Ares Management Corporation (NYSE:ARES) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So, my own personal perspective as we get towards the end of the year and everyone has a general consensus view that the hiking cycle is over, I would expect that there’s a fair amount of pent-up demand and we’ll see the M&A machine turn back on. I’d also highlight obviously places like special opportunities where we closed our second fund last year has been, very active. Places like alternative credit, very active. Opportunistic real estate debt and equity, very active. So, a little bit of a mix shift but still really, really exciting investment opportunity.

Alex Blostein: Great. Thanks for that. My second question Jarrod probably for you. I wanted to drill down a little bit into the 26% dividend growth that you announced this morning. Obviously, supported by a very robust outlook you guys have for fee-related earnings et cetera and all the things that sort of discussed already on the call. But is that a way of effectively seeing hey look FRE growth could be north of that and that’s sort of what informs your confidence around raising it by as much, or do you partially incorporate the fact that European style waterfall contribution will continue to rise and those are FREs almost cash flows and that kind of what gives you confidence in going above the typical dividend increase that we’ve seen in the past? Thanks.

Jarrod Phillips: Thanks Alex. Look, it’s a number of those factors all wrapped into one. First is, yes, we have a lot of conviction on our FRE growth as I mentioned in the script. We reiterated our guidance at the 20% per year growth. That’s ex the FRPR are related to the REIT, because that’s a little bit more difficult to predict. So we know that we have that strength. We also just came off of a very strong year where we easily covered the dividend for the year based on our FRE growth. And then, going into next year, as you mentioned, we continue to see a nice pipeline of the European style waterfalls coming in. So when you mix all those factors together we have a high degree of confidence that that’s the appropriate dividend level for the year.

Alex Blostein: Great. Thank you, both.

Operator: Thank you.

Jarrod Phillips: Thanks, Alex.

Operator: The next question today comes from the line of Benjamin Budish from Barclays. Please, go ahead. Your line is now open.

Benjamin Budish: Hey, guys. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I wanted to follow up on something Mike you said at the very beginning of the call. You said investors generally remain under-allocated to all with a little under 10% of global AUM. I’m just curious, how are your institutional clients sort of thinking about their allocations? I mean we’ve heard a lot from some of your peers about the denominator effect in private equity. Do they tend to think about credit separately? Is there a lot more room to run in private credit in particular? I’m just kind of curious how you’re thinking about that.

Michael Arougheti: Yes. I think, the good news is we’re in market and have been in market, with good success with private credit, private equity and real assets funds. I would say, generally speaking, denominator effect is impacting, what I would call, regular way private equity strategies or growth equity the most. You also have a little bit of a numerator effect in the sense that private valuations are lagging public comps and so, I think, it’s hitting both sides of that equation. Our private equity business is, obviously, positioned a little bit differently with SOF able to invest around the balance sheet in distressed and transitioning companies in industries. And our core buyout franchise, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, having the ability to invest in distressed for control in addition to traditional growth buyouts, which we think is a pretty unique setup.