KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE:KKR) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 7, 2023

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to KKR’s Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. And following management’s prepared remarks, the conference will be opened for questions. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I will now hand the call over to Craig Larson, Head of Investor Relations for KKR. Craig, please go ahead.

Craig Larson: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. This morning, as usual, I’m joined by Rob Lewin, our Chief Financial Officer; and Scott Nuttall, our Co-Chief Executive Officer. We’d like to remind everyone that we will refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our press release, which is available on the Investor Center section at kkr.com. And as a reminder, we report our segment numbers on an adjusted share basis. This call will contain forward-looking statements, which do not guarantee future events or performance. Please refer to our earnings release and our SEC filings for cautionary factors about these statements. So this quarter, we’re pleased to be reporting solid results with $0.63 of fee-related earnings per share and $0.92 of after-tax distributable earnings per share.

I’ll start by walking through the quarter. So beginning first with management fees. Management fee growth continues to be a real bright spot for us. In Q4, management fees were $706 million, that’s up 5% compared to last quarter, and up 19% compared to Q4 of 2021. And comparing full year 2022 to 2021, management fees increased 28% from $2.1 billion to $2.7 billion. Growth in full year 2022 was greatest within our Real Assets business where management fees increased over 50%. Net transaction and monitoring fees were $195 million, with our Capital Markets business, generating $144 million of revenue in the quarter. Now to go through expenses. Our fee-related compensation margin for the quarter was 20%, which is at the low end of our 20% to 25% range.

Rob is actually going to circle back on this topic in a moment. And other operating expenses for us were $177 million. The increase here compared to last quarter was driven by higher professional fees given activity levels across the firm as well as increased expenses related to capital raising. So in total, fee-related earnings for Q4 were $559 million or $0.63 per share with an FRE margin of 61%. Moving to realized performance income. We generated $339 million with realized carried interest driven by monetizations of Minnesota Rubber and Plastics as well as a number of public positions while realized incentive fees were driven by the crystallization of performance fees at Marshall Wace. Realized investment income was $223 million for the quarter.

Overall, our asset management operating earnings came in at $946 million. Now turning to our insurance segment. Global Atlantic had another strong quarter, generating $165 million of operating earnings. This quarter, the results were driven by an increase in invested assets from new business growth alongside a continued rotation into higher-yielding assets. This resulted in after-tax DE for us of $822 million, or $0.92 per share. Now turning to investment performance and Pages 7 and 8 of our earnings release. Page 7 shows investment performance across our major asset classes for the fourth quarter as well as the full year. Beginning first with traditional private equity, the portfolio was flat in Q4 and off 14% for the year. Those figures are below public indices for the quarter and ahead of public indices for 2022.

In real estate in the quarter, the portfolio was marked down by 8%, driven by a widening of cap rates on unrealized investments, offset some by strong rent growth in the quarter. And for the year, the portfolio appreciated 3% meaningfully ahead of public REITs as well as broad real estate indices. The infrastructure portfolio was up 3% in the quarter and up 9% for the year, very strong performance in infra given broad volatility again across markets. And on the leveraged credit side, the portfolio was up 3% for the quarter and minus 3% for the year. And our alternative credit portfolio was up 1% in Q4 and up 2% for the year. Volatility in 2022, of course, was not limited to trust the equity markets, investment grade and high-yield indices declined 13% and 11% over the course of the year.

Now perhaps more important are the figures that you see on Page 8 of the earnings release. This page shows investment performance since inception across our recent funds that have been investing for two-plus years. The figures you see here, of course, reflects any marks taken in Q4 or over the course of 2022. Looking at this page and taken together, we continue to feel very good about the returns we’ve been generating on behalf of our clients. In terms of our balance sheet investments, performance was flat in the quarter and down 5% for the year, again, against a volatile backdrop. Of note here, core private equity investments on the balance sheet have continued to perform. For the quarter and the year, the core PE portfolio appreciated 7% €“ excuse me, appreciated 5% and 7%, respectively.

Turning to capital metrics. We raised $16 billion in the quarter. This was driven by fundraising across our growth and traditional PE strategies, leverage credit, a block transaction at Global Atlantic alongside incremental flows at GA. This brings our full year 2022 total new capital raised to $81 billion. Our assets under management increased to $504 billion as of 12/31 with fee-paying AUM coming in at $412 billion. We continue to find opportunities to invest deploying $16 billion in the quarter. Infrastructure and traditional private equity accounted for about half of the Q4 deployment with opportunities to disperse globally. And finally, before handing it to Rob, consistent with our historical approach, we’re pleased to announce our intention to increase our annual dividend policy from $0.62 to $0.66 per share.

This change will go into effect for the dividend announced alongside first quarter 2023 earnings. And at the same time, we’ve increased our stock repurchase authorization back up to $500 million. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Rob.

Rob Lewin: Thanks a lot, Craig. And thank you, everyone, for joining our call this morning. I thought I would begin by giving you a sense of our recent annual planning meetings. We got our senior team together earlier this year to review where we are as firm, where we’re going and most importantly, what we need to get right to capture the opportunity that is in front of us. Listening and participating in these discussions was incredibly energizing. We’ve never had a stronger team and been more aligned around where we are going as a firm. We have a number of very clear avenues for long-term and sustainable growth and more confidence than ever in our ability to achieve it. I’m going to step through some of these more material opportunities for growth in a minute.

But before I do that, I first wanted to emphasize just a few points about 2022. Starting with our fundraising, we raised $81 billion of capital last year, the second most active year in our history and of course, all against a much more complex market backdrop and without significant contributions from our flagship strategies. Over 70% of our fundraising last year came in our real assets and credit businesses, strategies that are often front of mind for our clients in rising interest rate as well as inflationary environments. Moving to deployment, we invested a healthy amount of capital over the last 12 months. Looking at private equity and real assets taken together, deployment here was approximately 20% greater in 2022 compared to 2021 as teams were able to find very creative ways to put capital to work.

For example, across PE, growth in Infra, we announced or closed on ten take private transactions over the course of the year. And as our footprint has scaled and become more diversified, so has our deployment. Real asset strategies were 16% of total firm deployment activity in 2020, that number totaled almost 40% in 2022. Over that same two-year period, credit deployment has increased approximately two and a half times as the business has expanded with Global Atlantic as a partner and new focus funds such as asset-based finance. And finally, I’d like to circle back to our compensation expense and the comp margins that you saw in Q4. Fee-related compensation was 20% of fee-related revenues. That is at the low end of the 20% to 25% range that we’ve articulated historically.

While realized investment income comp was 10% of realized investment income, also at the low end, in this case, of the outlined 10% to 20% range. Carried interest comp was at the mid of the quarter which, as a reminder, is 65%. This had the impact of reducing our total compensation margin for the quarter, which including equity-based comp, was 32%. Given realized carried interest generation across KKR over the course of 2022, we felt that we could move to the low end of our FRE and investment income compensation ranges and show some expense discipline in support of our operating earnings, while importantly, still ensuring that we have the capacity to recruit, retain and incent world-class investment, distribution and operations talent. As we think about levers that we have as a firm to generate long-term earnings growth from here, operating leverage is really a key component.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

As a reminder, KKR employees own approximately 30% of our stock. So, we are very well aligned to drive margin improvement across the business. And before I switch gears, let me give you an update on the outlook for Q1 monetization activity. Things have slowed a bit on the monetization side, but nothing that is surprising to us given the environment and how we’re thinking about the timing of when we want to generate realization outcomes for our limited partners. So, as we stand here today, we have visibility on approximately $250 million of monetization-related revenue for the first quarter. Now turning the page and looking forward, we think there are really six key areas that are going to drive significant growth for KKR for several years to come.

The first area is real assets, where we have seen meaningful growth across our platform. AUM at the end of Q4 stood at $119 billion. That’s compared to just $28 billion at the end of 2019, so four times growth in three years. Growth in infrastructure has been driven not only by our flagship fund, but also our extension into areas such as core as well as Asia Pacific. The real estate platform continues to grow across a full suite of ten-plus products, further propelled by both Global Atlantic on the credit side and our acquisition of KJRM on the equity side. Our momentum across our real assets platform is obviously quite significant and aligns well with a big area of current focus from our limited partners. The second area of meaningful growth for KKR is continuing to leverage our market-leading position in Asia Pacific.

Looking at our progress in 2022, our Asia infrastructure strategy raised almost $6 billion, the largest in the geography, and we closed on our first Asia credit fund as well. Looking ahead, we expect our Asia real estate strategy to expand in 2023 as well our Asia tech growth franchise. And as I mentioned a moment ago, our acquisition of KJRM, which is our Japanese real estate business, is a great example of how we can use our balance sheet to strategically pursue inorganic growth to both enhance our market position as well as to access differentiated forms of capital. Looking at this progress altogether. Our Asia-focused AUM has now increased to $60 billion at the end of the year, that’s up roughly three times since 2019. Our local presence paired with our KKR toolkit has created industry-leading business against very compelling long-term macro fundamentals in the region.

The third area for us is core private equity, which is just a massive opportunity. As the addressable market is very significant, and the P&L impact can be positive across so many different parts of our financials. And most importantly, it is an area where we believe that we have the business model and culture that sets us up well to be the best global player in the asset class. As a quick reminder, Core PE is a long-duration investment strategy, and we expect to hold these investments for 10 to 15 plus years. We currently have 19 businesses within our core portfolio. These businesses generally have lower leverage than traditional private equity investments tend to be less cyclical and are more cash generative. These traits do create a more stable earnings profile within the portfolio.

Today, we manage roughly $18 billion of third-party capital, which I believe is the largest in our space. The AUM we manage positively impacts our management fees, transaction fees as well as carried interest. But core PE also accounts for over 30% of our balance sheet investments. Yet these investments only accounted for 1% of our after-tax distributable earnings in 2022 when you look at their flow-through impact to realized investment income. Looking at this another way, and to highlight this point even further, if you look through our balance sheet to the core PE portfolio, our portion of the company’s EBITDA totals over $600 million. This is not accounted for in our distributable earnings. Make no mistake, this 30-plus percent allocation is purposeful.

It is by design because we have a substantial opportunity to really compound our investments in an asset class where we know that we have differentiated capabilities. The fourth big driver for us is private wealth. We currently manage $67 billion of capital here compared to $37 billion in 2019. Approximately 15% of new capital raise has historically been sourced from this investor cohort, mostly from high net worth clients and in traditional drawdown products. Over time, we expect all private wealth focused capital will account for 30% to 50% of the capital that we raised as a firm. And along this path, we will continue to expand our footprint in the democratized access vehicle space. Our ambitions and views of the long-term opportunities we see for KKR have not changed.

Next, my fifth point is our continued focus on the insurance space. Going back to July 2020 at the announcement of the Global Atlantic acquisition, their AUM was $72 billion. Today, it’s close to $140 billion. So it’s grown about 2x in the last 2.5 years. Our thesis in buying GA was multifold. We believe that the combination of a leading life and annuity franchise with multiple ways to expand against compelling market fundamentals, combined with KKR’s origination and capital capabilities could lead to strong growth in AUM, operating earnings and book value while also delivering for policyholders. This has really played out and looking ahead remains a key strategic priority for us. Not only is the $139 billion of GE Capital itself perpetual, but the business has also helped us grow our third-party insurance client AUM to $56 billion.

That’s up from $26 billion at the time of the GA acquisition announcement as we have continued to create products that are tailored to this unique investor base. And finally, the sixth high-impact long-term growth driver for us is our balance sheet. I said the same thing last quarter as well. But there’s really not a corporate that I know that doesn’t wish they had more capital availability right now. The balance sheet has a clear competitive advantage in its continued ability to enable and accelerate growth in a way that is less dilutive for our public shareholders. To highlight this point, M&A, our investments in core private equity, our buildup in the insurance space and share buybacks have all accounted for roughly 90% of our net balance sheet deployment over the past five years.

And we expect that trend to continue over the coming several years as well. This is just another tool that we have to be able to drive earnings per share over time. To summarize, we continue to feel extremely positive about our future outlook. The six drivers that I just went through are particularly impactful for our long-term success, and we have real conviction across the entirety of our management team in our ability to build on our existing momentum. With that, let me hand it off to Scott.

Scott Nuttall: Thank you, Rob, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. I thought today, I would share how things look from Joe’s and my seat. There is no doubt that markets and the economy remain dynamic. There’s also no doubt many remaining focused on the macro, quarterly results, short-term catalysts and the near-term outlook for our industry and business. In summary, there’s a lot of noise out there. We find that noise is just that noise. We continue to raise capital, find interesting deployment opportunities and selectively monetize our portfolio. It’s business as usual at KKR. So from our seats, while the noise creates some questions, it’s important to not let it become a distraction. Building KKR is a long-term effort that takes years of planning and investment to get right.

Many of the businesses we are scaling now were started over 10 years ago. And many of the businesses we are starting now will be scaling for decades to come. We are singularly focused on what we need to get right: talent, culture, performance, clients and operations. If we get those things right, we will double KKR again at a rapid pace. If we don’t, our growth will be slower than it could be. Growth is the result of execution. So as a management team, we are focused on what we can control and executing on those five fronts. The good news is that as we look back at recent progress, we feel like our strategy is being executed well and the results are emerging. Named just a couple of things we look to as evidence. In the last two years, our AUM has doubled from $250 billion to $500 billion and our fee-paying AUM has more than doubled.

And over the same two years, our management fees and TDE per share have almost doubled as well. So the results of execution are starting to come through. But these metrics are backward looking. What’s even more encouraging to us is the strong evidence we have of growth continuing to be very attractive for years to come. Some of this may be apparent for these calls and some less so. To name just a few of the things that we are looking at. First, we’ve continued to create new businesses over the last several years. In fact, over 50% of the capital we raised last year was in strategies that did not even exist five years ago. And over 50% of our AUM is not yet scaled in our definition. Said another way, we have had a lot of recent innovation and half of the assets we now manage are still approaching the inflection part of the growth curve.

Second, our dry powder has grown from $67 billion to $108 billion over the last two years, positioning us well to invest into this environment, which we continue to find attractive. Third, our efforts in democratized products are just starting. We expect to have multiple vehicles launched this year after two years of structuring and team building work. This is upside for us and we expect will be an additional growth engine for the firm across all of our asset classes. Fourth, Global Atlantic goes from strength to strength, and has almost doubled assets since we announced the transaction 2.5 years ago, well ahead of schedule with significant opportunity ahead. Fifth, and maybe less visible, our sales team has grown from 100 people to 280 people in the last two years across institutions, insurance, family offices and private wealth.

It typically takes a year or two for a new salesperson to learn our products and hit their stride. The result of this investment will show up over the next couple of years and create even more wind at our back. Sixth, our carry-bearing invested dollars in the ground have increased dramatically. It’s important to understand that the cash carry we generated last year largely came from investments we made five-plus years ago when our AUM was a fraction of what it is today and our carry eligible invested capital was as well. To be specific, the vast majority of last year’s carry came from harvesting investments made when our carry earning invested capital was roughly $50 billion. Today, it’s about $150 billion, up 3 times. So don’t let the near-term monetization environment divert your attention from what matters.

The forward is incredibly strong as this much larger scale of invested capital matures with the returns on the slide Craig showed you. And finally, and perhaps most important, our team has never been stronger or more cohesive. In summary, over the last several years, we’ve made the investments for the next leg of growth at KKR and see years of opportunity ahead. And as we’ve done all this, the earnings power of KKR continues to increase. This is true regardless of the near-term noise and markets and is what gives us such confidence in our outlook. So don’t get distracted by the noise. The signals are strong and our confidence is high. With that, we’re happy to take your questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. At this time, we’ll be conducting a question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Craig Siegenthaler: Good morning, everyone. Hope you’re all doing well.

Craig Larson: Hey Craig, good morning.

Rob Lewin: Hey Craig.

Craig Siegenthaler: So my question is on Global Atlantic. I wanted to get an update and hear how early stage credit quality metrics have trended inside of this business, especially given prospects that we may be entering a recession in the U.S. in the first half of this year.

Rob Lewin: Hey Craig, it’s Rob. Thanks a lot for the question. The very short answer is that GA continues to trend really well as it relates to its credit exposures. We’ve talked about this in prior calls, but 95% of GA’s book is rated NAIC 1 or NAIC 2, so investment-grade in nature. The equity book at GA is sub 1% of total assets. And so we’ve done a bottoms up across the entire portfolio as we’ve gone into year-end and feel really good with how the strength of the balance sheet is holding up.

Operator: Our next question comes from Alex Blostein with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your question.

Alex Blostein: Hey guys, good morning. I was hoping maybe we could talk a little bit about margins and scale in the business. So Rob, this is probably for you. But you guys were able to bring down FRE comp this year partially because of pretty good monetization activity this year, I think, as you alluded in your prepared remarks. So if monetization income weakens in 2023 for variety of cyclical factors, should we think about that drifting back higher? Or is there enough sort of scale in the business where FRE comp rate could be at a lower run rate on a more sustainable basis? And I guess, bigger picture, I was hoping we can maybe just, again, kind of double click into how monetization activity flows through the margins in other parts of the business. You guys report and we sort of think about it in silos, but that’s ultimately not how you sort of pay your people. So wrapping all of that around, we’re hoping get a little more color. Thanks.

Rob Lewin: Yes. Got it. Thanks, Alex. A lot in there. So let me try and tackle one at a time. First, let me just start with margins. We believe that we’ve created a business model that allows for best-in-class FRE margins. And we’ve been consistent for a number of quarters now, a number of years now probably that assuming reasonable market conditions. We’ve got a business that can sustainably drive a low 60% FRE margins in spite of some of the investments that we’re making back into our business. But over time, as those investments that we’re making pay off and as the fees come in on the back of those investments as well as the efficiencies, we believe that we can create a business model that delivers mid-60% FRE margins. I think that’s going to come in a couple forms.

I think that will come from operating expense leverage. I think it also has the potential to come from compensation expense leverage as you would’ve seen in Q4 of this year. Now taking back to how we thought about compensation margin inside of the quarter, I’d say a couple things as it relates to that. The first, we want make sure that we’ve got and I said this on the prepared remarks, the right amount of compensation in our business such that we can recruit, retain, and incent world-class talent across the board at KKR. And as we looked at the pool of compensation that we had available in 2022, we made the determination that in Q4, we can operate at the bottom end of that range. Now you asked the question of monetization activity comes down next year where might that shake out?