Welcome to the last session of day two at the Barclays conference.
Woo-hoo!
I can truly say we saved the best for last. We've got the dream team here from Autodesk. We've got Steve Hooper, VP of Design and Manufacturing. And of course, Simon Mays-Smith, Head of Investor Relations. Also have Dan Harlan on the Investor Relations team here in the audience. We've got about 30 minutes together. Let's take 20-25 minutes, do some fireside chat here with the team, which I know is gonna be really fun. And then, listen, it's the last session, let's get a question out of here, out of the audience. We've got a mic runner in the back. We'd love to keep it interactive and fun. So maybe with all of that, Steve, Simon, thank you so much for taking the time here.
Oh, great. Looking forward to it.
No worries.
It wouldn't be a conference without all of that. Maybe just to level set here, Steve, right? Because we, you know, we've spent a lot of time together, right?
Sure.
Maybe just to, for the benefit for the audience, can you just share a little bit about your history with Autodesk, your role at the company, again, for those that aren't as familiar?
Yeah. So I've been at Autodesk now for about 20 years. So I've worked in a variety of positions. Most recently, I was the vice president for our design and manufacturing marketing group. And then over the last 5 years, I've led our product design and manufacturing group for software development. So I'm responsible basically for all of the tools in our portfolio that either create engineering and conceptual design information, simulate its behavioral characteristics, or help you manufacture it, whether that's fabrication, subtractive machining, or 3D printing. So my group's job is to understand you know the business requirements of our customers, some of their I'd say their macroeconomic drivers and the strategies that they're pursuing, and to codify that in software development requirements and then produce the software that solves their problems.
That's helpful. Well, 20 years, huh?
Yeah.
That's great. That's great. Simon, first of all, always great to have you at a Barclays conference and event. Maybe just to level set, here again for the group, before diving into it with here a little bit with Steve. Can you just recap, you know, some of the more important points, from the last earnings call that you wanted to make sure we knew, again, just so that we're all on the same page?
Yeah, I, I guess it was really sort of three things. One is, obviously beat and raise for this fiscal year across all metrics. Secondly, we were giving a framework of guidance for next year, not full guidance, 'cause no sensible company does that in Q3 the previous year, but to sell-- get some important stuff off our chest,
Sure.
For next year to make sure people have their heads in the right place. And making sure that people were reading full sentences, so weren't just reading 9%, but were reading the full sentence, which was 9% or more on that. Talking a lot about the new transaction model, which maybe we can do a bit about later.
Yeah
... as a sort of the final shift of us going more direct to our customers. And then the sort of final thing to look forward to is the sort of the mechanical rebuild in our cash flow over the next two years, as from a trough of this year, as we make complete the shift from Multi-year upfront to Multi-year annual.
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of fun stuff-
Yeah
... to talk about in there, as well. But Steve, maybe to start with you, so much knowledge here in the design and manufacturing space. I'd love to talk a little bit about the competitive backdrop a little bit. You know, I think we know the other players here.
Yeah
... in the space, whether it's Dassault or PTC or Siemens.
Yeah.
Where does Autodesk kind of fit into this mix in your view, in the manufacturing sort of market? And what would you say sort of customers point to in your solution, you know, when they select Autodesk in a manufacturing use case? Does that make sense?
Does make total sense. I'd say two things off the bat. One would be accessibility, and then we tend to characterize that as democratization. So, I'd say our competitors probably are more enterprise-focused than have been for the last 30 or so years. It's pretty difficult to come down market from the enterprise.
Right.
If you look at the addressable market in the manufacturing space, the lion's share of it's in the mid-market. Our growth engine really is in the low to mid-market segment of the manufacturing base. Not to say that we don't serve the enterprise as well, but you've seen this happen in cycles previously. If you think about AutoCAD, when the company was founded, typically that market was at that time dominated by a number of large enterprise 2D systems. I used to use one before I worked at Autodesk. I was an engineer.
Mm.
I actually used a version of Unigraphics, which is now part of Siemens.
Sure, yeah.
That was $20,000-$30,000 a seat, plus another $10,000 of hardware. And then AutoCAD came out, $3,000, sits on a PC Windows box, fraction of the price, an order of magnitude cheaper. It was considered ToyCAD at the time. It was considered low-end, bottom of the market. And typically, what we see is through every cyclical disruption in our industry, the disruptor has started at the low-end of the market, matured, and moved up.
Mm.
It's classic innovator's dilemma. I don't think I can think of a, a market, maybe others can, but I can't think of many markets where the high end comes down successfully into the mid-market.
Mm.
Usually the lower end, and when I say low end, I mean the marketized accessible software moving up. So I'd say most of our customers kind of rely on us to provide that high-end capability at a price point that's affordable, but it needs to be out of the box, self-serve, easy to use, fun to use, and that typically is where we sit in the market. I think some others have been successful at that in the past, but those products were mainly developed before the people that use them today were born, which is kind of unusual for software.
Right.
Most of our customers now are of a younger generation and expect more intuitive products, and that's something we aim to satisfy.
Absolutely. So democratization with AutoCAD, and I'm sure we're gonna talk about democratization with Fusion as well-
Absolutely
... which we'll definitely touch on. But maybe just to follow up on that point around competition, you know, it feels like Autodesk and frankly, some other competitors as well... I've talked about sort of just a competitive opportunity around SolidWorks, right? Which as we know, is owned by. So maybe for you, Steve, can we just talk about why now is perceived to be such a ripe time, right, to potentially displace? And why do we think Autodesk can maybe gain some disproportionate share in, as part of that?
I think there's lots of reasons. So software products have a natural product life cycle. And when a product gets to the end of its product life cycle, it tends to bloat, and it tends to try and justify the price point it's got based on additional functionality that many people don't actually require. I think that possibly is one source of challenge that that particular product faces. I think the SW itself recognizes that and has tried to make changes, but in trying to make changes and introduce new technology, they've undermined confidence in their current solutions, and they've caused a lot of confusion for their existing user base, who, I think, feel a little disenfranchised. That's certainly what people that have moved to us would tell you. So I think that's one potential source of dissatisfaction, which creates a competitive share shift opportunity.
For me, I actually pretend to prefer to focus on the value that we can deliver, not undermining our competition's position. For me, the value that we can deliver that you cannot deliver on a desktop product is generative AI and automation. Now, generative AI, everyone's gonna say it, it's like climbing up the top of its hype cycle. I'm not so much interested in generative AI specifically, as the automation capabilities it delivers, and that's something we've been focused on now for 10-12 years. So you'll remember back in 2011, moving to the cloud, everyone told us we were crazy. No one's gonna move to the cloud. No one's gonna want a subscription model. You're gonna lose all your customers.
People started to realize moving to the cloud delivered a lot of substantial benefits, but they associated them with what I would call first-order benefits, which are things like collaboration and connectivity, which is great in a supply chain. It's even better in a pandemic. It's awesome, but it's not the end goal.
Mm-hmm.
The end goal is to get to automation. To get there, you have to centralize and move data to the cloud, but you also have to move all the compute capabilities to the cloud. Once you've done that, you've got unique data and high volume with the services necessary to edit it, where you can train models and deliver automations. They don't have to be generative AI models. They can be procedural, they can be typical machine learning, AI models. In all those cases, though, you can create terrific value that you can't create in an isolated legacy desktop product, and that, for me, is one of the things I think our customers are waking up to. So I think the pandemic accelerated some of that because of the connectivity and remote collaboration.
The next wave of that disruption will be the automation capabilities we can deliver with things like generative AI.
Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe for you, I mean, just picking up on Steve talking about the cloud. You made, you know, an interesting comparison to the three clouds that Autodesk is building to what, you know, another great company, Intuit, did years ago. Maybe you could just sort of compare and contrast what we're doing here at Autodesk versus what, what they did to sort of provide some comparability across businesses that we're both, you know, that we're all familiar with.
Yeah, so just to put that in context, if you sort of look at the external representation, sort of customer-facing representation, which Steve's just been talking about, so you can use sort of something like Salesforce as an analogy for that. Which is sort of industry clouds with us building capability and services on it, our customers integrating and building capabilities and service on it, our channel partners building capabilities on service, and then having third-party providers providing capabilities and service on it.
Mm.
Then the internal representation, which is what we're talking about here, which is our shared platform, which we call Autodesk Platform Services, is where the Intuit analogy comes in. And I use Intuit because the person who did a lot of the work on the Intuit platform, Raji, joined us a couple of years ago.
Right.
There's a bunch of stuff which is interesting about that. We talked all about all of it at our Investor Day in March, and I'd encourage folks to go and have a look at that. But there's a few things that I'd sort of pay attention to as it relates to this conversation. The first one is around sort of common components of the platform, and therefore, our ability to share, to engineer more efficiently and with greater velocity and to reduce our technical debt over time. The second thing, which we talked a lot about at Autodesk University a few weeks ago, is around data granularity. So moving from big files to granular data, and then you can apply AI and machine learning to that granular data and get all, a lot of the benefits that Steve's been talking about.
And then the third thing is around the way that sort of money, the way you interact with your customers and the way that finances work, run around the system, where we, and we were talking a bunch about that on our Q3 earnings call with the new transaction model, et cetera.
Yeah.
So it's interesting. It generates opportunity for us. It allows us to scale. Long term, some lots of good opportunity from that.
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe one of those clouds that I want to talk about here, maybe back to you, Steve, is just the Fusion Cloud, right? Again, going back to that idea of democratization and making sort of another platform shift.
Yeah.
Maybe you could just... I mean, could we just talk a little bit about, you know, explaining the significance of the move to the cloud for the manufacturing industry? I mean, those other competitors that we talked about, you know, you know, they are very far from kind of a cloud journey here. You've gotten ahead of that curve. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I mean, we kind of discussed a little bit of it in the last question. So I think first-order benefits are, as Simon said, you move the data to the cloud, and you granularize it.
Mm-hmm.
So many legacy desktop products deal with proprietary data locked up in a large file format. That has two negatives to it. One, it makes it very difficult for people to collaborate and access that data together. I bet everyone in this room uses, like, Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, or an analogy to that. You all co-author PowerPoints, whatever, within your own companies. It's very difficult to do that if you have a proprietary system where the data is locked up in a file that's local. You need to be able to granulate the data so you can have concurrent access to it. It also means that if that data model's open, which is not something our competition does, other partners, like Simon said, like Ansys or like Cadence, can come in and write vertical applications on it, add data to it, read data from it.
It can be small, little companies. I met with an AI provider locally, who's based over in Oakland, that does large language model prompt-based features. They can write that into our data model too, so that we don't have to build all of that technology ourselves. So that's one benefit of moving to the cloud. The obvious one is, you know, collaboration, connectivity. You can turn a user on within 10 seconds.
Mm.
You know, you don't have to have an IT administrator infrastructure in your own busines to set all this stuff up. It's flexible, so if you, if you do wanna reduce capacity for a period of time, you can turn some stuff off, you can turn it back on. You can basically adjust your infrastructure to suit the demand that you're meeting in the market. So I think many of those things are, you know, integral benefits of moving to the cloud. I'd say there are other things that are on the horizon, generative AI and all the automation technologies we're talking about are one of them. You also have access to infinite compute. So most of our simulation services, they run in the cloud. You don't have to have one of these massive, like, workstations tucked away under your, your desk.
You can access pretty much infinite compute on AWS's platform. You know, you could run a crash test if you wanted, without investing in a massive local high-performance cluster. So-
Yeah.
Those are some of the benefits, I would say.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I wanna shift away from the cloud and talk a little bit about the macro backdrop here, right? Which, of course, is always a dynamic situation. You know, in my view, one of the great things about Autodesk's business is really the diversity of the end markets. You know, whether it's the A, the E, or the C, if you will, right, or manufacturing, of course. But just given, you know, the macro concerns out there, maybe it'd be helpful, particularly with all the time that you've spent at Autodesk, maybe it'd be helpful to talk about what your business, right, in manufacturing, has done in prior kind of downturns, right?
And maybe now, why now the businesses, you know, has seemed quite a bit more resilient, right, than maybe some economic indicators would show.
Yeah. I mean, in the past, we've always enjoyed the benefit of our multiple industries, which obviously diversifies the risk for any one particular vertical. The same is true in manufacturing itself. So many other competitors may have a rich history in aerospace or automotive, so if one of those subsegments has a problem, they suffer that problem perhaps disproportionately to the rest of the market. So again, our risk is diversified actually within the manufacturing bases. We serve many different segments. We tend to be more horizontal across manufacturing. I would say in the last downturn, we did benefit obviously from the various industry verticals we had going in and out of that cycle at different stages. This time around, obviously, we're on a subscription model, and so that subscription model-
Beautiful thing.
... I mean, it, it's a fantastic thing.
Yeah.
Not only does it give you a more predictable business, it also gives you a more resilient business in a time like this. I also think you've got to think about it from a customer's benefit perspective. They have the benefit. The perceived benefit to them is that they can turn software services on and off more flexibly. In a downturn economic cycle, it actually works in our favor. We would embrace it, not fear it. Any customer that's looking to save cost or integrate more flexibility in their IT infrastructure has a much better opportunity of doing that with us than some of these other high-cost solutions that are pretty much fixed. You know, they're pretty hard infrastructures to change and adapt dynamically.
It takes maybe three years to implement them, and if you're gonna upscale or downscale them, it takes another two years to do it. The flexibility that we can offer assures our customer more resilience in a downturn. It also means that they have the value of operating on that data in the cloud, and if they wanna move off of our platform, they're gonna lose that value. And so I think that kind of subscription entitlement, combined with the value of cloud data capabilities, means that we're much more of a critical partner to a customer, which makes us less likely to be deprecated through an economic downturn.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, Simon, maybe we can segue over to you with some more financial questions because, you know, it was just... I think one of the biggest things coming out of the last call was just this new agency model, right? That more direct relationship with the customer. Can you just maybe recap a little bit, and why that's so important to Autodesk strategically?
Yeah. So we've been, over multiple years, making a transition from a model which was essentially designed to ship CDs across the globe, you know, 30 years ago, to a model where we have a modern SaaS relationship. So part of that is around the way you price, where you've, you're moving from a perpetual license to subscription. Part of it is moving from multi-year upfront to multi-year annual, which we were doing a couple of years ago. And then this is kind of the final big piece, where you have moved from a, what's called a two-tier distribution model, with a distributor and a retailer, to a direct, and what's called an agency model, where you have a direct billing relationship with your customer. So really, it's around.
And then once you have a direct billing relationship with your customer, that enables a whole lot of other good stuff, which I'll, I'll come on to in a second. So that's the sort of macro context. And the reason why you don't do all three of those things at the same time is 'cause they're big rocks, and if you do them at the same time and something goes wrong, then you've got some business continuity issues, potentially... So you have to sequence them and do them sequentially rather than at the same time.
So in terms of what this will do, it will move us from a sort of two-tiered distribution market with what's called a buy-sell model, where we essentially sell our product at a discount to list to our channel partners, and then they sell it at less of a discount, to list, to their customers. Which means we don't set the price of our products, unlike almost any other company-
Mm.
To our customers, it's our channel partners who do. So one of the things that will happen is that we will move to what's called an agency model, where we will set the price of the product to the customer. And then our channel partners will then compete based on the value of the services that they're offering, rather than the amount of the discount that they're giving away, to the end market.
Yeah.
So that's one of the things. The second thing is that we will be insourcing some of the services that are being provided by the distributor. So we've built our own billing platform on which we, our channel partners, and our customers will sit. And so we will then start servicing directly and providing those services which historically have been provided by our distributor. And what the benefit we'll get from that, other than having some efficiency savings from that process, we think is really two things as it relates to the customer. The first one is, for the first time, we will be able to see both usage data and purchasing behavior within the customer base, and we think that will show up white space within our customers where there's opportunity for us.
Mm.
And secondly, it will make it easier for our customers to purchase our products. You know, so if they're using a channel partner today, and they want to use AutoCAD, they have to go to the channel partner, get a proposal, et cetera, and that can take time. Whereas with the new model, they'll just be able to hit a button, and they'll have it available to them immediately. And we think that means that they will get more of the products, that they want to consume.
Right. Feels like generally it just removes some friction from the sales process, right?
Yeah.
And gives a lot more visibility into how customers are using the tools.
Yes, and, and what it will do for us is it'll also move all of our sales and marketing dollars into one place, and it's essentially been in two places-
Yeah
...one at pre-revenue and one in the operating costs. And then by moving it into one place, we think we'll then be able to, you know, having it all in one place, we can optimize it as well going forward.
Great segue into the next question.
Yeah.
I think that Debbie gave a good bit of guidance just on how to think about, you know, what the transition could do to the income statement and cash flow. Could you just remind us what she said just on the impact to revenue? Not quantitatively, right?
Yeah.
But just qualitatively. You know, the impact to revenue, the impact to operating profit and margin and free cash flow.
Yeah. So it's really math, which is, if you look at our revenue, we, we essentially report net revenue. And that is comprises of gross revenue, which is the effective price which the customer pays, less the what's called Contra revenue, which is the amount we pay our channel partners. And the net of that is the net revenue, which is what we report. Under the new model, we will report gross revenue. The contra payments will move from pre-revenue to sales and marketing costs. So, what will mechanically happen is we will have higher revenues, we will have higher costs, but profit dollars will stay about the same.
Right.
Which means mechanically, that our margin % will be lower.
Right. So it's really just geography here, right?
Correct. Correct.
Okay, got it. Got it. That's helpful. And no change to free cash flow as well, right?
Correct.
Okay.
As I said, as we, as we then optimize that, that will then create opportunities to improve profit dollars and cash flow dollars over time.
Got it. Understood. Understood. How long should it take for this transition to take place? I mean, you know, that seems like a big undertaking, a global business here, of course. How do you think about timing? And to the extent you can disclose, I mean, you know, what's the total revenue opportunity that we could be going after? What could that Contra revenue sort of contribute once this is sort of all said and done?
So we'll talk a bit, bit more about that, probably in February when we give full-year guidance, and I'll explain why. Which is, we've essentially been testing this model for some time, for 18 months. So we started off with a single product and a new product, so very simple, so low volumes with a single product called Flex.
Mm-hmm.
We then told you in Q2 that we were testing it in Australia, and that test started about two to three weeks ago. Essentially what we're doing there is we're testing it on two dimensions. One is around breadth. We're substantially testing all of our products, and then the second one is volume, where Australia obviously has more volume than Flex. So that's beginning to test two additional dimensions. Depending on how that test goes, we will know how much more engineering we need to do, if any, before we then move on to regional tests. And simplistically, there are two types of regional tests. So for example, America, where you have a massive volume test, 'cause it's big, but single, single language, single jurisdiction.
Mm-hmm.
In Europe, you have a volume test, but it also has a bunch of other dimensions around different countries, different languages-
Mm
... different legal systems, different currencies as well. So those are different dimensions of complexity. So we have to make sure that the billing system can handle all of these different dimensions-
Yeah
... of complexity. So because we don't know yet whether it can, that will determine the speed of the rollout of the transition. And then the second thing to understand is that when we transition a region from the date, we don't transition immediately all of the old revenue that's already been put on the balance sheet and billings. We only recognize the incremental, the new business, and the new renewals, as they come through over time. So what will happen is it will bleed in and build the effect over time, that transition from the contra revenue from-
Right
... from contra into the operating costs will essentially bleed in over time. What that means is that whatever the impact is in fiscal 2025, it will be bigger in 2026 and bigger in 2027. It's like, it's almost like a subscription stack.
Yeah.
Building it over time.
Sure. Absolutely. So maybe we'll use that to sort of dovetail into, you know, into the sort of preliminary outlook that we talked about, you know, for next year, which is 9%+, right? Revenue growth. You know, maybe a couple of questions there just on this agency model. One of the questions that I had coming out of the earnings call, I'm sure you did as well, was, "Oh, well, boy, it's 9%+, and you're getting a benefit from this agency model. Boy, the real growth profile is much lower." Talk to us about why that math may, you know, why that may not be correct?
... Well, I think really sort of two things. As I said, we said 9% or more, we didn't say 9%. So it doesn't preclude an outcome that is within the 10%-15% range...
Mm-hmm
... that we've talked about on average. And that was an on average and over time range that we talked about at Investor Day.
Yep.
But the second thing is to understand, which we talked about on the call, which is qualitatively what is going into the 9% or more statement, which is some headwinds from the pace of new business growth this year, which has been slower, consistent, but slower than it was last year. And that's partly because of the economic cycle, and it's partly because of non-economic factors. So an example of that, non-economic factors, you can actually see in our P&L this year, with our APAC growth has been slower, and that's because China locked down last year, which means we've got less business coming off the balance sheet through the P&L, through our APAC business this year.
Similarly, this year, we've had the writers strike, and that will have-- that's had an impact on the new business in the media and entertainment business, and that will have an impact on revenue growth next year. So there are both cyclical and non-cyclical reasons why new product business accelerates and decelerates. The second one we've already talked about, which is the impact-- Oh, well, I'll actually come back to that. Second headwind is FX. Again, we haven't quantified it, but we hedge our revenues. And so, FX has been moving around quite a bit. But, from what we know today and where rates are, we expect to have a headwind as well next year. And then the third thing is the absence of the true-up revenues that we've had.
So back in 2020, a bunch of our customers were predicting future usage of large enterprise customers, and they predicted cautiously because of the pandemic.
Got it.
And so they've had to buy extra tokens this year, at the end of their contracts, and that won't—that's a one-off, which won't recur next year.
Right.
That creates a bit of a headwind for us next year. Those are all headwinds, and then in terms of tailwinds, we'll get some tailwind from the new transaction model as we report gross revenue rather than net revenue.
Absolutely.
-as well.
And really the speed of that will dictate-
Determine the size of it. Yep.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we've got three or four minutes left here. I'm gonna shift to free cash flow, and maybe one or two last questions here. Any questions here from the audience before I move over? You know, maybe circling back to you, I mean, you know, so we talked about revenue, we talked about sort of the change in geography. You know, the other thing we talked about in the last earnings call was just this, you know, the path, right, around free cash flow normalization, right? And we said that really wasn't gonna be very much of a linear path. There were some, you know, there were some sort of considerations for this year compared to next year. Can you just remind us how we should be thinking about that?
And also, what is really the North Star, right, on kind of what normalized free cash flow looks like in terms of, you know, rules and such?
Yeah. So starting at the end-
Yep
... is that we've gone through a model of transitioning from multi-year contracts, so typically three-year contracts, where we've been paid up front. So let's say that's a three-year contract for $1 a year, that would be getting paid $3 in year one, $0 in year two, $0 in year three, to a contract where we're doing signing multi-year contracts, but getting paid annually, so $1 a year. So, and we made that transition on March 28 for the vast majority of our business, the emerging markets business. And so, at the beginning of this year, so what it means is this year, we have a big drag on our free cash flow relative to last year because we're essentially trading $3 last year-
That's right
... for $1 this year. That may sound terrible, except when you start looking forward, because next year, what will happen is that the 2024 cohort, the fiscal 2024 cohort, which the calendar 2023 cohort, we've got a January year end, will come back and pay us the second $1 of their contract, and the fiscal 2025 cohort will pay us the first $1 of their contract. Then the following year, in fiscal 2026, the 2024 cohort will pay us the third $1 of their contract.
That's right.
The 25 cohort will pay us the second dollar of their contract, and the 26 cohort will pay us the first dollar of their contract, and you see magically then we've rebuilt that 3 dollars of that subscription stack.
That's right.
So that's mechanically what's happening underneath. We said the path would be nonlinear, and the reason we said the path would be nonlinear is that we had about $200 million of cash flow in our first quarter, which came from the old model. So that makes this year's cash flow not comparable with next year's. And so what we're saying, what we said last, no, it was two weeks ago, is that you need—if you wanna compare this year's cash flow with next year's cash flow, you need to take out that $200, $200 million from this year's cash flow, and that will make this year's cash flow comparable with next year's. And what you can see from that is that we'll see pretty good growth.
Got it. Got it. Well, maybe in the last minute that we've got, I mean, just the natural, you know, last question, you're generating such nice cash, is just capital allocation. You know, talk to us a little bit about how Autodesk has thought about capital allocation, and you know, how that might change down the road, if, if at all.
So we have a, you know, hopefully a pretty clear and pretty normal capital allocation framework, which is to invest organically, to invest through acquisition, and to buy back shares to offset dilution. We've been applying that framework flexibly, so for example, over the last year or two, we've changed the way that we buy back shares from buying in-year dilution only. And as the share price has come down, we've been buying forward the dilution. So essentially-
Mm
... buying back future years' dilution as well. And the reason for that is that the reduction in the share price has enabled us to buy back shares below the cost that we've been issuing them to our employees.
That's opportunistic.
So, so opportunistic. So as a corporate finance trade, that makes sense for us to do every day of the week. There's also been an issue, which is the valuation, you know, asset prices have reset in many parts of the world because of higher interest rates. But in some areas, they haven't, but particularly, you know, in certain parts of tech, the forces of higher interest rates and the realization that that has an impact on value takes time to come through, but at some point, that will change as well, and we expect to see opportunities there too.
Got it. Got it. Well, I think that's about all the time that we have left here. Steve, Simon, thanks so much for the time. This was really educational. Really learned a lot.
Great.
Thanks a lot. Yeah.
Thanks, Michael. Good to see you.
Thanks.
Good to see you, man.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks.