Patria Investments Limited (NASDAQ:PAX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

And I don’t think the — I’m generalizing, but most of the infrastructure funds that do play Brazil, they take that development risk besides one or two players. So on the other strategies that we have within the vertical, we have also a core infrastructure product. And there we do — we don’t take the development risks there. But of course, we focus more on the yield side mostly for Brazilian investors up to now. We plan to also have these core infrastructure funds in other countries in Latin America, like Chile, Colombia and Mexico. We also now have infrastructure credit, which is a very interesting product that we have already anchored by two major institutional investors. But the flagship strategy differentiator is the development nature, development angle that I just explained.

Again, I hope I answered your question there.

Michael Brown: Yes. Thank you for all of that color, Alex. I appreciate it.

Operator: Thank you. And our next question comes from Ricardo Buchpiguel with BTG Pactual. Your line is open.

Ricardo Buchpiguel: by the performance fee-related booking in the quarter given the generalization of performance fee if OpEx was still pretty much flat for the quarter, right? So can you please explain what has happened with this line and efficiency, the margins of the related FRE actually similar in the following quarter? Thank you.

Marco D’Ippolito: Ricardo, your voice —

Alex Saigh: This is Alex again here. Marco, do you want to take this question.

Marco D’Ippolito: I’m not sure I got the full — just confirm to me if I got the full question because the voice came in a little bit broken up. The question is about overall margins and also income tax. Is that — those are the two components of the question.

Ricardo Buchpiguel: No, sorry. We just saw that the OpEx were pretty much flat despite the performance of fee related booking in the quarter. So I am trying to understand what drove this better performance and exactly if you can normalize this level of OpEx for the following quarter? I’m not sure if you heard me now.

Marco D’Ippolito: Okay. So let’s first differentiate the two kinds of expenses, the expenses related to the carry. You’re going to find that below the FRE on the carry interest on location and bonuses for the quarter, which is 10.2. So that ties to the 29.1 that you see for the quarter which is completely different from the personnel and admin expenses that you see on the top. The 58% margin is what — it’s in sync with the overall margin for the year. It is slightly above what we have indicated throughout the quarters during the last year, we indicated in the mid 50s. And we are ending up slightly higher than that. We’re gaining some margin on personnel expenses throughout the year. And we were losing a little bit of margin on the admin expenses due to some of the fixed cost associated with the acquisition of Moneda that had a lower margin, a lower overall margin.

But overall, we can say that we’re happy with the margins and with the progress of the expenses in a year where of course inflation hit very strong.

Ricardo Buchpiguel: Very clear. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Beatriz Abreu with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Beatriz Abreu: Hi, Alex, Marco, and Ana. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. First question would be on the FRE guidance of 150 million for 2023, which implies a 15% increase from 2022. Could you tell us how much of that growth do you expect to come from organic growth versus how much coming from inorganic growth if any? And a second question, if I may, would be on the real estate strategy. So this was a segment that you expect it to grow the most in fee AUM by 2025, if I’m not mistaken. So if you could give us some color on the segment’s outlook for 2023 and what kind of growth you’re expecting, that would be great? Thank you.