the notice calling this meeting and the management information circular were disseminated to voting shareholders in accordance with all applicable laws. I've asked the secretary to keep a proof of the notice and proof of mailing within the minutes of the meeting. The minutes of last year's meeting of shareholders held on May 6, 2015 are also available should any shareholder wish to review them. So based upon the scrutineers' preliminary report in attendance, secretaries confirm that there is a quorum present. I therefore declare that the meeting is properly constituted for the transaction of business for which it has been called. So turning to the first item of formal business, I'll now table the corporation's 2015 annual report to shareholders, which includes the Corporation's consolidated financial statements for the fiscal year ended December 31, together with the external auditors report. Copies of our annual report have been mailed to shareholders who have requested the report and are also available here today. The second item of business at our meeting today is to elect directors who will serve until our next annual meeting of shareholders. And before I introduce the nominees, I want to first note that we had one Director this past year, Lance Leitman, who decided to retire after 10 years on the Board. And I want to take this opportunity to thank Lance for his service on behalf of shareholders. He's a superb Director, and he was also the longtime Chair of our Management's Resources and Compensation Committee. It's now my pleasure to introduce the 16 Director nominees standing for election this year. To assist you in identifying our directors, their pictures will be shown on the screen as I read their names. The 8 proposed nominees for election by holders of the corporation's Class A Limited Voting shares are Elyse Allen, Angela Braulle, Marcel Coutu, Youssef Nazar, Signe Wab, Diana Taylor and myself. The 8 nominees for election by the holders of the corporation's Class B limited voting shares are Jeff Glidner, Jack Cockwell, Bruce Flatt, Robert Harding, David Carr, Phil Lind, Lord Gus O'Donnell and George Taylor. 15 of the proposed nominees were elected at our last annual meeting in May of 2015 and are standing for reelection today. We're also delighted to have Elyse Allen standing for election for the first time this year. As noted in your information circular, Elise is the President and the CEO of GE Canada and has been a magnificent addition to our Board. Information on all 16 director nominees is set out in our management information circular, which was posted on our website for shareholder review and available from the company upon request. The meeting is now declared open to receive nominations for the election of the proposed directors. Chair, I nominate for election as directors the 8 nominees for the Class A limited voting shareholders and the 8 nominees for the Class B limited voting shareholders named in the management information circular dated May 2, 2016. Thank you, Karleen. Mr. Sher, I second the motion. Thank you. Thank you, Rami. Are there any further nominations? Are there any further nominations? If not, I declare the nominations closed. As there are 16 directors to be elected and the same number of nominees, I now declare that those nominated have been duly elected as directors of the corporation. Ladies and gentlemen, many of our directors are with us here today and are wearing their nametags. I hope you'll have an opportunity to meet and talk with them after the meeting over some refreshments. The 3rd item of business today is the appointment of the corporation's external auditor and authorizing the directors to set their remuneration. As stated in the information circular, the Audit Committee has recommended to shareholders that Deloitte LLP be reappointed as the corporation's external auditor. Now in order for someone to move this resolution. Mr. Chair, I move that Deloitte LLP be appointed the external auditor of the corporation until the next annual meeting and that the directors be authorized to set their remuneration. Thank you, Rami. Mr. Chair, I second the motion. Thank you, Karli. The resolution has been moved and seconded. The motion is now before the meeting for discussion. Adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the votes cast at the meeting by holders of each, each of the Class A limited voting shares and the Class B limited voting shares voting as separate classes. Management has received proxies representing approximately 73% of the corporation's Class A Limited voting shares and 100% of the Class B. These proxies direct me to vote over 98% of the Class A limited voting shares and all of the Class B limited voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by a show of hands. All those in favor? Thank you. Opposed? Thank you. I declare the motion carried. The 4th item of business today is the approval of the advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation, which is described in the management information circular in greater detail. The corporation has put forth an advisory resolution at this meeting as part of its ongoing efforts to both meet its corporate governance objectives and responsibilities and also to ensure high level of shareholder engagement. Because this is an advisory vote, the results will not be binding upon the Board. However, the Board and Management Resources and Compensation Committee will most certainly take into account the results of the vote as appropriate when considering future compensation policies and decisions. The Board welcomes comments and questions on the corporation's executive compensation practices. Now in order for someone to move the motion. Mr. Chair, I move that the advisory resolution accepting the executive compensation described in the management information circular dated May 2, 2016 be approved. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I second the motion. Thank you, Rami. The resolution has been moved and seconded and the motion is now before the meeting for discussion. And as before, adoption of this motion requires a favorable vote of a majority of the Class A Limited Voting shares. Management has received proxies representing approximately 71% of the Class A Limited voting shares, and these proxies direct me to vote over 94% of the Class A Limited voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by a show of hands. All those in favor? Country minded? Thank you. I declare the motion carried. Now turning to the final item of formal business today. Shareholders are being asked to consider a resolution to approve the adoption of a new management share option plan. The corporation's use of stock options is an important component of its compensation arrangements. The Board believes that this practice achieves the greatest possible alignment between management and shareholder interest and assist in attracting and retaining qualified and motivated senior executives and employees. It's now in order for someone to move the resolution. Mr. Chair, I move that the resolution to approve the adoption of the new management share option plan as described in the management information circular dated May 2, 2016 be approved. Thank you, Rami. Mr. Chair, I second the motion. And thank you, Karli. The resolution has been moved and seconded. The motion is now before the meeting for discussion. Adoption of this motion requires the favorable vote of a majority of the Class A Limited Voting shares. Management has received proxies representing approximately 71% of the corporation's Class A Limited Voting shares, which proxies direct me to vote over 88% of the Class A Limited Voting shares in favor of the resolution. I will now call for the vote on the motion by show of hands. All those favor? And contrary minded, thank you. I declare the motion carried. Ladies and gentlemen, that completes the formal part of today's meeting, and we'll now move to our management presentation. Bruce Flatt and Brian Lawson will be presenting on behalf of the management team. At the end of the presentation, they'll be available to respond to any questions or comments that you might have. And please note that in responding to questions and talking about our new initiatives and our financial and operating performances, I'm required to tell you about forward looking statements. These statements are subject to known and unknown risks, and future results may differ materially. For further information on known risk factors, I would encourage you to review the Business Environment and Risk section of management's discussion and analysis in our annual report. And ladies and gentlemen, I would now present to you our management. Bruce, please. Good morning and thank you. Thanks, Frank, and thanks everyone for coming today. As everyone knows here over the past 25 years, what we've done in the business is turned ourselves into one of the leading global managers of real assets around the world. And the business, as most of you know, is very simple. And we try to focus on the competitive advantages that we have to enable us to put money to work for the shareholders and for our clients in a most effective way to earn maximized returns without taking too much risk. And but there's really 5 things that we do. Firstly, we source equity from our clients and from our balance sheet. We put it into large scale transactions and use our access to capital to be able to do those type of things. We use our global reach to identify assets and try to buy them on a value basis. We finance them on a very low risk and long term basis. So we ensure that we never get ourselves in trouble in any of the assets that we have. And lastly, we try to use the large platform that we have built up and the business that we've built up around the world in the operational capabilities to try to squeeze more return out of those assets than you would otherwise get if you didn't have those people. 1st and foremost, though, when we're looking for investments, what we're always trying to do is to look around the world and find a spot where we can find value. And often, that means it's places which are out of favor, it's industries that are out of favor or it's areas where people are moving away from and we're always trying to move in the direction where there is value around the world. And there's really 3 distinct things that we offer our clients, and that brings us to about $114,000,000,000 of fee bearing capital that we have today alongside the capital that we have invested off our own balance sheet. Dollars 44,000,000,000 of that is invested in the listed partnerships that we have that trade on the stock exchanges. Dollars 52,000,000,000 dollars are in private funds, which are offered to our institutional clients and invest beside the listed partnerships and $16,000,000,000 are in our public markets business, which are listed securities managed on behalf of institutional clients, which provides us very important benefits to the organization. Firstly, it diversifies the source of capital that we have in the business. It provides a number of options to our clients that's becoming increasingly important as we offer those options to our clients and they come to us because we can do large scale things for them and put very large amounts of money to work for them. 3rd, it provides us certainty of capital through turmoil when there's periods of turmoil. And lastly, it aligns the duration of our capital with the strategies that we have. And what this has allowed us to do is to continue to build what we think of as a best in class global portfolio of real assets. We're in approximately 30 countries. We don't plan on being in too many more. We think we can deploy the capital we have and large amounts more into those areas. And we continue to build up the resources in each of the markets we're in to operate, find more and grow value out of the assets that we have. The team today is about 55,000 people globally, which really allows us to enhance returns on capital. They find often find organic investment opportunities within the businesses that we have, which is usually the best way to put money to work. And it gives us an enormous advantage in due diligence and looking at things when we're trying to figure out assets in the market and we're looking at them. And we've tried to use these competitive advantages, 1st and foremost to benefit the clients because if our clients do well and if our partnerships do well and if our institutional clients do well, then Brookfield will do well. So 1st and foremost, we're always thinking about how do we benefit the clients within the organization. So far and including the financial crisis, our average returns, if you look across our funds, are very strong, both in the opportunistic funds and the core plus and value add funds that we've offered our clients. And that's one of the reasons why we've continued to be able to build capital up in the institutional funds that we offer in our partnerships. As I said, it's enabled us to continue to grow the fee bearing capital at a pretty good clip. We're up to $114,000,000,000 and we've been continued to be able to put that to work in what we think are very good long term investments, which will earn the returns we need to in each of the funds that we create for the clients. As an example of a few of those over the past 18 months, we bought a business in the U. K. Called Centreparks, and it's a we offer rental units for people that want short stay vacations, and it's a very unique business. It's not found anywhere else in the world. These are 400 acre parks where we rent villas or cottages to people, and it's an extremely robust business. It's done extremely well since we've owned it. 2nd, we bought a large hydroelectric business in Colombia, which was almost $5,000,000,000 It's 3,000 megawatts of hydro plants in Colombia. It used to be the one of the national hydro companies of the country, and we think it will be an exceptional investment longer term and a great country. We've bought a large multifamily rental portfolio in the United States, a logistics business in Brazil and have continued to work on a transaction on work on that transaction. In addition to that, within all of our operations all the time, we put money to work beside the investments we have. And usually, these are actually the best investments you can find because they're the lowest risk because you actually know what's there and you can just add on to the side of them. So we're building a number of office developments around the world either in the locations beside one of the buildings that we have or new developments in the cities that we're in. We have a number of wind developments and some hydro developments that we're developing across the world. And a lot of our infrastructure investments being toll roads, pipelines, transmission systems have many add on investments that we put onto the assets. So we continue to build out a number of those across our portfolio. Turning to the markets. They've been pretty up and down. I guess everyone seems to be more aware of what's in the capital markets today. I'd say generally, they're pretty favorable for us. The latter part of 2015 in the stock markets was a little rough, But we don't view that this investment cycle is over. We actually think the volatility being out there is good because what it means is that people won't get too complacent. If I reflect back to 2,007, volatility was extremely low and people got complacent and that was one of the issues that caused the financial crisis. There's no doubt, I'd say, the exception to that is things exposed to commodities and to emerging markets. Many of those are still in stress, although we're starting to see signs of turning. And our belief is that interest rates will slowly move up in the United States. But because rates have gone negative in other places of the world or almost to 0 in some places and some negative. We think that we'll have a suppressing effect on what you would otherwise have seen in the U. S. With interest rates. So we think it'll be a very slow grind upwards. And what that means is that's very good for the type of assets we have, which I'll talk about in a minute. Our global reach provides us with a very significant number of opportunities. And just because of the people we have out there, we see many things and people bring us many things. But in North America, we're continuing to see this as an environment to recycle capital. We've been selling a lot of assets with long term cash flows that we've done most of the operating things in that we can do, and we've turned them into almost fixed income instruments for the next 10 years. And therefore, we've been selling and harvesting capital out of those investments. And it's not that we think those are bad investments. In fact, the owners of those investments will be very happy with them for the next 10 years. It's just our money needs to earn higher returns than the capital that's going into those type of assets. In Europe, the opportunity is really to find exceptional assets, which we can now fund at very, very low interest rates. So the return on equity is good compared to otherwise what you would get in that economy. In Asia, we continue to methodically build out the business. We now have offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai and Hong Kong. And we think there'll be many investments over the next 10 years that we'll be able to access and continue to build up our resources there. And in Brazil, we still believe in the continued long term emergence of the country. It is a great country with a very strong middle class with enormous resource base. They've had a tough ride the last 3 years, but we actually see the markets bottoming and think there's a number of opportunities that we'll still be able to add into the portfolio going forward. So with that, we continue to see very strong flows of capital into the Real Asset business, which is generally what we think of as the 4 products that we offer our clients, property, renewable power infrastructure and our private equity business. And there's really a couple of reasons for that. One is that money continues to grow exponentially in the institutional client fund world. And that's really for two reasons. 1, once you get capital, as they earn 5%, 6%, 7% returns in those funds, The funds just ex cement financially multiply. And second, up until recently, many of the funds had very, very strong inflows, especially with the in the oil countries. That's abated a little bit, but there's still a lot of capital forming into institutional funds. Maybe more importantly, absolute amounts, what's happened over the last while is that because of interest rates getting very low in almost every country in the world, developed economy in the world, the funds are having a hard time putting that money to work. And what they're doing now is allocating greater portions to real assets. And it's really just simple math. If they have bonds, it says 2% here. In fact, treasury in the United States is 1.5% for a 10 year and less than that if you're less than 10% in virtually every other developed bond in the world, it's closer to 0. So people can't invest their money in fixed income instruments anymore. So they can either put them into credit, they can put them into equity or they can put the money into real assets. So we're seeing a significant flow of money into real assets, and we can still earn them 7% to 15% returns on a conservative basis and sometimes higher returns than that. As a result of that, we continue to see more money heading into real assets in this environment that we're in. And we said this many years ago that 40% of allocations of many institutional clients of their funds will be in real assets. Some will be higher, some will be lower, but we continue to see that trend happening, and it may even be more than this when it's all over. That trend should continue, irrespective of interest rates. Really, and there's 4 or 5 points that I'd just highlight. Number 1 is that global growth is very slow, and it looks like that's going to continue for a while. Number 2, the negative interest rates are putting enormous pressure on the Eurozone and on in Japan, and that money is flowing into America and into products like ours. Number 3, interest rates clearly are only going to rise if you see an improving economy, and that will be muted because of what's going on in those other economies. Our business model works very well at anything 10 year treasury, and we're at 1.5% today. So there's a long way to go of increased interest rates, and we can still earn very strong returns for our clients. And lastly, our belief is that despite any of that, real assets will retain their value over long market cycles. And therefore, we think this is still an attractive place to be for our institutional clients and any of our partnerships as we grow them. To evidence that, we just showed a simple slide here of our latest infrastructure funds. And this is indicative of the whole industry, but it's this is actually our results. Our funds have gone $2,700,000,000 to $7,000,000,000 to $14,000,000,000 for infrastructure, from $4,000,000,000 to $9,000,000,000 for real estate and from under $1,000,000,000 to $1,000,000,000 to $4,000,000,000 for private equity. So you can just see the trend of increasing capital flowing into real asset funds, partly because we've grown our franchise, but partly just because there's been more money available to go into these type of assets. And our differentiation, what we've tried to do is to continue to have long duration capital to ensure that we had a large balance sheet to fund opportunities and to take advantage and capitalize on opportunities when they're there. Most of our fee bearing capital in the business is perpetual capital or it's very long term in nature, and that gives great stability to the overall business and to the commitments we make to people that we invest for, we invest with or people that we're doing transactions with. In addition, it provides great stability in the income of the company and the cash flows of the company and continues to compound away within the business. The strength of our balance sheet gives us also significant considerable liquidity for us to deploy within the operations. Our liquidity today is about $6,000,000,000 of core liquidity. We have undrawn fund commitments, meaning we can, by contract, we can go get money from our clients and put it into opportunities. So that's at our discretion to call that capital and that's just under $20,000,000,000 We continue to monetize assets on the balance sheets we have in this environment of low interest rates rates where we can harvest capital at good returns. We have very broad access to the debt and the equity markets, and we have a number of organic products that we're creating within the business. And all of that allows us to continue to grow the asset management franchise. We remain focused though on making sure that we adhere to the value based investment philosophy. Even though we've grown over the years, we've tried to ensure that we continue to keep that investment thesis within the business, which really means 5 things: acquire great assets, assume we're going to hold them forever, continue to try to buy them at less than replacement cost, put prudent financing on them so we never get financial issues and only try to acquire when capital is scarce as it normally means it's the right time and try to work hard at execution within the portfolio. In conclusion, and then Brian and I will take questions, I guess we continue to think we're well positioned for growth within the business. As I said, we have Our assets are long life, many of them with growing cash flow. Our assets are long life, many of them with growing cash flows. Our fundraising momentum is good. There are many attractive investment opportunities in the world, largely because of the global franchise that we have. And we've tried to align ourselves and our balance sheet with every client that we have, so that we have our capital beside our clients, and that's very meaningful to any investment person when they're looking at something. And that, I think, gives us a great strategic advantage. So with that, if there are any questions, Brian or I would be happy to take them. Hi, Mr. Flat. My name is Robert Bath. I'm a stockholder. A thing that's occurred to me is whether there's any material risk to the company, I think not, in any possible outcome around this Brexit referendum. Is there one outcome that we would favor? Are we neutral? Is it really not a material issue to be concerned with from our company's point of view. So the question just is on Brexit and what And any exposure. So we have a significant business in London and in the U. K. In general. Some businesses we have won't be affected by it and some will be. We're strongly in the camp that the U. K. Should remain. We think it's an important thing for the country and for the continent to remain together. So we're strongly in favor of remain. But longer term, we're going to stay in the country and we'll it always has been a good economy to invest in. Mr. Platt, my name is Kevin Thomas. I'm with the Shareholder Association For Research and Education. I'm here today on behalf of the BC Teachers Federation, which is a shareholder. My question relates to the operations in Qatar, Brookfield Multiplex. It's a global construction company, of course, part of our assets, And it's been in the Middle East since 1997. Really, there's a lot of questions around risks in Qatar, around labor practices, forced labor, problems with migrant workers and health and safety particularly, which will get a lot of attention leading up to the World Cup there. So we're a bit concerned about the exposure to that, how the company is managing health and safety risks in those operations, Particularly, how Brooke feels upholding safe and decent working conditions? Are you conducting credible verifications of the manpower agencies that you're using? Doing random unannounced inspections of subcontractors? And most importantly, would you consider doing some kind of sustainability report or reporting on the website about these kinds of risks to shareholders? So thanks for the question. I'll let Brian answer the specifics of that question. I'd just say maybe just for everyone's benefit, we one of the businesses that we have is a global construction business. We operate around the world. We have a we're the largest contractor in Australia. We have big operations in the Middle East. We're the largest contractor in London. So it's a very professional, very good business for us and it has been 10 years. So it but and we adhere to very high standards within the business. Yes. So I'll pick up on that and thanks for the question. It is as Bruce mentioned, it's something that is important to us, and it is a global business with very high health and safety standards, and we do apply those on a global basis. I think one of the perhaps one of the simplest ways to think about it is that in Qatar, for example, our experience there in terms of protocols and outcomes, most importantly, is equal to or even better than our operations in the K. And Australia. So we've had very favorable performance in that regard there, but it's something we will obviously continue to be focused on and be happy to follow-up with some of your specific questions offline. But thank you for your comments in that regard. Thank you, both. Simple question. Do you have a major competitor? If so, would your name the major competitor, please? So I think the question is, who are our competitors? Is that our competitors? So I'd say we have many, many competitors and no one should ever think that they don't have competitors because the minute you do, you're in trouble. And but it's more specific to businesses. So our real estate business, we have many people that we compete with in the operating businesses and buying things, etcetera. In our infrastructure business, there's many great infrastructure companies around the world that we either compete with or operate the side or do things with. In our Renewable Power business, there's a lot of Europeans that buy assets similar to us. So there are many competitors in the industry around the world. I'd say as an asset manager, there's really there's, I guess, a handful to 10. Between 510 similar organizations that take money from clients, meaning our institutional funds. So they take money from institutional investors and they put it to work in the sectors like we do. And some are in real estate and some are in infrastructure, some are in private equity and some are in all of the above. Our business is a little more broad than most. It's larger than many. And it's we have a bigger balance sheet. We put more money into it from our own balance sheet. But there's about 8 or 10, most of them are U. S. Domiciled companies. There isn't one really in Canada that would be similar to us. Good morning. My name is Paul Dernan, I'm from Burlington. If there is a Brexit and 40% of the U. K. Trade is with the continent, It was in the paper that HSBC says we're moving 1,000 bankers from London to the continent. And I wonder if it could not be such a happy wave goodbye and the EU put tariffs onto goods coming from England. And I believe I'm right in saying that the British companies trading on the continent would then have to have their own offices there in the event of a Brexit. What maybe I'm looking too far out, but this the EU could kind of come back at the UK in a nasty way on this? So thanks for the question. I would just say we're in the remain camp. So we're hoping everyone votes that way on next Thursday, Wednesday, Wednesday or Thursday. But what would happen if how does it affect the company directly if it is a Brexit? So first, I was going to say, Lord O'Donnell, who's a real expert in the UK and who's on our board is in the front row over here. So I might get him K. And who's on our Board, is in the front row over here. So I might get him up after to answer questions if there's more on this. But what I'd say is, look, it's not known, because remember what happens with if someone does not if they don't vote remain is there's really nothing happened. It's kind of like an advisory vote. People, there is no situation that's ever been tested like this and they'd have to figure it out. And we'll have to see what happens after if that occurs. And we just we're in we think it will remain. So I'll paraphrase the question just so everyone hears it. The question is, many of the pension plans, including CPP, have significant amounts of capital, and they're putting it to work in real assets just like us. And are we working on the same side all the time? And shouldn't we be? I'd say everyone should work with us. There's no doubt. Here's what I'd tell you. The world of what happened over the last 20 years, everyone used to invest. In fact, if you go back 30 years, most people invested their portfolios in fixed income, in institutional client accounts. Then they went to equities, and it was very successful putting money into equities and they diversified the portfolio that way. And what's happened over the last 10 years, and I give great credit to the Canadian pension plans here because they really did a great thing for the wealth of all individuals in Canada, is that they very early on realized we need to get out of fixed income because rates are coming down. We need to build the ability to put money to work in other assets like we deploy. Remember, all we do is essentially an outsourced investment management business for institutional clients. We're putting money to work for other people that don't have 700 people around the world investing for them. Some of the institutions do that themselves. There's not many that can do exactly what we do because they don't have 700 people and they have been doing it for 25 years like we've done or 40, 50 years like we've done. And but some do and some are doing it themselves. Our business is taking money from the people that don't have those skills themselves. Or even if they do, we can be additive to them. There are some institutions in the world that are doing it themselves And those ones, we're generally either not investing for. And once in a while, they're in a transaction either with us or possibly against us. And that's just a fact of transactions in business. But there's a huge I guess, the point of putting up the slide of the amount of money that's in the world for real assets, there's an enormous amount of money that's out there that needs to go into products like we offer. And therefore, I think there's lots to go around. Mr. Flatt, given the embarrassment of riches that you have with your new successful fundraising and the large amount of new money that's going into real assets, Surely, there's a lot of competition for value investors around the world. Could you give some examples or specifics of areas or ways in which you expect to find really compelling investment opportunities in the near and medium term? Yes. So the question really comes down to do we have too much money for the opportunity set that's out there, I guess is the way I paraphrase that question. And generally, I just say that our what we try to do is work off of our competitive advantages, which are really threefold. Number 1, we have more money than most people to put to work, largely because we're amassing capital from different institutional clients and from investors like many of you in this room. So we try to focus on the size that we have and do transactions in that scale, and that enables us to eliminate many, many competitors. So it gets us up to a very so when we bought the hydro company in Colombia, it was $5,000,000,000 not too many people can have $5,000,000,000 to go and buy an investment in Colombia, just a large amount. So that's the first thing we try to differentiate ourselves with. The second is, we have operations in 30 countries in the world. And it's one thing to say, India is cheap, we should go to India and make an investment. It's not easy to make investments in India. And it's not easy to operate assets in India. It's not easy to do things in India. You have to be there. You have to know how to do it, and you have to have people on the ground. We have people on the ground in 30 different countries. So it gives us a competitive advantages because we have people in those 30 countries and we can pick the times when we go to each of those countries. And third, we have 50,000 operating employees or more, and those people give us incredible operating capabilities on the ground. And if you take those 3 together as competitive advantages, we continue to find lots of opportunities for the capital we have. In fact, we have more opportunities than capital. And we have to be very selective as to what we invest into because there are more opportunities than capital. And that's only because we've set up we've invested the money of the corporation to set up the franchise we have over the past 20 years. So the direct answer is, even though we've been successful in raising a lot of money, I think we can still put it to work prudently and earn the returns we've promised to our investors. I don't share the concerns in regards to Europe that some others have. I think it might be the opposite that there might be too much hesitation. I was hoping you could talk about value opportunities you see in Europe, especially in regards to the position in the Balkans? Thank you. Position in the Balkans? Yes. So we've had an operation in Europe for 10, 12 years, and we've continued to expand the business. Originally, we started in the U. K, and then we went on to the continent. We're in most of the countries in Western Europe today, being France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and a few others, but that's where the major money is. And we think there's some great opportunities. We just bought 21 office residential and retail buildings in Berlin in a portfolio. We think it's an exceptional opportunity. We bought at 75% lead and a 5% yield. We'll be able to grow the cash flows and we're financing it at less than 2%. So the levered returns are good. So we continue to see opportunities there. And it's really focused on size. That was a $1,300,000,000 transaction and our operating skills that we have that we can bring to the table. So I'm not I think there are a lot of opportunities in Europe. And we're a long term investor, so we think of these things in very long durations. We've never been in Eastern, the other countries in Europe. I don't know whether we will be. And it's really just for us to go to a country, we have characteristics that we have to meet. It has to be a country that's large enough that we can find big opportunities. It has to be a country where we can do most of the things that we do. So we can do 1, 2, 3 of our businesses that we're in. Otherwise, it's just not worth setting up all the apparatus and learning the tax structure, getting the country and meeting all the senior people in the country and all those kind of things. So if we're going to go to a country, we want to make it meaningful enough that we can actually it can make a difference to us over the next 20 years because it takes a lot of effort to set up. And lastly, we want to make sure it has the right culture of respective capital. We think of those three things when we go to a new country and we're very methodical about when picking specific countries and they usually have to have scale. Thank you, Bruce. Ladies and gentlemen, if there are no further questions or comments, I'd like thank you for attending today. We truly appreciate your participation. We know there are many other things you could be doing with your time, and you've chosen to spend it with us. So we're grateful for that, and we hope that you found the meeting informative. Executives, Board members will be around for some time after the the meeting as well and available should you have questions that you wanted to ask personally. That brings me to the end of today's meeting. Unless there's any further business And since there's no other business, I declare the meeting terminated.