Good morning and welcome to the Power Corporation fourth quarter and year-end 2020 earnings conference call and webcast. After the presentation, we will open the call for questions. Instructions will be provided at that time. If you require assistance throughout the call, please press star zero for operator assistance at any time. Please note that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, March the 18th, 2021, at 8:00 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Jeffrey Orr, President and Chief Executive Officer of Power Corporation. Mr. Orr, you may proceed.
Thank you very much, Operator, and welcome everyone to our Fourth Quarter Results Call. I hope everybody is well and healthy. With me today is Greg Tretiak, Chief Financial Officer of Power Corporation. We'll get right into the presentation on our results for the Fourth Quarter. Just we got a few pages up front on disclaimers, and on page four, you've got pictures of Greg and I in a former life, which I'm looking forward to being back in a suit at some point in the upcoming months. I'm going to move right forward to page six on the presentation. The Power Corp part of our communication of our group is a very important one. But you've also, of course, got reference to our public companies, Great-West Lifeco, IGM, and GBL, all who have their own recent material released in earnings calls and participations in conferences.
All of that material is available on the various websites that you see there for you if you have specific questions on the operating companies. I'm going to flip right forward, then, to page seven. We continued since our last call, I think it was November 11th or 12th, with a strong pace of activity across the group. Some of that was closing transactions that we had previously announced. There was also a fair bit of fundraising going on across the alternative asset platforms. We also made progress on surfacing value on some of our standalone businesses, Lion being the obvious example. We'll talk a bit about that in the presentation. We also continue to receive recognition for the work that we continue to do across the group in terms of our corporate citizenship.
And I've got a fair number of recognitions across that we'll talk about in the presentation as well. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Greg to speak specifically to the results for the quarter. Greg.
Thank you, Jeff. A good quarter, a strong quarter. You can see the NAV at CAD 41.27 at the end of December, up 18%, an additional 8% when we marked it on March 17. And net earnings for the quarter at CAD 0.92, adjusted net earnings at CAD 0.93. The CAD 0.93 compares to the prior year's CAD 0.84. The difference between net earnings and adjusted earnings is largely due to the write-down of the DTA in 2019 of Putnam. The board of directors declared a dividend of CAD 44.75 per share. So now I will turn you to the next page, a little review of the net asset value. Left-hand panel, which is in per share, you can see that the per share CAD 41.7 at the end of the year, that's CAD 6.33, up 18%, as I said earlier. Contributing, obviously, all components contributing to this strong increase in the NAV.
The publicly traded companies collectively representing CAD 5 of that CAD 6.33 increase. The alternative investment platforms also contributing CAD 0.24. The increase largely driven by Power Pacific Investment Management, which continued its strong outperformance relative to the benchmark. Just give them a kudos. Their 10-year outperformance record is something like 9% over the MSCI index. Then, of course, Lion, which had a November announcement, merger with Northern Genesis. That valuation that we have at December 31st is the CAD 10 that the SPAC was launched at. In our number, there is an interest of CAD 780 million with respect to Lion. On the right-hand side of the panel, it is in billions of dollars. You can see that the publicly traded Lifecos, representing about 80% of the NAV, hasn't changed significantly from the prior period. Wealthsimple is in the Sagard Holdings number.
The entire group of the platforms representing about 9%-9.5% of the NAV. Then, of course, the standalone businesses. We have a couple of slides later in the deck. I won't go into any detail here. But you can see they represent about 4%. And that kind of rounds out the net asset value. And with that, I will take you to PCC's earnings per share. As I mentioned earlier, CAD 0.92 net earnings for the quarter. The adjusted net earnings, CAD 0.93, which is up sequentially from the CAD 0.65 in Q3 of 2020 and CAD 0.84 in 2019, as I previously mentioned. Just looking at the Q4 results, no surprises, given that the publicly traded companies have reported earlier this quarter. And so looking at the first line below, the publicly traded companies, you can see the alternative asset management platforms contributing CAD 0.05.
A strong contributor there was KOHO, which is in the Portage funds. The KOHO announced in December a close of a successful financing round. Our collective ownership in the group dropped below 50%. So given the accounting conventions, when that happens, you have to remeasure. And at that point, we remeasured to that round of closing's value. And I think KOHO was valued at CAD 250 million. Our gain on the quarter as a group was about CAD 71 million. And PCC's direct investment was CAD 30 million. So you can see that contributed to our earnings in the alternative investment platforms line of the nickel there. Of course, China AMC also contributing. We have a slide later on, so we'll address it at that point in the deck. And the standalone businesses, Lion obviously contributing in the quarter. And this is the earnings contribution.
We control Lion or have a control position in Lion. So this increase, which is about CAD 0.03 and the CAD 0.07, is really the valuation of the call rights that we have with respect to Lion. And that particular transaction was announced in November. And we also have dedicated a slide to Lion to discuss it in some detail. And with that, Mr. Chairman, or I should say, I'm back in the board meeting still, Jeff. So I'll turn it back to you.
I won't tell Mr. Desmarais that you've appointed me as chair in his absence, Greg. But thank you. So the next three slides, most of you will have seen before. So I'll go through them pretty quickly. But just on slide 11 to remind folks that we are focusing on financial services, not diversification. That's been our strategy since we closed the reorganization in February. And each of the public operating companies are pursuing their own organic and inorganic strategies. But at the Power level itself, we're focusing our attention on two things really: building our alternative asset management businesses, as well as managing our standalone businesses in a manner to realize value. That's the Lions of the world. We're doing that in a smart, timely way, not honoring our commitments to our partners, but doing it so that we surface value to maximize value over time.
But that is also a very big focus. And we're glad we made progress on that in the last quarter. Also managing our costs carefully. And our financial position continues to be something we manage prudently. We do have a focus on returning capital to shareholders. But we do that in mind of our financial position. And then at the bottom of the page, communicate, communicate, communicate. We are really on a tear across the group here to make sure that we're out in front of the market as we are honoring our commitments that we made to be very transparent so that people understand what we're doing and what we're focused on. Page 12 is just another way we think about it. Our value creation strategy is focused on three key levers. And the first two focus on the public companies.
They are 80% of the gross asset value of the business. So that's a key part of our value creation. But we do have down in number three at Power a lot of, I would say, low-hanging fruit that we can focus on. And we can do a lot of simplification to surface additional value at Power Corporation, which is taking a lot of our attention as well. Page 13, again, I think some of you will have seen this in different presentations. But as this is still a fourth quarter earnings call, we can look back on 2020. And it started with a bang with the collapse of the dual holding company structure up in February. But we followed that up with just a, I would say, a blizzard of activity across the M&A front through a good part of the year.
And then a couple of transactions that were financing rounds down in October and November that, in the case of Wealthsimple, I think showed we had, I think that was a 3x on what the group had invested in. And then Lion was significantly more than that. So we did a couple of transactions at the end of the year financing that started to surface the value of some of the investments we've been making over the last couple of years. Okay. Let me move forward then to talk a bit about the public companies. And page 14 just kind of tries to do a high level as to what's going on at those companies. And the first bullet point there, capitalizing significant past investments to drive higher earnings and cash flow growth, those are really Great-West Lifeco and IGM points.
GBL is more of a net asset value company in terms of its valuation than an earnings company. But for Great-West Lifeco and IGM, which are the bulk of the portfolio and the asset value, the focus there is that the management teams are both trying to capitalize on what the companies have invested in over the last four, five, six years to strengthen their positions in the marketplace and turn that strength into and the momentum that they're starting to show in top-line growth and market share gains into higher earnings for the shareholders. And we've done a lot of investment. We've done a lot to improve our client experiences. We've done a lot to invest in our businesses and our technology, time to focus on creating shareholder returns here.
And the key to that is getting higher earnings and cash flow and being able to then demonstrate that to the market on a sustainable basis. So we have to execute on that. But that's core. And then the second bullet, and I don't have to say too much about it because pursuing M&A transactions to enhance earnings and strategic positioning, we've obviously, on the page I showed previously, had a lot of success. And that augments what we do under the first bullet. So with that, I'm going to just then move forward to page 15. And just, there's some highlights on that. I'm not going to walk through all of these points for you. But there is strong momentum across each of the groups. A couple of things on Great-West. They've continued momentum organically at Empower in addition to what's going on with the acquisitions.
Continued focus on digitizing the platform you see in the third bullet point there. Canada Life in Canada continues to digitize and made some big moves in the quarter. At IGM, really tremendous momentum. Mackenzie on fire, best quarter in terms of net flows in the company's history. IG Wealth, what we used to call Investors Group, had its best net flows in over two decades. So significant momentum showing at IGM. And continued successful growth in GBL. They did successfully complete the reorganization transaction with Pargesa to collapse the two holding companies into one. And that was finally completed in the fourth quarter.
And along the bottom of the page for each of Great-West Lifeco and IGM and GBL, you see just some recognition of the whole focus on what the companies have been doing to be focusing not just on shareholders, but the broader stakeholders in their group, their communities, their clients. And we all, every company and every public company knows this is not just about driving returns for shareholders. You've got to be contributing across all your stakeholder groups. So you're not going to be in business very long in the world today. And we're just highlighting the fact that those are big focuses at our group. And we're getting some recognition for it. Okay. Let me turn to page 16. A couple of highlights on specifically I'd like to drill down on page 16. We've talked a lot about the MassMutual and Personal Capital acquisitions.
Just as a way to summarize what we've done, the first bullet point is that we enhanced Empower's clear number two position in the DC market. And we did so on what we expect will be a highly accretive basis to earnings and cash flow. But the Personal Capital acquisition also did a lot for the group. First of all, it added a high-growth direct-to-consumer wealth business. And Empower already has a growing wealth business. So that's where individuals are dealing directly with Empower. And Personal Capital enhances that. And it also provides tools that will enhance the capability of Empower's DC business. So we think this is a market where we have a lot of opportunity for growth. And down at the bottom of the page, you see a little bit of perspective on it. The Personal Capital's business had been growing very quickly organically.
You see the assets on the platform from 2016 to 2020. That's without acquisition. They had been growing quickly with the market, but growing much faster than the market in terms of the quality of that platform. They were at CAD 735 billion in AUA at the end of the year without MassMutual. With MassMutual, that jumped to CAD 925 billion. Then you see on the bottom the wealth management platform of Empower, which is really when folks are coming out of their DC programs, either they retired or they're in a job change. Empower has been focusing on having them come into an Empower retail offering where they're no longer on their corporate employer's plan. That business had been growing smartly from CAD 6 billion to CAD 16 billion of assets.
Then when you added Personal Capital, it's up to CAD 33 billion because Personal Capital has a direct-to-consumer business of about CAD 16 billion. So we doubled the size of that. So that's a little bit of a breakdown of what the businesses that are going on at Empower. And as I said, those assets, CAD 925 billion plus CAD 33 billion, crossed the CAD 1 trillion mark on January 31st, a little bit through market, but largely through some very big employers coming on the plan at Empower on their DC platform. So very excited about what we're building there. And we'll continue to talk more about that in the months ahead. Page 17 is just a note on Putnam. We've been kind of quietly going along without talking or making a lot of fanfare about it.
But Putnam, over the last several years, has really reduced its cost footprint and starting to get some revenue uplift over the last few quarters. And that has translated into the best profitability we've seen at Putnam, I think, since we've owned the franchise. This is material from the Great-West Lifeco disclosure. But it's looking at Putnam on a Putnam basis before you allocate financing charges or acquisition amortization. It's just a straight Putnam number. These are the numbers the Putnam Board, for example, would look at. And it's basically revenue minus costs on the line in the graphs. And you can see we've been running at a margin of revenue pre-tax of about 12% in each of the two quarters, Q2, Q3. And then Q4 was a big quarter above 20%. Now, there's a little bit of non-repeatability in that. And that the market was up.
So, there's some little bit outside gains on seed capital. And there were some performance fees that were realized in the fourth quarter. But Putnam basically running at about a 15% margin to revenue when you look at it before you allocate financing or capital charges to it. And the numbers along the bottom, these are U.S. dollars, are the same numbers after tax. And so you end up with we're starting to see some profit contribution here coming through for Putnam. And just before I leave the page on Putnam, they're also in the Barron's performance survey of all the U.S. companies on a 10-year basis. I think they were the third of the 50 or 60 companies, third best track record.
So they've really made the point many times that we've really been focusing on making sure they have good investment performance and they have a great long-term track record, which sets them up well, we think, for continued success. 18 is then a focus on continued traction at Mackenzie. I made the point earlier. But you see it expressed on the left-hand side of the page in terms of AUM. So with the organic growth at Mackenzie plus the acquisition of GLC plus the acquisition of Greenchip, which is an ESG manager that had been working with Mackenzie that's now part of Mackenzie, they've got AUM of 187 at the end of the year. And then another way of looking at Mackenzie's success and traction is on the right-hand side of the page.
The dotted line is the net flows into the retail investment funds, including ETFs as a percentage of the average assets. And you can see that since about 2017, Mackenzie has been very positive. And it flows up and down a little bit with the market tone. But on a 12-month trailing basis now at 5.5% of average assets. And at the bottom of that graph you have in gray the estimate of the mutual fund net flows of the industry. And that's taking the best information we can get from all the mutual fund company disclosures. But Mackenzie's been gaining market share on a pretty significant basis here now for about three years, three and a half years. And that seems to be accelerating. So we're really thrilled about what's going on at Mackenzie. I'm going to turn here to some of our other businesses.
Just a note on Wealthsimple. It's been having a tremendous year in 2020, huge growth in its assets under administration, 94% growth over a year. Those bars down on the bottom right are every six months. They're not annual. If you showed it annually, of course, it's a lot steeper than that. Then we did already talk about the third bullet point. The leading investors in the U.S. back in October put a value of the company at CAD 1.4 billion pre-money. That's a big jump on the group's position. Business just continues to grow quickly. It's across all the platforms. It's not just kind of started off as the invest business, but they've got a cash business. They've got a trade business. They've got a tax business. So they're really broadening out the ways in which they can serve their clients.
We're quite excited about what's going on at Wealthsimple. Page 20, I think Greg went into the numbers as to what we've done at Lion. I think we had CAD 54 million invested in the business Canadian when we announced the transaction. This has been, obviously, it's extremely exciting and very successful at this point. You may have seen this week that also the Canadian and Quebec governments and we got the Prime Minister and the Premier together announcing their support for expansion of the manufacturing facility in Quebec here, and so there's lots of excitement, and we're really pleased about how this is working out. We're optimistic for where Lion goes in the future. I'm going to take the next two slides to talk about fundraising and growth in our alternative asset management platforms, so a lot of momentum that was highlighted on the earlier slide.
We've got, at this point, CAD 5.6 billion in AUM across Sagard Holdings and Power Sustainable that is funded and another CAD 2.9 billion in commitments. And the third bullet point illustrates that of the CAD 5.6 billion that's funded, 46% is from third parties. But of the CAD 2.9 billion that's unfunded, so that's the newer fundraising or people that have made commitments that the money hasn't been put to work yet, 80% of that is from third parties. So this is just making the point. We are turning these businesses from being originally diversification vehicles for Great-West for the most part, Great-West, excuse me, diversification vehicles for Power Corp into third-party asset management businesses. And on the bottom right-hand side of the page, you've got the funding split between Power and third parties. Sagard Holdings at this point is majority funded by third parties.
Power Sustainable, the current capital is all Power Corp. But they are moving quickly to a third-party model. I'm going to show that on the next page if you flip forward to page 22. Actually, I'll just start at the bottom of the page to continue along the Power Sustainable. Did announce the launch of a CAD 1 billion sustainable energy infrastructure partnership. It's not funded yet. It's not closed. But we are having third-party capital coming in from Desjardins, National Bank. Another third-party investor in Great-West has got some money in there as well. And on the Power Pacific platform, which Greg talked about, that's our team in Shanghai. They've been managing money since 2005, amazing long-term track record. They've got CAD 100 million of third-party capital that has been committed to go under that platform. Good progress by Power Sustainable Capital on its fundraising.
Up at the top of the page, continued success of Sagard Holdings on its fundraising. You've got some of the highlights of some of the recent announcements on funding. Some of those, like Sagard Credit Partners and Sagard Healthcare Royalty Partners, those are not new, the Credit Fund II or Healthcare Royalty Partners. But the amounts have been increased. We had previously announced, for example, I think of the Credit Partners, CAD 450 million funding. It's up to CAD 650 million. Continued strong momentum at the platforms. We're very pleased about the progress. Page 23, Greg mentioned what's going on at China AMC. It continues to really grow well. We think the leading asset manager in China, certainly if you look at long-term funds, it is the leading asset manager in China. It continues to grow its assets. It continues to grow in sales. It continues to grow in its profitability.
So I'll leave it at that. And again, remind those who are not aware, we have 13.8%, 13.9%, I can't recall, at Power Corp. And we have an equivalent size share down at IGM. Page 24, our standalone businesses. I won't spend much time on this page. We've talked a lot about Lion. But we do have three other businesses there that we think are strong businesses that we're also focused on creating servicing value and ultimately realizing value for the benefit of Power Corp shareholders. Page 25, continued progress on our expense reductions. And we think we're 61% of the way there in terms of the CAD 50 million target that we announced. So continue to focus on that. We're a lot of attention on building the businesses and on growing the top lines and values. But we're also following a very disciplined approach to our cost at Power Corp.
We'll continue to drive and hopefully make good progress on that in the quarters to come. Page 26 is just a reminder of our commitment to communicate. You've got a number of progress points that Power Corp, Great West, and IGM have made over the past 12 months. You've got a Power Corp, not that IR is just a function of how many people you talk to, but it is one tangible measure and a proof point of the energy we're putting into it. We had 93 meetings with institutional investors or analysts in 2020. As of last week, we were at 41 year-to-date already. Those are, again, institutional meetings or one-on-one analyst calls. They're not even analyst calls, I should say. That's with analysts and investors. We're not talking about a one-on-one call with an analyst. These are actually meeting with investors and analysts.
So continue to be very active on that front. And continue to enhance the disclosure. You're seeing some of it in Power Corp's results this quarter. You're also seeing it at Great-West Lifeco. And at IGM, they just a couple of weeks ago came out and had a call where they've announced that their new segmentation results are bringing all the way down to the net earnings line that had been at the EBIT line previously. And so we're continuing to put a lot of energy into how we communicate. Page 27 is a look at our net asset value discount. We had been, and what you're looking at here, I should say, is the discount at Power Corp looking right through the Power Financial discount and counting both of them.
Some people had looked at Power Corp's discount before the reorganization on taking Power Corp at its trading value. This is taking Power Financial, excuse me. This is taking Power Financial on a look-through basis for Power Corp all the way down to Great-West Lifeco, IGM, Pargesa at the time, and then the Power Corp assets. What you see is that the discount had really traveled in the range. It had averaged pretty steadily in the period of 2015 right through to the end of 2018 at about 34%. You can see it bouncing around. But it was pretty well around the mid-30s. We announced in January of 2018 that Great-West Lifeco was selling its U.S. life insurance business. And at that time, we also announced they would be considering taking the proceeds and buying shares back to mitigate the dilution.
We followed that up, I think, about five weeks later with the announcement of the three-level buyback, and then continued to communicate. We started our IR after it was pretty heavily through the last half of 2019. Then we announced the reorganization. We continued to narrow the discount. We had a bit of a blip as we went into the pandemic. Holding companies around the world had their discounts widened out, but we've been continuing through 2020 with all the transactions we've announced to grind away at the discount, and we've got it down right now. It's about 26%. We don't control it, of course. But we can influence it, and we're continuing, we think, to continue to execute on our strategy. We're optimistic that there's a reason that we can continue to have that discount shrink. We've had it much lower than the 26% if you go back historically.
And so we think we can continue to whittle away at that as a value driver. And with that, I will go to page 28 and kind of try and summarize here what our value creation strategy is. First and foremost, the first two bullets, as I said, 80% of the value of the businesses are in our public operating businesses. So getting higher earnings growth at the operating businesses organically and adding to that through M&A is job number one. If we get higher earnings growth, we'll have higher earnings. And we might even get a multiple revision relative to our peer group if we execute on that. So that would be a big driver of the net asset value. And then secondly, we've got holding company levers that we're using in number three.
We're creating and surfacing value, as we've demonstrated in this presentation, communicating, and with some good execution potential to lower the discount. All of those levers add up to a pretty exciting value creation story. We're working on all of them. I'm quite excited about it. Then, before I finish, I just want to come back to a point I made a few times during the presentation, but just a couple of the recognitions we've had recently. The Carbon Disclosure Project recognized Power Corp and Great-West Lifeco as two of the three Canadian companies that received the top score of A. There's only three companies across the country that got that. We had two of them, which is great. IGM also scored very well on that score.
And then Corporate Knights, Reuters recently recognized both Power Corp and IGM as one of the top 50 corporate citizens in Canada. And IGM itself was ranked 29th overall globally amongst all companies and was the top-ranked number one-ranked financial services or investment services company globally and top-ranked financial services company in North America. So this has been a focus of the group for decades. In the last few years, we've started to communicate what we're doing in a much clearer way. And we'll continue to put focus on that, obviously, with all that's going on at ESG. And ESG across everybody's businesses, this is a key part of our focus as well. And we're starting to talk about it a little bit more. And with that, Operator, I'm going to end my remarks.
You can open up the meeting to questions from those that would like to ask questions.
Thank you. So, ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, please press star one if you wish to ask a question. And your first question comes from the line of Nik Priebe of CIBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Okay. Thanks. Starting on the investment management platform, you've achieved good progress on external fundraising. As you strive towards an improvement in the scale and profitability of that business, is M&A a lever that you would consider to accelerate the strategy on that front? Or is the build-out of that platform something that you might prefer to do organically? Just some thoughts around that would be helpful.
Yeah. Thanks, Nik. Good morning. I think the answer to that question is organic is really where we're focused, and I wouldn't want to exclude M&A. It is possible that we could add some capabilities there. I think the main energies are on organic. These are people businesses, right? So people have gone and they're culture businesses. They're investment management businesses. What you could see potentially is if there's a capability that is not within the platform that we could add, that I think would be something that would be feasible. Buying somebody who has the same capabilities and merging them together, maybe. That's certainly not the focus. Primarily organic. I don't want to shut the door there on whether we could do anything outside.
And just add, Jeff, that speaking of capabilities and where they might help leverage the consumer proposition to the clients of the various platforms, Grayhawk is probably the best example, which is a capability that the Sagard Holdings platform acquired in the fall of, I think, 2019 sometime. And they've been with us for about a year. And they're bringing capabilities in the individual wealth management component of the business.
Yeah. That's a great point. Thank you, Greg, because I was answering Nik's question from an investment management point of view. And Grayhawk comes at it from an advisors distribution in the high net worth for the products is kind of the primary benefit there. So thank you for adding that. Nik, other questions?
That's helpful. Yeah. Just one other for me. I mean, you called out the strong growth that China AMC has experienced since acquisition, and I recognize it's a small component of your NAV, but when I look at 2020 alone, I think AUM was up more than 40%, but when I look at the fair market value of your investment, I think it's only increased in the single digits over the same time frame. Can you just remind us how the fair market value of that investment is determined in your NAV calculation and whether there's any event, I suppose, that could trigger a revaluation there?
Yeah. I'm going to pass this to Greg. But it's a private company, of course. So it's not like we have immediate market recognition on the stock market. But so, Greg, why don't I throw that one to you?
Sure. Nik, our practice has been to mark that when there is a catalyst or an event-driven opportunity to remark the position. The last time it was marked was when we traded, or I should say purchased, the 10% component. And that's when IGM acquired their interest. And we participated in it as well. And that was back in 2016. Boy, it hasn't been that long. So the mark is rather dated. And as you know, we have a partner who is the CITIC Securities organisation in China. And they're a publicly traded company as well. And so our practice there is to recognize when we both think the opportunity and the event presents to remark it. So it's carried at that old mark for the time being.
Got it. Okay. That's helpful. That's it for me. Thank you.
Okay. Thanks, Nik.
Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Doug Young of Desjardins Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning. Jeff, just going back to the low-hanging fruit at Power to surface value. One of the things you suggested was returning capital to shareholders. You're sitting on CAD 1.2 billion of cash and cash equivalents. I think you're still planning on purchasing CAD 350 million of preferred shares. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm just trying to gauge how much cash you want to retain on the balance sheet, thoughts on buybacks. I know your biggest ownership is Great-West. Great-West has a moratorium on dividend increases and buybacks. How does that factor into your thinking when you approach buybacks? This is something I get questioned a lot on. I'm just curious your thoughts.
Yeah. Great. Good question, Doug. Thank you. I'll take a rip at the ball. And then, Greg, you jump in and add any thoughts you might have. So you're quite right. We have talked about returning capital to shareholders. The low-hanging fruit I talked about was, in fact, surfacing value within the various standalone businesses, doing a better job of explaining, simplifying it so that what we're left with is alternative asset management businesses, doing a better job of explaining the value creation there. And as well, surfacing NAV and then having the opportunity to buy shares back, potentially at a discount to NAV. And that creates even more value. So all of that is kind of, when it comes together, adds nicely to what we're doing at the operating businesses. Specifically, your question, we had talked about doing share buybacks.
And we basically, under COVID-19, have really stopped those buybacks with the exception of nullifying potential dilution from options. So we've had a little bit of activity. So we've been pretty conservative through the COVID period. And at some point here, we will move into a new mode where we're more open with our buybacks. And we're looking forward to that as we move forward. I do want to point out on the buyback front, though, that we have always supported our operating businesses if they have some sort of an opportunity to make an acquisition. And I probably need, using your question, to just highlight that.
And I've said it in, I think, every investor presentation we've been in the last several months at least, that if we get an opportunity, Great-West Lifeco or IGM have some great acquisition, we will prioritize building out those businesses for attractive acquisitions they might make. But absent that, because those are kind of episodic, if I can put it, when they actually have a deal and they need capital, our plan is to reduce our cash and buy shares back. We have not changed our view on buying back, I think it was CAD 350 million of prefs. We haven't done anything on that under the current environment.
And as for the final part of your question, the amount of cash that we would like to hold, I think we have kind of a guideline that two times our operating expenses and financing charges would be kind of a minimum we'd sit on. And maybe, Greg, I'll pass it to you on that. And you can complete the answer to the extent you want to add anything.
Sure. Yeah. That would be about CAD 50 million to give you a rough ballpark, Doug, in terms of the two times. And that's what we generally target. And it's not a firm number. When opportunity presents, I think we could go lower. But that is, generally speaking, where we target. And we have traveled above that for some time. You observed on that earlier. So the only other thing I'd say is just the line of sight, if you will, on the two balancing equations that Jeff mentioned are important when it comes back to getting the share buyback program more active. And that is basically line of sight on surfacing the value from some of the opportunities we talked about.
But not only that, when we have opportunities that present in the M&A sphere, we'll balance those two to guide us in terms of how much we would and how aggressive we would be in buying back.
Doug, I just want to point out that while we've surfaced value for our standalone businesses, we haven't monetized anything at this point. So the Lion transaction is great in terms of showing the underlying value we have there. But we haven't monetized anything. We haven't done it into our cash. The company's done a SPAC and has, but we haven't sold any shares, of course.
Yeah. You take me to my next question, just on the standalone businesses. And we look at what you have in your NAV. Is there any way that you and you've given the amount that's related to Lion. But there's still substantially more that's in that kind of bucket. And maybe I've missed it somewhere. But is there any way you can break down the value that you attribute to some of these larger items in the standalone businesses that's in the NAV?
So Greg, I'm going to throw that to you. I think the question is, can you break down the number between the standalone businesses into the individual parts? I'm going to throw that at you.
Yeah. I think I'd take that question away for you, Doug. We haven't actually broken those down in the past. But GP Strategies is a publicly traded company. So I think you can figure that one out. So the other two would represent the amount that is the remainder. So I'll leave it to you.
Okay. Yeah. That's fine. And I can always come back. But just last quick one, just trying to get a sense of the expense side. You show CAD 20 million corporate expenses. I know that's after tax. And so let's call it CAD 30 million pre-tax. I'm just trying to triangulate that back to what you show in slide 25, the CAD 35 million-CAD 45 million. And if it's easier to chat on this offline, I'm happy to do that as well. So thanks.
I'm not sure where you were going there. We have CAD 50 million of cost savings pre-tax on page 25. We think we've got 30 of that reduced. And we have CAD 20 million to go. Those are pre-tax costs at Power Corporation.
Yeah.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah. No. I was just going to say in the financials, to get you adjusted, it just shows corporate expenses of 20. I'm sure there's something else that's somewhere else, and I know that's after tax. Yeah, so I can follow up. If it's easier to go through it offline, that's fine as well.
Sure. We can follow it up offline, Doug. But one of the things, there's a couple of one-timers in the quarter. So that may be what it's accounting for, the difference when you're looking at it. I'm having trouble looking and finding it on my slides right now. But that's probably what the difference is.
Okay. Thanks.
All right. Thanks, Doug.
Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Geoffrey Kwan of RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Good morning.
Hey, Geoff.
Maybe asking it a slightly different way in terms of some of the surfacing value stuff that you've done. Obviously, a number of things over the past couple of years on simplifying structure, surfacing value, that sort of thing, but based on, I guess, how you think about what additional opportunities you could undertake to further simplify the structure or surface value, but assuming no acquisition is involved in that, if we were to use the baseball analogy, what inning do you think you are right now in terms of this whole process of, again, simplifying the structure of surfacing value?
That's a good question. Every time you think you're in the third inning, three years later, you've got lots of innings ahead of you. It never ends. I guess that's maybe a flip answer. But let's start with Power itself. I think the right place to be at Power is where we have a business which is simple. It's finances, i.e., it's alternative asset management. We're making money on our capital. We're already doing that. We're making good money on the invested capital. We're making money as asset managers. And we're probably, depending on where you go and what platform it is, kind of one, two to three, four years. It depends on the fundraising, really, getting more scale there.
Three years from now, four years from now, we've got a clean Power Corp that's got seed capital in it, has got investment management fees and carry, and is making money as an asset manager. We're doing a good job of explaining all of that. We have good disclosure that people understand what we're making on the seed capital and what we're making as an asset manager. That's a simple business model at Power. That's where we're aiming to get to. If you then ask, what are the opportunities across the broader group to simplify things that exist? There are other opportunities out there. We get asked the question a lot. There are things we talk about. We have China Asset Management in two places. We have asset management businesses across the platform.
Are there things that we can do to put those in a more logical structure? And those are things that I don't want to get ahead of ourselves and start speculating when and if those could happen. But we talk a lot about those. So it's a little bit that there's still lots of opportunities within the operating businesses where we may be able to create more dynamic companies, stronger companies, and companies where the market would give greater recognition for the businesses they're in. So I don't know whether that puts us in what inning. But there's still lots of opportunities, I guess, is the way I'd conclude on your question, Jeff.
Jeff?
Yeah. Go ahead, Greg, please.
I was getting all anxious because I thought Geoff Kwan was going to be asking about the baseball analogy, and I was going to say that, yeah, we have CAD 0.03 on the sale of Rawlings in the quarter, so that's where I thought you were going, Geoff.
My other question was just kind of at the corporate level. In 2020, you had tax recoveries of, I think it was CAD 52 million. It was, I think it was CAD 43 million in 2019. Can you talk about, I guess, how we should kind of think about how that tax line might play out in 2021?
I know who's answering this question.
Yeah. That's highly dependent upon the amount of gains that we will recognize going through the year, and if you look at our financials, you'll see that we still have a fair number of tax losses carried forward that we can apply on an ongoing basis, so that will be the determinant in terms of how much we will realize going forward.
Okay. So maybe ask it another way then. If there were no gains that you're booking, would that mean that the number would be a normal kind of assumption on taxes? Or just wanted to understand the mix as to what's driving the tax recoveries. Obviously, you mentioned gains, but just trying to understand if we make certain assumptions around how 2021 goes, what that might mean for the tax line.
Yeah. So you have to look at our tax line between what's payable and what is cash taxes, Geoff. And so the accrual accounting is basically the topic I was talking to on a cash basis. So we are not paying taxes at this point in time on our earnings, quite frankly, because we're applying our previous tax losses to our income. So at the holding company right now, we're not paying tax. Does that help you with your understanding?
Yes, it does. Thanks.
Okay. Thanks, Geoff.
Thank you. And your next question comes from the line of Tom MacKinnon with BMO Capital . Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my questions, morning, Jeff and Greg. Just taking on the simplification that Jeff was discussing, just taking that a little bit further. IGM owns 4% of Great-West. Great-West owns 3.9% of IGM. You do have China AMC in two places, Wealthsimple in two places. How should we think of any kind of cleanup associated with that? And because I assume some of these things are core, but some of these things are non-core, and how should we be thinking about as that gets simplified? You just did this whole reorganization to avoid having two NAV plays. Shouldn't the entire NAV play be at the top and then pure plays down below? I'm just curious as to what you're thinking is there.
Yeah. So good question. And I'll start by saying all of that, where it sits is for historical reasons that made sense at the time. So if I go to Wealthsimple, when we first started Wealthsimple, it was part of a fintech play. And we were running it primarily off of the Power Financial level at the time. And as we started to build the Wealthsimple, we realized this is something actually that could be a very it's not just a fintech play. This could be a part of the franchise long-term. And IGM maybe is the best place to start to build that out. And they started, so it was funded at the top in the initial rounds. And the next round went into IGM. So you end up with it in two places. And I agree that's not simple.
It was also quite a venture capital bet at the time, right, and so it is where it is right now. It's a more complicated story on the cross-ownership between Great-West and IGM. They'll go back to many, many, many years ago when some large transactions were being funded, and the group was trying to encourage cooperation across common buying and common systems, and anyway, those are there, and we're aware that that's something that we also talk about from time to time. You know the story on China Asset Management. We would have put it in IGM at the first time that we got an opportunity to buy a block. We were not eligible at that time in 2011, I think it was, when the first block came.
We either bought it at Power or we didn't buy it at all when the subsequent blocks came available. IGM had then qualified to be a buyer. And we got IGM involved. So there's a history that's not a direct answer to your question, Tom, but that's just a little bit of the history. So we do still have opportunities to look at all of those things. They're all opportunities for us to look at, to simplify, and put things in a more logical place and assemble assets where they're in one spot and they're in the correct spot. You asked whether I think part of your question as well was whether these are long-term holds or not. And I think we've invested a lot of money in China Asset Management in the last several years. We think that's a great place to be a great market to be positioned.
We have a very unique position in the Chinese asset management business. I don't think there's any other non-Chinese party that's got as much long-term assets when you look at our 28% collective group. I don't know that there's anybody who's got more of the Chinese asset management than our group. So that's a great asset. Wealthsimple's got lots of momentum. But I don't want to say that and we haven't identified Wealthsimple as a business that is standalone. I mean, it's financial services. But we're going to make, obviously, not going to paint ourselves in a corner as to what we do with respect to any of those assets in terms of how we realize how we turn those into value creation for the company. I don't know if I answered your question.
I think what I said was that they're all in different places for historical reasons. They're all opportunities to simplify. But I'm not going to speculate on how, when. I won't go that far.
Yeah, is the thinking to have? I mean, before you had a sub underneath Power Corp, and that was like an NAV under an NAV. Is part of the simplification to have pure? We don't need to have an NAV story underneath an NAV story.
Yeah. Sorry to jump in. That was part of your question I missed. So when that happens, it's because there's an industrial logic, if I can call it, to put it there. So let's say IGM. It's got China Asset Management, which although it's an earnings driver, it's such a high-growth earnings company that if IGM should be a multiple of X, it should probably be a 2X, right? So you start to say, "Hey, you can't just have this capitalized at IGM's multiple." You try and call it out and say, "There's a lot more value here than just 11 times or 12 times or whatever IGM is trading at because of its growth." You have other opportunities.
For example, when IGM is invested in Wealthsimple or when they had an investment in Personal Capital, they're not making those investments as a VC because they want to make money as a venture capitalist. Each of those investments at IGM were done because those companies could have potentially, and may still, in the case of Wealthsimple, be part of their long-term business model. But you're at very high-risk stages of their company's buildup. So you're not funding it all alone. You've got partners coming in. Those partners provide capital, but also, in many cases, expertise to build the businesses. But they're down at IGM not because IGM wants to become an NAV play because they're making those investments because they could be very important parts of their long-term business franchise. At Power Corp, that isn't we're prepared to do NAV businesses.
We are doing NAV businesses, as is the case at GWL. So I hope that clarifies. We don't have a strategy at IGM or Great-West Lifeco to go out and put a whole bunch of NAV businesses in place. But you do things. Sometimes you got to buy stuff that's not earning money because you're looking five years out. And you're saying, "This could be an important part of the franchise." Actually, I'm going to go on and say Personal Capital for Great-West Lifeco and Power is part of that. They didn't buy it because they want to become an NAV play. They bought it because they think it's going to drive earnings. It might be three, four, five years out that it's really going to drive earnings. But they acquired it for that reason, not because they want to turn themselves into an NAV play.
Am I going up the hierarchy in there?
That's good. That's good. It's just, yeah, I think the distinction was it's part of the long-term business franchise.
Exactly.
Just a long-term there is.
And then you swallow hard. Tom, then you swallow hard. When you're looking for IGM, Great-West Lifeco, and you feel you have to buy something that's not earning anything because it could potentially really drive your business three, four, five years out, you swallow hard because you may not get any value recognition for it. And you do your best to try and point out to the market, "Hey, there's value here," which is what IGM is doing in their new segmentation and trying to draw attention to that.
Right. And just a final quick one. On Lion, I think it says in the slides you're 34.6% ownership. Is that fully diluted? And what would that be if this acquisition closed today?
Greg, I think I can answer it, but I'm going to go ahead and throw that to Greg.
Yeah. That is the fully diluted number, Tom.
That's assuming if it closed today because I think it was based on the subscription or based on the order and what was.
No, that would be based upon the value of the CAD 10 on announcement. That's how I see it.
And that's not going to change based. That's IGM's content.
It could change depending on where the price is, right? That will be the determinant of how much the dilution will be. I can't give it to you yet on the CAD 19.08 that we're at. What it's trading at today right now. I don't have that at my fingertips.
Okay. You're basically saying it's a dilution gain for accounting, not a mark-to-market gain through the books. Is that what you're saying, Greg?
No, I think he was going out.
Yeah.
I think he was.
Yeah. We're just going to try to get the fully diluted ownership. If we wanted to track the price of this thing, what would be the so the 34.6 was when it was CAD 10, but it's not CAD 10. So it's more like CAD 20. And would that still be 34.6?
Yeah. So Tom, I don't have that number handy right now. I haven't calculated it. And it would affect the fully diluted number. So I'll endeavor to get that back to you.
Okay. That's great. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Tom.
And Kenya, next question comes from the line of Graham Ryding of TD Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you. Good morning. If I could just jump to your investment platforms for my first question. So specifically under Sagard Holdings, so the management fees and then they've been increasing nicely with the increase in your funded AUM. But if I were to compare that against the investment platform expenses, I guess what level of third-party AUM would you need to reach to make that line item consistently profitable?
Again, I don't have the numbers in front of me. But Sagard Holdings itself, from its fee revenue and carry, I don't think is too far away from being at a point where it is breaking even. But I don't have the exact number. But that includes fee revenue that it would earn from the fees that Power Corp has invested in its own seed capital. So Power Corp is a limited partner when we put seed capital in, just like any other third-party investor. And if you think about that, Power Corp, if we were investing seed capital elsewhere, we would be paying those fees as well. So on its total fee basis, Sagard Holdings is, I would say, a year or two out on its break-even point.
Power Sustainable has probably got another couple of years to go there in terms of its fundraising, depending on the pace of that fundraising. That's the way I'll answer the question big picture. And I'd invite Greg if you wanted to add any further detail to the answers to the question.
Yeah. I think there's a very good illustration of where the profitability of the platforms is currently. If you go to, I think, page 48 of the MD&A, you'll find it, and you can reference it, and if you have any further questions, you can give us a call.
Okay. Sounds good. And just to segue on to Power Sustainable Capital. So the 1 billion infrastructure fund, would you be able to share the amount of third-party AUM you're targeting over there?
We haven't disclosed that yet, but I think we will be shortly. But I don't think we've disclosed that at this point. So I don't think we're in a position to say that. But there will be hopefully further announcements here as we move forward in the short term.
Okay. That's fair.
It's the best we can do right now. Yeah. Thanks.
No worries. And just.
Go ahead, Freddie. I didn't mean to, yeah. Go ahead, please.
No, no. That answers my question. I was just going to my last question. So in the whole simplification process, I had a question on GWL. And I mainly asked this because of your focus towards financial services companies. So I'm just wondering how you see GWL fitting into the strategy. And I appreciate that you've already collapsed Pargesa and reduced one holding company over there. But going forward, do you have any plans or are you thinking about doing anything with GWL?
Yeah. It's a very good question. One we get a lot. And I think when you look at GBL, you could certainly make the case it's not a financial services company at this point. It's maybe some version of a closed-end fund. It's a closed-end investment manager with a very different business model, with an influence model in Europe where it buys large positions, frequently goes on the boards, adds value. So you can debate whether that's financial services or not. I think what it is is very unique. Let me start with that. The change in strategy that we announced a year ago, we certainly have gone from kind of diversification to just focusing down on financial services. GBL itself is 7%, 8% of the total value. But whether or not it's financial services, it's actually a great asset we have.
So we don't have any plans to be not being part of GBL going forward. It's something that was built up starting with Paul Desmarais, Sr. in 1980. It was actually financial services back then. We've got really the largest I think it's the largest holding company in Europe. A deal flow through the relationships that we and the Frère family and the whole group that are in GBL have built up over decades. It's made a lot of money for the group in the past. It can go through periods when the European economy or the global economy, I should say, because the real estates or global businesses are not doing well. It's gone through some periods like that. But over time, it's created a lot of value for Power Corp shareholders. So we don't have any plans to change it or to dispose of it.
But I would agree that it is probably not a pure financial services company at this point. But you've got to be. We are focused on creating value, and we think it's a source of additional value. I think that's the best way I would put it.
Yep. That makes sense. Those were all my questions. Thank you for your time.
Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you once again. It is still open if you wish to ask a question. There are no further questions coming through at this time, gentlemen. Please continue.
Okay. Well, then I won't say much more. I'll just wrap it up and thank everybody for your attendance here, and we'll be back actually pretty soon because I think Q1 is just around the corner, and so wish everybody a good day, and we'll talk to everybody soon. Thank you very much.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference call for today. Thank you for participating. You may now all disconnect.