It's my pleasure to welcome The Carlyle Group CEO, Harvey Schwartz.
Patrick, great to be here. Good to see everybody.
Thank you.
I think this was my, this was my first conference last year.
It was.
It's good to be back.
Yes.
Happy anniversary.
Happy anniversary for our annual breakfast date. As a reminder, if you want to submit any questions, you can do it on the Pigeonhole website, and they'll show up here and I'll try to work them in as we get through the questions I've prepared. So maybe to start, Harvey, given we have most of the big alternative manager CEOs here, let's start with a higher level macro question. I sense increasing concern with my client base that sticky inflation, higher for longer rates, slower economic growth, could be particularly bad for levered risk assets. Do you guys agree with that view? Higher level, what's your outlook for inflation rates and the economy, and do you think we've achieved a soft landing?
Okay. Well, first of all, everybody, great, great to be here with all of you again. I think something that sometimes a little bit get lost when you're in the forest is kind of really what's driving the biggest macro factors in the world. I'm of the personal view that we're in the very early stage of a pretty significant paradigm shift. And what I mean by that is many of the macro paradigms that have driven economic growth, low inflation, are either shifting or they're reversing. And so, I celebrated my sixtieth birthday this year, 2 grandkids now, by the way, and... This is a tight group, and, so we'll just play it without the coffee. The...
Now, but if I look back over my lifetime, basically, declining interest rates, declining inflation, globalization, a couple billion people came out of poverty, regulation was reduced. These are incredible drivers of sort of reduced economic friction, and then when you take in geopolitical sort of trends over the past 30 years and globalization, all these things contribute to economic growth, more frictionless economic growth, and reduced inflation.
Mm.
In many regards, these things are shifting and not likely to reverse back anytime soon. So if you think about just two very, very big ones, globalization and the geopolitical climate today versus what we've had over the past 30 years, I think these are hugely significant trends. And so when you start asking questions about, okay, well, what's the inflation, economic inflation outlook or the outlook for interest rates? I often get asked this question, Patrick, like, what are the riskiest things out there that-
Mm
I see in the world? And I think one of the riskiest things out there in the world is recency bias. So if you're looking through... Again, just my personal opinion, if you're looking through the lens of, "Hey, we just went through 15 years of quantitative easing and relaxed monetary policy globally," if that's your recency bias, you're in the forest.
Mm.
And so what's really driving inflation? It's many factors, but it's post-pandemic, it's deficits, it's onshoring, but it's all those factors that simultaneously were contributing to deflation are in the process of reversing. And I don't think it's particularly exotic when asked, well, why are interest rates higher? Like, it's almost like people are very perplexed by this. It's actually, on the one hand, quite a good thing. It's a good thing because the economy's growing.
Mm
... unemployment's low. I don't think as market participants, we should be celebrating, "Hey, it'd be great to go back to zero." We ended up at zero because we ended up in 2009. So I don't think anybody should be wishing for zero. And if you think about what's happened structurally with deficits, that's another reason why interest rates are higher. That's not such a great thing, right? If you go back to, I don't know, 1990s, 2000, 2.5% deficits, and then, you know, pre-pandemic period, 3%-3.5%, now we're tracking 6%, on our way to 7%. So we've been in the camp-
Mm
-for interest rates. When I was here last year, we were calling for interest rates higher for longer. That's the way we've been running the business. Now, we have a pretty big edge because we have hundreds of portfolio companies with 1.3 million employees around the world.
Mm.
We roll up that data every month, and we could see very precisely coming out of the pandemic, the inflation spike. Now, when we see the inflation spike, we see it very differently than the way we see it in the broader economic news, but we would see inflation spike, like, up 80%.
Mm.
Because it'd be component parts that might be $1, all of a sudden, $2. And what we saw in that process was operators, CEOs, for the first time, really in a generation, realized they had pricing power. They didn't know it.
Mm-hmm.
They passed those prices along successfully. So when we look at the portfolio companies today, there's nothing flashing there that says imminent recession. There's nothing flashing there that says inflation's gonna cool immediately to 2%. EBITDA growth is high single digits. I think bigger picture, stepping back, we're in the early stages of some very significant paradigm shifts, which we should all be informed by, which really, in the end, I think are actually quite good tailwinds for the business.
Mm.
I say that because as micro investors and one of the largest participants in private capital, when you go through these kind of shifts, the opportunities to deploy capital over many years, I think, are extraordinary. In a quarter, it doesn't matter.
Mm-hmm.
... because as you go through the transition, the opportunities then reveal themselves. When you're transitioning very quickly, and we went from 0%- 5% interest rates, everybody is sort of like, "Okay, I need to digest this." And so you get a slowing of M&A, you get a slowing of risk appetite. That's all quite normal.
Right.
But as rates settle in, but if we were sitting here a year from today, and we had two cuts, it wouldn't surprise us. Now, the good news for everybody that wants cuts, this is a Fed that knows how to cut. Like, there's a lot of policy flexibility for this Fed. If they wanna cut, they're gonna cut. And so I don't know, I'm a little surprised people are so surprised.
Helpful. Thanks. So we mentioned it's, it's our one-year anniversary.
I missed you.
Yeah, me too. So it's been just over a year, obviously, since we were here, since you took the seat. Sorry. So I think it'd be a good start after that, maybe to update us on, you know, your key takeaways from the first year on the job, what you've learned, biggest surprises, biggest challenges, and things you're most excited about.
Sure. So, how did I approach joining Carlyle? I did a lot of due diligence. I spent a lot of time with the founders. I knew a lot about the firm, obviously, from my prior roles and just being in finance for a long time. Huge respect for the firm. When I joined the firm, I very specifically said to myself: new CEO, new firm, firm has been through a lot of stress with CEO succession, which is never easy for the clients, it's never easy for the teams, and it's not easy for executing strategy.
Mm-hmm.
So I was keenly aware of the circumstances, obviously, and my only prerequisites when I came in were, in no particular order, one, I wasn't gonna make any decisions quickly at all, which was very frustrating for people like you, and I understand it, but I wasn't gonna do that because I needed to be much more informed about all the competitive strengths of the firm and the firm's positioning. That was one. Two, I was gonna spend a lot of time getting to know my clients and my partners internally and my business heads and the teams. Three, it was a prerequisite that I get the founders very involved in the business. They built the business. The teams are very attached to the founders. They add a huge amount of value, and so that was a prerequisite.
Mm.
And four, I said, I was aware that everybody knew there had been friction before with the founders. It got, I think, disproportionate publicity, like a lot of things do. But I basically said, "Listen, I just wanna be perfectly aligned with all of you. You own 30% of the company, so I want my compensation basically to be virtually all aligned with them.
Mm-hmm.
Other than that, I approached it—I basically tried to drop any pre-biases and say, "Okay, just start with a white sheet of paper in terms of my own education." So I spent the first year approaching it that way. It pretty quickly emerged a couple of things. One, the organizational design needed to be addressed in a way that would allow growth, execution to be mobilized much more quickly. And I had no anticipation of this, but in retrospect, ended up being some fairly meaningful changes. John Redett came in as our new CFO and Head of Corporate Strategy. It was really a change in job description and role, 17 years with the firm, 16 years as an investor.
Mm.
So internal move, changed the Head of Tech, changed the Head of HR, changed the organizational design, and changed the Head of Global Affairs. Brought in someone new that I'd worked with for many years, to basically do everything client-facing, reorganized that. Reorganized and brought in a new Head of Wealth. And so a big part of it was reposition the organizational design in a way that a new COO in transition now. But reposition the team so the team could really unlock the energy in the company-
Mm.
'cause it had gotten a little stagnant. Two, then we started working on various explicit initiatives. We had an expense review that we started. We reviewed the entire compensation plan, made those changes, launched a whole bunch of new initiatives on the back of that, and sort of really just repositioned the organizational architecture, and some of the businesses, tweaked some of the businesses from an investing perspective, where we'd had some underperformance, shut down some parts of the business, added to a lot of parts of the business. And, you know, in the end, it ended up being a great outcome. We had our best financial performance of the year-
Mm.
Sorry, on record, and third best fundraising year ever. I don't know if I would have felt that exactly if I was sitting here a year ago with you. But the team really came together. I'm super proud of the leadership group and all my business heads, and I'm grateful for my LPs and their support. And, and then we launched the capital plan, and we've kind of completely redesigned the way we think about capital deployment. But other than that-
Mm-hmm.
- not a lot going on.
So I guess summing it up, what do you think you're most excited about now that you've made all these changes?
So I view my role at the highest level, overly simplified: it's my responsibility to mobilize human capital and financial capital. I think that's every CEO's role. So, one of the things that would come up when I arrived at the firm, when I would talk to teams internally, they'd say, "Difficult to make decisions here.
Mm.
There's a lot of reasons why that can be the case. Having worked in a lot of different businesses, I've seen that in a lot of my prior roles. A lot of it is just unlocking the potential of the firm. So you had asked me before, I didn't answer. I think the thing which I was quite confident of was the power of the brand. The most surprising thing about the firm is the extraordinary power of the brand. You didn't do it, but I think one of your competitors just came out with an analysis where one of the top recognized brands from reputation perspective and wealth. But the brand... I know the power of working with a great brand. The brand reach and access is truly one of a kind.
So now it's just a question of: how do we unleash all the strengths of the firm systematically, again, in a very disciplined way? And I think over the past year, I'm really proud of the teams for doing all that work.
Okay. That's a nice segue into the big changes you've highlighted. First, the compensation structure-
Mm.
Probably one of the most tangible actions you've taken thus far, moving to tie more compensation to performance fees, thus boosting the margin on fee earnings. So how should we think about the cadence of getting to that new 30%-35% FRE comp ratio target? Does it depend— Excuse me. Does it depend— Excuse me, I got a frog in my throat. Does it depend on big improvement in the realization outlook?
You sure you're just not emotional 'cause...? Yeah.
In other words, are employees committed to these new ratios, even in a low realization environment like we're in now?
So one of the most important things, in our business, all of us run the same business, is compensation. And when I first showed up, I got two questions, pretty much every meeting from anybody who was interested in the stock, and they just repeated and repeated them. One would be, "When are you gonna change the compensation plan, and, when are you gonna buy back stock?" And what I would say to people on the compensation plan is, you're really talking about... Having been in this industry for a long time, you're really talking about the spinal cord of the-
Mm-hmm
... institution, and so you have to do these things, most importantly, with an exceptional level of care. So we spent an enormous amount of time thinking through how to do this, because we want this truly to be, as we described when we announced it, and internally, and to all of our clients, a win-win-win. We want better alignment from a performance perspective. Our investors with their clients, our clients, they want it, our clients want it, so that's a win. We - I personally hugely value the $2 billion that the firm has in carry, but, we know from a multiple perspective that the street values the fee stream more, and that's fine because we can deliver more fees. And so it's a win across the board. The execution is the piece that we wanna be super thoughtful about.
So the reason why we introduced it the way we did is because this is not something where... We're not gonna allow it not to be a win-win.
Mm.
And the only way that happens is if we over-accelerate this because we press too hard on the gas pedal. So this is gonna be a super systematic, orderly transition, and we're gonna be patient with it. So you shouldn't expect us to, as we described when we announced it, you shouldn't expect us to hit this as a, as a goal, like, "Oh, we're gonna do this by X quarter.
Mm-hmm.
Because this is a very methodical, systematic change, and we're gonna do it with care.
Got it. The other big tangible change you made was on capital return-
Mm
... with the new $1.4 billion authorization and what sounds like a firm commitment to use it. On the other hand, stock comp, you know, remains a big bugaboo with many investors I talk to. So taking those two offsets together, do you expect to meaningfully reduce the share count? And what is a reasonable cadence to think about putting that $1.4 billion to work, given the price is now, you know, meaningfully above where you announced it?
Bugaboo, is that a, like a technical research?
It is
Term? Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, well, this is like a proof is in the pudding thing. So, I went back and had studied what you just referenced effectively, which is since the data firm went public, I think every year there's been dilution-
Mm
... in the firm, and last year was the only year we reversed it, since you know, the new team was in place. I'm super focused on how we think about the capital deployment, and again, this is a first principles exercise. It's truly just about like our capital, again, going back to my responsibility and the team's responsibility in terms of financial resources and talent. In terms of the financial capital, this is a I think of every dollar as a precious resource.
Mm.
And so we are gonna be very disciplined about the deployment of that capital into growth, that deployment of that capital and how we manage it to shareholders, and if we do things that we feel are really accretive from an inorganic perspective. And the way we designed this plan was we wanted to have enough flexibility to have a meaningful impact if we need to, and that's why we came out with the $1.4 billion. And I think in the first quarter, John's in the firm, right, that we bought back around $150 million. I think that's almost as much as we ever bought back in a year as an entire firm.
Mm-hmm.
I think the most we have ever bought back as a firm was the first year I showed up.
Mm-hmm.
So this is a pretty big shift in terms of the way capital management is being deployed. Now, internally, everybody should understand this is a very big shift also. So John and the team have put in a whole different approach to how we think about marginal capital deployment, in terms of business selection. So this is bigger than just the $1.4 billion, but obviously that's quite important, but it gives us a lot of flexibility.
Mm-hmm.
That's the key. So the key is, where do we wanna be on any given moment on the efficient frontier of buying back stock versus deploying it back into the business? We gave ourselves that flexibility. In terms of forward path, because what's really what you wanna know, I'm not gonna give you one.
Yeah.
But I got it. But, let's just address the obvious. But because I want the flexibility along with the team to toggle, right?
Mm-hmm.
If we see accretive opportunities, we're gonna invest in those, and we're continually invest in the business. But also, you know, we wanna be very cognizant of how much float is out there, so we're a little bit constrained by float.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, we don't wanna be unnecessarily driving the price up.
Got it. Let's move to private wealth, topic that everyone is focused on. How are you thinking about differentiating Carlyle's product from the others that have probably been in the market a lot longer? You often mention the brand as a differentiator, but your major peers also have that. So how do you see the global wealth strategy playing out over the next few years?
So I think, again, this is one of these mega trends where wealth is coming into the space, and it's not just a U.S. phenomenon, it's everywhere in the world. We were the first to launch a partnership in Korea last October, in terms of distributing wealth products and credit. And so this is a global phenomenon.
Mm-hmm.
I'm not a big TAM person. I never liked the TAM argument. I do think there's a real TAM argument here, just because the migration and the interest in, differentiation in terms of how wealth advisors are thinking about working with their clients in wealth is real, and I do think there's so much to play for globally-
Mm-hmm
In terms of the TAM or however you wanna cut the numbers. I think the opportunity set is huge for the industry. In terms of the brand, you know, we've been in the wealth space for many, many years, and we've raised over $50 billion in the wealth space, and that is in part why the Carlyle brand is so recognizable and the reputation is so strong.
Mm-hmm.
I think to be successful, you need a couple of things. You need brand recognition, you need a very keen understanding of what the wealth advisors want for their clients, and I'm gonna come back to that in a second. Then the third thing you need is a portfolio of solutions that those wealth advisors can look at and use as a toolkit, and you have to perform.
Mm-hmm.
Performance is not optional, and that means in all respects. What they expect from a performance perspective, what you advertise, how you deliver it, how you reinforce it, how you support it with knowledge, how you provide liquidity, all those things. And I do think we're really, I think, as an industry, in the first inning of this.
Mm-hmm.
I know this because about six months into the role, I started spending a huge amount of time in this space. So much so for people to understand that I've met with hundreds of advisors at this stage.
Mm-hmm.
One-on-one, groups. I really wanted to understand from them exactly what they need for their clients. And there's a lot of ways you can approach this marketplace. And our strategy may evolve over time, and certainly will evolve over time, but the way we're thinking about it is a core suite of a credit solution, which for us is CTAC.
Mm-hmm.
A secondary solution. We have this extraordinary business that you all know about, AlpInvest. Tremendous track record. That's a new solution for wealth clients. And then in 25, we'll likely come out with a private equity solution. That's kinda like the cornerstone of your toolkit.
Mm-hmm.
Let me just run through, for example, CTAC. CTAC is basically a horizontal slice of everything we do in credit.
Mm-hmm.
Last year, for like a 14.5% return. CAPM, which is the secondaries product we launched a year ago, first year returns 17.5%. But if you're a wealth advisor, you cannot possibly, as a firm, create every product that wealth advisor wants. I actually think that's a completely misguided strategy, and you can't be pushing product.
Mm-hmm.
These are our partners. So we're on a platform. We're on a platform... I view it, these are partners for life.
Mm-hmm.
And what we wanna have is key partners we work with, where we get the benefit of our historical performance, the iconic power of the brand, and then alongside this suite of core solutions, then there'll be feeder funds, like there's always been. Because if you talk to a lot of wealth advisors.
Mm.
They don't like the open-ended products. They'll say, "Listen, I like the one-off things for my client." And so you can't be all things to all people, but you have to be enough things to enough people.
Mm.
That's how we're thinking about it.
On that point, KKR made a bit of a splash last week with its announcement of a partnership with Capital Group to build retail products for, you know, more the mass affluent market with more liquid credit, combined with the illiquid private credit. Do you think this is a path Carlyle could take as it seeks to broaden the franchise? Or think it makes more sense to do this internally, or neither? Do you even want to do the mass affluent? Yeah.
I think that, again, this gets back to where we are in the first inning. This partnership that we established in Korea a year ago actually targets basically the mass affluent.
Mm.
And we work with a firm, KIS there. And so, and they're private wealth clients, and they have an extraordinary franchise, and they're great, great partners. I think that... You know, the ecosystem of finance is fascinating because of the way it changes all the time. And again, this goes back to these paradigm-shifting things. One of the paradigm shifts is that, you know, if you went back, I don't know, only to 2000, 1999-
Mm.
For those of us in the business that long, you know, people paid, like, 3, 4, or 5 cents to trade a share of stock.
Mm.
Then no one could have predicted the advent of ETFs. Again, but put yourself in the mind of the wealth advisor or the wealthy client. They want to avail themselves of the whole toolkit. So you're gonna see insurance, more insurance wrap product. You'll see retirement-based product. But they wanna have the full solution kit for their client, and it's really about paying attention to that.
Mm.
So I think we're gonna see a number of partnerships evolve over many, many years. I think, again, it's all about providing incremental alpha and portfolio diversification to that end client through those partnerships.
Mm. Okay.
Yeah, I expect you to see us do more of them. I think the industry will do more of them.
Quickly, before we move on, this is something I think investors are very focused on, CTAC and CAPM. Where are you in terms of, you know, the breadth of distribution, and is there a clear pipeline of-
So right now we're focused, yeah. So right now, it's predominantly U.S., although going international, RIAs in the U.S. and a number of platforms. I'm under some restrictions as it relates-
Right
... to CAPM, but we shortly are announcing a couple of more platform partners.
Great.
David Rubenstein and I did a whole tour up and down the West Coast, three weeks ago, right after Milken, meeting with wealth advisors. And I gotta tell you, that's super important because you really get to hear what is most important to them, and that's what makes this durable.
Mm.
I think these partnerships are exactly that, incredibly valuable partnerships.
Makes sense. Thanks. Moving to credit, you've tripled the size of this business over the last five years. A large part of this business is still CLOs-
Mm
... and Fortitude. So where do you see the biggest opportunity to kind of grow this business, you know, increase the diversification? And can you do that organically, or do you think you could - would have to do more tactical M&A, or maybe just lift out teams from other firms?
So, super comfortable with the organic footprint.
Yeah.
If you, again, step back for a second, what's really happening? So the word private credit, I think, has become a little bit confused, but let's just think of ourselves as, as an industry, as credit providers.
Mm.
There's no particular mystique about private credit. But as credit providers now, this has really gone from over a 20-year trajectory from direct lending to sponsors, mostly middle-market sponsors, to a full build-out of the CLO business, the direct lending business, asset-backed finance, and opportunistic credit.
Mm.
We're in all of those spaces, growing quite nicely. You know, a lot of this is about, again, the ecosystem of finance and not to, like, become a technocrat. But if you look back at what's happened over the past 20-25 years, 40% of the companies go public as often as they used to, or the population-
Mm
... of public companies is down 40%. And if you went back again, like to 1999, 2000, back then, a company from the first time they got capital, private capital, might go public in, like, 3 or 4 years. Now, it's 11 years. So this trend is reinforced. The need for private capital is reinforced by the fact that companies are much more likely to stay private.
Mm.
Then you have some other overarching big, big factors, which is the regulation of the banking system.
Mm
... and the fact that the more efficient capital provider is often the private capital provider, us and our industry. And so this is really just the ecosystem of finance finding the efficient deployment of capital.
Mm.
We wanna be in that full breadth, and we are. Our asset-based finance business, after three years, is over $7 billion. We're in some extraordinarily interesting flows. It fits quite nicely with the Venn diagram of Fortitude-
Mm
... and the insurance complex, because you need all that expertise. But, I would argue a lot of the firms are growing because of their insurance franchises-
Mm
... just like we are with Fortitude. And, but it's about having that full breadth across the capital structure. And again, that gives us the ability to create solutions like CTAC... which touch across that whole horizontal. And I like that because it gives more diversification and less concentration, for the wealth advisor. Again, when you're from the CLO through asset-based finance, through direct lending, through opportunistic credit, I like that for the wealth client. I personally own it.
Good.
Thank you.
That's a nice segue to insurance, obviously. You've taken a little different tack in the insurance opportunity than some of the other large alternative managers with Fortitude partnership. Could you contrast maybe how you're approaching this channel relative to the others, how you see it growing from here, and to what extent you have the breadth of asset management capabilities to fully service, you know, the insurance opportunity?
Well, I think we've already demonstrated we have the asset management capabilities to service it, so I would, I would knock that question off.
Okay.
But, I think the, I think the strategic question of fundamentally for the industry, with this convergence of asset management and insurance companies, is the degree to which how much do you want to be a vertically integrated insurance company? I think that's the big strategic question for the industry, and I think, you know, the answer to that will be defined over 5, 10, 15, 20 years. I think that the... Again, not to be boringly technocratic, but I think the, the, the question that really needs to be asked is: what is the source of financing, and how diversified is your financing? One way of talking about the wealth space is the way which I think is most important, which is what's most important to that customer-
Mm-hmm
and that client, and how do you deliver expertise to that client. The other way of thinking about it is a channel. But the other way of thinking about a channel is it's a source of funding. And so I think the fundamental question is, strategically, is where do you want to sit, and where is the efficient frontier of diversified funding sources?
Mm-hmm.
I could define those as institutional capital. I could have a subset that's insurance-related just because of the duration nature of it, versus, for example, pension fund and their own statutory requirements, where they operate in the cap stack. Less in, for example, equity, more in private investment grade and the wealth channel. And across all those, how do you want to think about the diversified nature of your funding? And then within that, what's the benefit of being more like an insurance company on that spectrum versus not?
Right.
I think that's a super important question, which, you know, people will take a different tack in the industry. As we go through it, I think there's a fundamental question linked to that, which is, can be phrased as: how capital-heavy do you want to be versus capital light?
Hmm.
I've mostly operated in a capital-heavy model, as all of you know, 'cause I ran the trading business at Goldman Sachs.
Mm-hmm.
And I was responsible for the balance sheet. And I've lived through the cycle of capital heavy is the single best model in the world, and then I woke up in 2008, and nobody liked capital heavy. So I think that, again, cycles determine these things, but not a quarter. But what I like about what I stepped into is the foundation of our credit business, and Fortitude gives us huge operating flexibility.
Hmm.
I don't have any particular strong view on any one model, but I do know that we can pivot very significantly from this model, because we're at the capital light end.
Mm-hmm.
So I like our current position quite a bit.
Great. So I'm gonna move to-
Did you get, did you get any of that or no?
Yes.
I was just kidding. No, the audience just got so serious. I had to lighten it up a little bit.
Still early. Let's move to fundraising and performance, which are obviously interconnected.
Yep.
You stuck with your 2024 guidance of $40 billion for the year-
Yep
... but the run rate was obviously well below that in the quarter. So I sense investors are still a little skeptical on how you get there. So how should we think about the cadence to getting to that $40 billion this year? What is your confidence level in hitting that target? And what products do you think will be the biggest contributor to getting to that target?
This is the thing that I need to figure out how to communicate with you and the audience on. When we came into the third quarter of last year.
Mm-hmm
... I said: Hey, I think there's gonna be a pretty significant pickup in fundraising in the fourth quarter. I think we raised $17 billion-
Mm
in the fourth quarter. Everybody was surprised we raised $17 billion in the fourth quarter. When we said we were targeting $40 billion for this year, I should have said, "But it won't be coming in as a daily averaging $10 billion a quarter." Okay? Because if I left people with that impression, that's my mistake. But if you look at sort of the fourth quarter and the first quarter, I think it's $22 billion-
Mm-hmm
We raised in six months. And so we still feel good about the $40 billion target. I think you should expect the second quarter to be meaningfully above the first quarter.
Mm-hmm.
How's that?
That's good.
You got it?
I got it.
Great. Uh-
Very good
... and we feel comfortable about the FRE target, but, you know, we don't run the business fundraising quarter to quarter. We just don't.
Mm.
It's not the way we think about it. We think, again, as fiduciaries, raising that capital, deploying that capital in the most prudent way, working with our partners. And often our partners, they're - we don't expect them to live on our quarterly deadlines, nor do I even ask my teams-
Mm-hmm
... to do that.
Mm-hmm.
The way we operate the business is not maybe perfectly consistent with the way you would like to model it. But I can give you directionality. But right now we feel good about the fundraising momentum. And as I said, last year was our third best year ever, so I feel good about it.
Any particular products do you think will be, you know, the biggest contributors to that?
So there are real natural areas of growth-
Yeah
-in the firm. I already mentioned the strength of the secondaries business. We're actively raising a real estate fund, which I can't talk much about-
Mm.
But the team's world-class, has a fantastic 20-year history, has outperformed every benchmark by hundreds of basis points. There's credit, which is growing. And so all those areas, the pipeline insurance feel is pretty good.
Mm-hmm.
So yeah.
Great.
I feel good about it.
In this vein, one of the topics that comes up a lot, I'm sure in your meetings as well, is the performance of the recent buyout funds. So how are you thinking about the health of those portfolios? Your long-term track record is obviously still quite good, but the recent funds appear to be underperforming. So how should we think about the trajectory of that business from here, and the health of those portfolios?
So I think there's three things you should think about. One is the long-term history of being in this business for 35 years. And Jonathan remembers off the top of his head, but I think the gross return is 26% over the life of the buyout funds and private equity. And so this team has a long history of performing. You're right to point out that the last vintage in U.S. buyout, for example, is importantly performing to our desired target, but I wouldn't say underperforming.
Mm.
We've seen some... You know, away from Carlyle, we've seen some situations where buyout funds really have massive holes in them. But we made some systematic changes. You know, I, I referenced it earlier. For example, in U.S. buyout, we asked the team last year to systematically go through, make sure they're very comfortable about the power zones. We had not had good performance in consumers, so we exited that vertical. That's a contributor to the last vintage that you're talking about. And most importantly, the teams are exquisitely focused-
Mm
... on the portfolios. Will stay that way. There's nothing better to reinforce the need for performance than a bit of underperformance.
Mm-hmm.
And so I can tell you, everybody's very focused, and we'll make changes where we need to. The good news is, in that CPA, which is about half deployed at this stage, that's the most recent vintage.
Mm
... looks pretty good.
On the other hand, real estate performance is pretty good.
Performance across the platform.
Yeah
... is way better than pretty good.
Yeah.
But we have some pockets-
Yeah
that we're addressing.
So that said, I sense CRE. It was last year, it still is, it probably will be when we're sitting here next year, is still a point of concern for investors as slowing trends appear to be spreading to more than just office, some potentially impacting parts of your portfolio that you do have more exposure. So maybe firstly, remind us of your real estate mix. Secondly, how are cash flows trending in the various buckets in your CRE portfolio? And to what extent do you have any incremental concern that there could be more pain in those portfolios as the focus expands to places like multifamily, industrial?
Yeah. For those who don't know the business, let me just take a step back.
Yeah.
And again, I have to be a little careful 'cause they're in the market-
Okay
-fundraising, and I don't wanna trip a rule. But, this is an extraordinary team with, an amazing track record. You've probably heard me say many times when I get asked questions about the future, I say, like, I don't have a crystal ball or my crystal ball is not better than anyone else's. Their crystal ball pretty good. They stopped investing in office right around 2013.
Mm.
And they have a very systematic framework for how they view demographics, opportunity, and as I said, they've outperformed any benchmark by hundreds of basis points. And so, they have missed all the problem areas, and they've been in all the areas of strength. I think when you have an interest rate environment that goes up 500 basis points in 2 years, I think what you're seeing here is an effect where you're going to have, for example, maybe some demographic delays in things.
Mm-hmm.
But the areas like multifamily, for example, multifamily rents might not be going up as quickly as they were in the past, but the reality is that interest rates being up has really curtailed construction.
Mm.
And so this has a self-correcting mechanism, unlike office space, which demographics have just shifted in office space.
Mm.
I think it's impossible to call the bottom there, and my team's not excited about office space yet, as an example.
Got it. Okay. Moving to realizations, I think the overarching takeaways from all the other Q1 earnings call was a still fairly cautious tone, I think, on the outlook for realizations this year. I think Carlyle might, might have been on the more optimistic side of that spectrum, actually. So why do you think the tone from others was more cautious than maybe you were? Or maybe what about your portfolio or pipeline made you more optimistic? And has your outlook shifted more positively or negatively on this theme since the call?
Well, on realizations, again, across the platform, what informs us is just the level of activity and the pipeline that we can see-
Mm
-what's about to be realized. So, I would say I'm sort of still in the same place. I think second quarter realizations will be lower than first quarter realizations. But, you know, we had McDonald's, we had Neptune-
Mm.
we had very identifiable realizations. I can't speak to anybody else's portfolio, but we have some extraordinarily good assets, and when we have the opportunity to monetize those assets, again, we have $2.2 billion of accrued carry that's gonna come in over the next couple of years. And when our teams see the opportunity to monetize those assets in the best way on behalf of our institutional clients and our clients broadly, they're just gonna do it. But I can't speak to why it's-
Mm.
A little more active at Carlyle versus others.
Got it.
But again, it's not a quarter-to-quarter thing.
Mm-hmm.
But I think the environment, we'll see what happens over the next nine months. I do think markets are a little more fragile now than they were maybe three or four months ago, but this is not a three or four-month game.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The other side of that coin is deployment, which feels better than realizations. But you have a lot of dry powder, your competitors have a lot of dry powder, and, you know, a lot of people are talking about this $600 billion+ that needs to be put to work in the next 12+ months. How close do you think we are to seeing a big uptick in deployment? And how do you avoid overpaying or seeing IRR deterioration from so much money being put to work?
Yeah
in such a brief time?
I think, I think language is super important. So, I think you're right exactly the way you described it, because I think there's this expectation in the industry that $600 billion has to be put to work.
Right.
A good way to not get IRR is to feel like you have to put money to work. And so we don't put any pressure on our teams to put money to work. I think you can't let capital drive investing. Investing has to be driven by the opportunity set, and then it pulls the capital. And so, we're very conscious of being patient for opportunities.
Mm.
You know, it's a privilege to be at Carlyle because we get a lot of incoming unique opportunities, and our teams are always looking, but we're gonna be disciplined about how we deploy it. I do think, again, normalized interest rates and a normalized cost of capital versus an overly subsidized cost of capital and the environment we're in now, today, it might be creating a bid-offer gap in terms of people's willingness to transact. It may be creating an M&A environment where people are hesitant. It may be creating an environment where IPOs are more challenging. But in the long run, I think it creates enormous opportunity-
Mm
... because it will encourage M&A strategically to create value. It will encourage carve-outs. A lot of, a market clearing cost of capital is a much better environment for a micro investor.
Mm.
Whether it's opportunistic credit, because there are gonna be companies, really good companies, that need marginal capital to get through the higher rate, that's a fantastic place to be deploying opportunistic capital. You know, when our CLO business a year ago, we were sitting here, you know, you probably would have argued, because I think the consensus would have been, "Hey, CLOs are not coming back.
Mm.
Okay, here we are, a year later, we've had multiple deals priced. We're as busy as we've ever been, and interest rates are high. So I think that, again, as the market adjusts to this, I think there'll be lots of opportunity for our $70 billion+ of dry powder, but zero pressure on my teams to deploy it.
Great. So getting close to the end, a couple of finishers. First, on the capital side, I think some investors have been frustrated that you don't put M&A higher on the capital priority list as a way to maybe quickly diversify the business further away from private equity. So are we correct that M&A is low on your priority list? And-
No.
Okay. Fair. And if you were to do more in organic, where do you see the biggest opportunities or holes where that option could make the most sense for Carlyle?
Don't see any big holes, but anything we would do in M&A has to be culturally the right fit. It has to have all the right industrial logic. It has to be super additive to the franchise and our institutional and our wealth clients, and to all of our constituencies. And it has to be accretive over time. If you look at the platform today, the platform is very well diversified. I know our biggest business is traditional private equity, but if you actually look at the segment, that includes real estate, that includes infrastructure, that includes renewables, that includes energy. But the secondaries business, the credit business, all of the foundational pieces are there. We could systematically, organically grow, and... But I'm super open to the right opportunities if I think they really fit.
But it's not like, I have a private equity platform, and I need a credit platform.
Mm.
or if I didn't have a secondaries business, I might have a very active conversation with you, because I think it's a fantastic business for diversification, because there is a obviously very obvious, secondaries can be very active when primary is less active, and I think secondaries is such an extraordinary wealth product, but I don't know how much I would pay for that.
Mm.
I know a lot of people would pay for my business, but I already own it.
Mm.
David and the founders bought it for $25 million, like 12-14 years ago.
Mm.
So I think that that's a business I would chase if I didn't have it, because I think it's a really powerful part of the toolkit when you think of the next 10 years of how the industry evolves. But we, we don't feel any pressure, but it doesn't - we certainly, for people to think we wouldn't entertain the right asset, the right team, that would just be illogical. Why would I do that?
Mm-hmm. Mm. Fair. So to conclude, I have an Outperform on the stock, but, many of the investors-
In fairness, not really, not really that high.
... disagree with me. So for those that have a different view, what's your elevator pitch on what you think those investors are missing and should be buying the stock here?
Iconic history and one of the best brands in the world. Diversified platform in a great industry segment, where you have perfect alignment now between the management leadership team and all the constituencies, and a path to executing. A lot of stocks in the world people can buy.
Mm.
You know, for those that buy it, I really appreciate your support. But we're in a great lane with a great brand and a great team, and, you know, I wouldn't bet against us.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick. It's good to see you.
Yeah.
Thanks, everybody. Great to see you.