Janus Henderson Group plc (NYSE:JHG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Roger Thompson: Just again, just adding some meat to the bones there. It was not a great year for flows for Janus Henderson. We were $30 billion Asia-Pacific as a whole was slightly positive. So it’s just there. Within that, Australia has seen some very strong growth, both in the intermediary and the institutional channel. So we’ve got a great business that’s growing well in Australia. Ali and I visited Japan, I think we mentioned it on the call the last one we had. We got some real, real opportunities in Japan and are excited there. Ali — I think, Ali is going to Japan — going to Asia in a couple of weeks because again, we’ve got a business there that, yes, as Ali said, we’ve been there for a while, but our business there is relatively small.

And we’d like to see that grow significantly and some of the investments that we’re talking about in the SLT investments that we’ve mentioned on the call and before. One of those is growing the Asian business. So I hope I look forward to telling you more about that in the future.

Ken Worthington: And just a quick one. You wrote down intangibles this quarter, I think, $36 million. Can you give us a little more information on the nature of those write-downs?

Roger Thompson: Ken, they’re noncash accounting adjustments for intangibles on prior acquisitions. So we can take you through that off-line if you want in more details, but I say, noncash accounting.

Operator: Our next question comes from Alex Blostein from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.

Alex Blostein: Ali, I was hoping we could maybe dig into a little bit more in your comments regarding intermediary distribution. It’s a fairly competitive channel as, of course, we all know understanding that it’s growing, so you guys would like to add incremental resources there. But maybe talk a little bit about which products you expect to really lead in this channel that you think you could really sort of lean into to drive incremental net flows? And does that also expand beyond the existing intermediary channels into new ones or kind of doing more with the platforms that you already have?

Ali Dibadj: Yes. Thanks for the question, Alex. So we understand that it’s competitive in that marketplace, and that’s good because we’re pretty strong competitively, and we are a big believer, I’m a big believer in the U.S. intermediary market, our brand, our team, our products, your question I’ll get to, and our partners, current ones and ones that we’re developing over time, we feel very comfortable that we can over time again till build that business even more strongly than it is today. I mentioned a new hire to lead that group, North America Client Group, gentleman by name Michael Schweitzer, you may have heard his name. He came from a very strong competitor in the space, and he just arrived in November and already changes are happening, changes organizationally, changes to particular people One of the ones that we’re most excited about is that we’ve brought marketing right into the operating unit of the North America Client Group to be integrated in the way we go to market with our clients — for our clients to improve accountability, collaboration, urgency, all those things that we talked about almost back to day 1 for me.

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