Blackstone Inc (BX) 2013 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Welcome to the Blackstone fourth-quarter and full-year 2013 investor call.

I would like to turn the call over to Joan Solotar, Senior Managing Director, Head of External Relations and Strategy.

Great.

Thank you, Sheena, and welcome, everyone, to Blackstone's fourth-quarter 2013 conference call.

I am joined today by Steve Schwarzman, Chairman and CEO; Tony James, President and Chief Operating Officer; Laurence Tosi, CFO; and Weston Tucker, Head of IR.

Earlier this morning, we issued our press release and slide presentation illustrating our results, and that is available on our website, and we will file our 10-Q Report at the end of next month.

But I would like to remind you today's call may include forward-looking statements which are uncertain and outside of the Firm's control and actual results may differ materially.

For a discussion of some of the risks that could affect the Firm's results, please see the risk factors section of the 10-K.

We don't undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements.

We will refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, and for reconciliations you should refer to our press release.

I would like to also remind you that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any interest in any Blackstone Fund.

The audiocast is copyrighted material of Blackstone and may not be duplicated, reproduced, or rebroadcast without our consent.

So just a very quick recap.

We reported economic net income or ENI for the quarter and full year.

ENI per unit was $1.35 for the fourth quarter and $3.07 for the full year.

That is up 73% from 2012, which was also then a full-year record.

The improvement was primarily driven by sharply higher performance fees.

Distributable earnings were $821 million for the fourth quarter.

That is $0.68 per common unit, up 51% from last year's fourth quarter, and for the full year, we had distributable earnings of $1.56 per common unit.

That is up 68% from 2012, really driven by considerably higher realization activity.

We will be paying a distribution of $0.58 per common unit to shareholders of record February 10.

And just one final comment.

Hopefully you have received the invitation to next Thursday's webinar that we are hosting with Joe Baratta, who runs our Global Private Equity business, where he is going to run through his outlooks for PE in 2014.

And with that, I am going to turn it over to Steve Schwarzman.

Good morning and thank you for joining our call.

The fourth quarter as Joan indicated capped a record year for Blackstone.

Strong growth and investment performance in all of our businesses resulted in record year-end and full-year revenues of $6.6 billion, up 60% from the prior year.

Earnings of $3.5 billion, also a record, were up 76%.

And distributable cash continued to show strong upward momentum, rising 66% to $1.9 billion.

Our limited partner investors continue to entrust us with more and more of their capital, over $50 billion in 2013.

And we ended the year with record AUM up $266 billion.

That is up 26% year over year.

And we now manage nearly three times more assets than when we went public in 2007, which is very atypical for almost any money manager.

Very strong returns in most asset classes has led to a dramatic increase in the investable assets of our limited partners.

In fact, they have a much larger pie than they had the year before.

If nothing else changed but these gains getting reinvested, we would expect to see greater inflows here at Blackstone.

However, limited partners in addition are increasing their allocations to alternative managers generally.

And they also want to do more business, as they've articulated, with fewer managers with a bias towards the largest and best performing firms.

Blackstone, consequently, is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this trend.

The Blackstone brand name is one of the most trusted in asset management, due to our singular focus on both protecting our investors' capital and generating strong returns over our 28-year period.

2013, our private equity and real estate portfolios appreciated 29% and 31%, respectively.

In credit, our drawdown funds, namely our mezzanine and rescued lending portfolios, as Tony mentioned in the earlier call, had gross returns of 26% and 33%, respectively, for the full year.

Our now public holdings dramatically outperform the equity markets and were up nearly 50% last year, Helped by six highly successful IPOs during the year.

In the fourth quarter alone, we completed four IPOs including Hilton, Brixmor, Extended Stay and Merlin, which ended the year valued 35% above just their third quarter mark.

And 70% higher than the year-end 2012 margin on a combined basis.

Significant increases in realizations over our historic marks are consistent with the trends we have experienced, as we have explained to you, over the last 6 1/2 years since we went public.

Hilton is the largest investment Blackstone has ever made at $6.5 billion in equitable capital.

It illustrates how our model can drive outperformance over the long run.

With Hilton we chose a great business and put in place an outstanding management team led by Chris Nassetta, focused on accelerating the Company's global growth.

In the depths of the financial crisis, we were able to stick to our plan without the pressures of quarterly earnings targets or investors asking us for their money back at the worst possible time.

Last month, six months after our initial investment, we brought Hilton back to the public market with 40% more hotels than when we acquired it.

In effect, we really fix and improve these companies and drive growth.

The year-end stock price equated to a value of 2.6 times profit for total gain from our cost of over $10 billion.

This is a record for the private equity industry for any investment that has been made.

And we are very confident in the Company's outlook going forward.

This is very often how private equity investments work.

We have found the interim marks to not necessarily predict future performance as we continue to add value.

I also want to highlight our IPO of Merlin.

This is a company that we basically built from scratch when we bought the London Dungeon in 2005.

I don't know whether any of you have ever been there, it is a lot of fun.

It is small, people jump out and scare you, but it was a modest start to the business.

And we turned it into what it is today which is the second-largest themepark operator in the world behind Disney.

It is a great illustration of how the flexible mandate of our private equity funds work.

We have the ability to do large deals, but we also create companies through platform buildups depending on where we are in the cycle.

Merlin's year-end stock price equated to a multiple of original costs for our remaining unrealized investment of 10.5 times profit in local currency.

Returns for our liquid funds were also strong in 2013.

Our credit hedge fund, as Tony mentioned, had a gross return of 24%, well above benchmarks, which hopefully eases some of the concerns we have heard around the impact of rising rates .

Our Hedge Funds Solutions business, BAAM, had composite gross return of 12.8% for the year.

BAAM's focus is on generating attractive long-term risk-adjusted returns and over time has actually outperformed market indices with much less volatility, basically about a third.

Overall, our strong investment performance is reflective of our focus on creating value in our underlying portfolio assets as well as our position of being a solutions provider in credit in BAAM.

We invest in (technical difficulty) [approved] assets and once our job is done, we start to exit and return capital to our fund investors.

Having endured a protracted down cycle to which there was no incentive or pressure to sell assets, we have a greater amount of seasoned assets which we are looking increasingly to exit.

That is certainly not expressing a view that markets have peaked.

In fact, we remain extremely active in terms of new investments in 2013, deploying or committing nearly $20 billion, a record for the Firm.

One of Blackstone's key competitive advantages is the extent of our global scale with leading platforms in each of the alternative categories where we can identify relative value and move capital where it makes sense.

Importantly, we don't operate franchises.

And all decision making is centralized with real sharing of intellectual capital across businesses subject to compliance.

This helps make us better investment decision-makers and avoid mistakes.

And the results are better returns for our investors and greater capital inflows for Blackstone.

Turning to fundraising.

We raised $17 billion in the fourth quarter alone and over $50 billion in 2013, excluding acquisitions.

Much of this was in brand-new products such as tactical opportunities or strategies adjacent to our global funds such as Real Estate Asia and Real Estate Europe.

During the fourth quarter, our tac ops business raised an additional $1.5 billion bringing us to over $5 billion, where we will likely pause to focus on deploying capital although we could raise a lot more money.

Strategic partners, our new secondaries business, held their first close for their new fund of almost $700 million on their way to a targeted $3 billion plus fundraiser.

In credit, we continue to see strong inflows across the platform including several separate account mandates from large investors built around some of our highest conviction ideas.

And BAAM reported $440 million of net fee earning inflows to the fourth quarter despite the fourth quarter of each year being seasonally higher for redemptions.

BAAM has achieved $5.8 billion in net inflows for the year, including January 1 subscriptions, which was one of our strongest years ever.

In fact, nearly $1 out of $10 that went into hedge funds globally last year was given to BAAM.

Lastly, our real estate platform had additional closings for our new Asian European funds, helping drive the $8 billion in additional real estate inflows just in the fourth quarter.

This business has reached nearly $80 billion in AUM.

I just want to report that again.

Our real estate business has reached nearly $80 billion in assets under management, which is almost double where we were two years ago as we broadened the platform globally and tripled the size of our debt strategies business.

In response to increasing interest from our limited partners we have made our first two investments in core real estate which are more stabilized assets designed for longer holding periods.

While it is too early to detail our approach to this market, it is a very large asset class that we are well-positioned to address.

Our cultured innovation continues to drive market share gains to the Firm as we launch new products to take advantage of market dislocations and opportunities as they arise.

In the past three years alone, we have raised $132 billion of capital.

And this is a blizzard of numbers, but I want you to get that one.

We have raised $132 billion in capital in the last three years, excluding the impact of acquisitions, which is comparable to the combined inflows of the next four largest publicly listed alternative managers combined.

In closing, 2013 was a record year by any measure.

At [$3.

billion] in earnings, Blackstone now exceeds the earnings levels of any other publicly listed asset manager in the world and possibly any other asset manager in the world we just don't have access to one company's numbers.

I believe this is proof of concept of what we been speaking about for years.

That, as we grow assets at substantial rates, invest and obtain historical levels of returns, which are substantially in excess of what most other managers can do, then our overall earnings levels as a firm will result to continue to increase over time with, of course, some variations year to year.

Last May at our Investor Day in New York when the stock was $20, we presented a scenario where, if we grow our fee-earning assets at a 13% rate, which is much lower than our historical growth rate of 28%, and if we achieve levels of returns in our various businesses which were slightly lower than our historical performance, then our model implies $80 stock price nine years from now based on a 5% dividend yield and a number of other assumptions detailed in that presentation.

In addition, our model implies $25 more in cash earnings during the period for a $105 per unit value in nine years from now.

The assumptions underlying our model based on the world today seem reasonable to me.

As you can see in our results, we are working hard to execute on them.

Despite all this, for some reason that is absolutely inexplicable to me, our stock continues to trade at a sharp discount to traditional asset managers.

While we have made some small progress over the past year, moving from 9 times earnings to 10 times earnings, traditional asset managers are on average still trading at 850% premium to Blackstone.

This is despite the fact that we have grown assets under management over the past three years at a 28% rate versus the traditional managers growing at 7%.

In other words, we are growing four times faster.

We have more stable assets with 70% of our AUM locked up for seven- to 10-year terms.

And our distribution yield of almost 6% is more than double the 2.8% that traditional managers pay.

If we compare ourselves directly to the publicly listed alternative managers only, our shareholders benefit from a much greater degree in terms of the liquidity in our stock.

Our free float of roughly $17 billion is well above the free float of our four nearest listed alternative peers combined.

In addition, our average daily trading volume of $125 million is well above the combined trading volume of this same group.

So, why the discount?

Frankly, it is a mystery to me.

In my experience these types of discontinuities in terms of public market valuations correct themselves over time.

We hope you all will be part of our shareholder base that will benefit from a normalization of our price-to-earnings multiple, which I believe should be at least equal or higher than the average publicly listed traditional asset manager that is growing at one quarter of our rate.

Were we to see this discount eliminated, our shareholders, of course, would receive a very substantial benefit.

Thank you very much.

And now I would like to turn this over to Laurence Tosi, L.T., to take over review of our financial results.

Thank you, Steve.

And thank you everyone for joining our call.

As I begin my comments, I would like to point out the latest iterations of our disclosures, all of which reflect the thoughtful feedback from analysts and investors and we thank you all for that.

On pages 12 and 13 of the release, you'll see enhanced detail on AUM drivers, and on page 18 you will see some additional financial disclosures primarily on BCP V and our investment in Hilton.

Finally, as I begin my remarks, I would like to draw your attention to page 4 of the release, which shows several trends I will address in my remarks.

Blackstone's strategy and business model centers on generating sustained outperformance by our funds, relative to their asset classes across cycles.

When we achieve that result, as we have over many years, it drives the Firm's growth and financial performance, not just in the current year but also creates sustainable momentum for future years.

We believe this attribute of our financial performance is often misunderstood if not, frankly, underestimated.

As Steve pointed out, strong fund performance is often positively correlated to asset inflows and growth.

Vertically for Blackstone given our leading fund performance brand and our unmatched diversity scale and depth across alternative asset classes.

Looking at 2013, record levels of fund performance drove market appreciation in the funds of $33 billion and, at least in part, contributed to gross inflows of $60 billion.

The combined effect of these two forces, appreciation and inflows, translated to $181 billion of performance fee eligible assets at the end of the year, up 35% over the course of the year.

That is a multiple of the underlying fund appreciation and asset growth.

Those totals are after $30 billion in realizations which reduce asset levels as capital is returned.

Appreciation and inflows also combined to drive up assets in our incentive fee earnings funds which generate both increased management fees and incentive fees.

That is why both BAAM and credits hedge funds generated their highest realized incentive fees ever at a combined $474 million, a 57% increase for 2012.

Similarly, our drawdown funds and private equity, real estate and credit generated $1.1 billion in realized carried interest and investment income, a 164 increase from 2012.

You can see on the distributable earnings charts on page 4 that net realizations have grown at a 91% compound rate over the past few years and even accelerated in 2013.

You can also see the compounding effect at play on the Firm's performance fee receivable.

As more performance fee earning assets are essentially created by appreciation or raised through inflows, that receivable jumped 50% year over year to $3.4 billion even after a period of record realizations.

Without those realizations, it would have doubled.

It is critical to note that the compounding effect should allow us to meet or exceed these revenue levels with lower appreciation than we experienced in 2013 simply because the fee generating asset base is much larger.

You can also see the compounding effect in the annual earnings, up 76% to $3.5 billion, far more than fund appreciation or asset growth.

Further, as the mix of performance fees and investment income increases, along with flat non-compensation expenses, Blackstone's margin increased to an industry leading 53% in 2013.

We think sometimes when investors just look at growth by measuring how big they predict a successor fund to be, they often miss the growth that comes from new strategies and businesses, what we refer to as Blackstone's innovation advantage.

Across Blackstone, we are now on our sixth and seventh generation of ideas and fund offerings within the segments marked by constant innovation of adjacent and synergistic strategies, regions, products and client basis where we can extend our track record and investing expertise.

This is a higher growth, lower risk approach than rolling up subscale managers in isolated units.

In the last year, $45 billion or nearly 75% of our inflows related to businesses or funds that did not even exist in 2007 at the time of the IPO.

Those innovations now account for $111 billion of our total assets.

Many of those new businesses are funds that are always in the market.

$105 billion or 40% of AUM consists of funds that are positioned for perpetual fundraising rather than episodic fundraising.

The focus on our episodic funds often overlooks this consistent growth driver.

Looking forward, there are several leading indicators of Blackstone's future financial performance that investors should note as we enter 2014.

Record ENI is the most direct indicator of value created in future earnings power.

Realizations and distributable earnings accelerated in the fourth quarter, a trend that has been gaining momentum over the last few years.

Our investment pace remains at a record level, which is made possible by our investment in a global footprint for origination.

Last year 40% of the Firm's investments were made outside of the US, a record percentage for Blackstone.

Portfolio operating fundamentals are at some of the best levels we have seen, including 11% EBITDA growth in private equity in the fourth quarter and strong momentum in key real estate indicators, such as RevPAR, occupancy and home price appreciation.

Further and finally, Blackstone now has $36 billion in diversified public equity holdings held in performance fee eligible funds.

I will close with a comment on the strength of the balance sheet.

The Firm now has $7.29 a unit -- per unit in cash and investments on the balance sheet, up 23% over the last 12 months.

The strength of our balance sheet and the consistency of earnings prompted S&P to upgrade the firm to A+ in the fourth quarter, making Blackstone one of the highest-rated financial services companies in the world.

With our full-year 2013 announcement this morning, Blackstone is the world's most profitable public asset manager with a record $3.5 billion in earnings.

The key takeaway should be that Blackstone's sustainable momentum with 26% annual growth to record asset levels, strong fund returns, record accrued performance fees and a favorable operating environment all indicate that earnings and performance should all continue, but could create the compounding effect that leads to accelerated distributions.

And with that, we are happy to take any questions.

And if I could just remind you to limit first round one question each so we can get to everyone.

Sheena, if you can please open it up to questions now.

(Operator Instructions).

Dan Fannon, Jefferies.

Maybe we can talk about the investment environment and where you are seeing some of the best places to deploy capital, what you are most excited about, thinking about in 2014.

I would say that in real estate, as I mentioned before, we are focused on both Europe and Asia.

We think there's a lot of great opportunities that have emerged in Asia lately and Europe's was -- we had a very strong year last year and we think that will continue.

And private equity energy continues to be front and center for us.

It accounts for a huge portion of what we do.

It has been remarkably successful for us.

I think our latest energy fund has our IRR in the 50% range, which is stunning.

And so we are quite -- as I say energy is front and center.

I talked a little bit more about earlier about specialty finance and I think the other thing that we are very focused on is packing great managements in companies that can consolidate industries and giving them growth capital to do that.

Credit is a challenge right now, frankly, to put money out in long-term debt because with rising interest rates I think we are poised, but combination of it is a deals-driven business but also a rate-impacted business and neither is all that favorable right now.

However, on our hedge fund which is where we deal with more liquid stuff, they have been focused on event-driven kind of investing where will -- and acting as a catalyst and that has been really, really successful notwithstanding the low rates.

And then in BAAM, our Hedge Fund Solutions business, we are removing much more to manufacturing our own.

This is instead of trying to pick hedge fund managers we are coming up with themes where, combing through the hedge fund universe to find out whether it is [to find] expertise, bringing some of them on board to play roles and more of an implementation role than investment strategy role in terms of executing some of those strategies.

That has been really successful for us and -- where there are various themes that we have looked at, but one of them for example, we just took a major stake in the -- well, lots of themes there's no one that I think jumps to mind there.

So that is kind of how we see the landscape.

Great.

Thank you.

Bill Katz, Citigroup.

You've talked in the past about the ability to leverage up into the retail channel.

You have had some good success early on.

One of the themes that seems to be building across the asset management reporting fourth-quarter results to date is a greater interest by a number of attritional management in the alternative space as well.

I wonder if you could comment a little bit about how you see the evolution of the retail business.

Is this a market share opportunity relative to mutual funds or is it a market share opportunity for Blackstone within that?

Thank you.

We don't see getting into mutual funds.

Not traditional [loan or] mutual funds.

Now our hedge fund solutions guys have been very creative about creating a daily liquidity hedge fund product which is appropriate for 401(k) plans and other retail kinds of products.

So to the extent you will see some of our products embedded in products like that Our GSO guys have created an ETF, for example.

So there's some stuff that we are creating where you are embedding our traditional alternative or alternative product into more loan only formats I suppose, but basically that sort's of small potatoes.

What we are really focused on is bringing alternatives to retail investors.

And let me just give you some statistics.

The average pension fund has about 25% of their assets in alternatives.

The average endowment and foundation is up close to 50% and the average retail investor is at 2. And I am talking about high net worth retail.

I am not talking about all retail.

Well guess what happens?

A funny thing happens, the best investors are the best long-term -- investment returns are the endowments and foundations, with 50% in alternatives.

The next best is pension funds at 25% and the worst is retail with 2%.

And it is not surprising.

What we bring are consistently higher returning products than any other traditional loan only asset class that are not totally correlated with the market.

So you also get some risk mitigation, some volatility dampening.

And we think retail investors are owed the opportunity to invest in our products.

And it will -- that we will benefit from that, yes, by diversifying our source of funding.

But they will benefit from that most particularly.

So we have invested.

We are now into our fourth year of building our retail distribution capabilities and it is not simply just lobbing a product out there in to a retail system or a private bank and saying, I hope you can sell it, it is really creating products for it.

It is building up a service network to service their clients, it's building up a distribution to distribute to them and it is an educational system to educate them and so on and so forth.

So it is a major effort.

And the proof is in the pudding.

Five years ago we sold about $0.5 billion a year of our products through retail channels.

It is up over $7.5 billion today.

Thank you.

Christian Buss, Credit Suisse.

This is actually [Dena Chin] filling in for Christian.

Congratulations on a very strong quarter.

Over the last few months we have seen a rash of regulatory noise impacting global banks including the finalization of Volcker, the Fed's white paper and visible commodities and concerns on banks' involvement in highly levered deals.

How do you think about pros and cons for Blackstone with all these changes?

And also do you think the increased opportunity sets far outweigh the continued pressures on banks who are [employing] clients and also financiers of your business?

Thank you.

The banking system has undergone through a very wrenching series of regulatory change recently.

Changes which have not been fully implemented yet and I think what that does is slows down their opportunities for extending credit and will also result in lower returns on equity for the banking system.

They also have increasing limitations in terms of how they look at compensation and issues of that type.

We are relatively affected by that in the alternative investment area which, frankly, has done extremely well in terms of protecting capital and going through the financial crisis with very little impact and virtually no demands on the public sector for support.

We see this trend as basically good for alternative asset industry and good for Blackstone, for sure.

And we were doing fine before these types of regulatory restrictions were unleashed on the banking system and we will do fine afterwards.

I am frankly most concerned that the country keeps growing.

I want a stable and sound system so we don't have to live through what we all did globally with the financial collapse.

On the other hand, there's of certain balance one needs to keep countries growing at a rate that satisfies the needs of their populations along with safety and soundness.

Overall on balance, this is a positive thing for our industry on a limited basis, although getting the country to grow as fast as it can prudently is in our best interest.

Yes, let me just -- also when the banking system pulls back the companies that take it on the chin are the smaller and medium sized companies that aren't the household names.

They are not the Fortune 500.

They are not public companies.

And those are the companies that are the engines for US job growth and US economic growth.

And that is what we focus on is the loan only funds that can buy bonds in public equities and making -- the Fidelity's of the world, the Mutual Funds of the world, those are great.

But we provide capital to the smaller and medium size companies that aren't public that they need to grow and so in a sense changes to the banking regulations have increased the country's need for our kinds of services.

Michael Kim, Sandler O'Neill.

So assuming more LPs increasingly gravitate toward more flexible multi-strategy solutions, how much of a competitive advantage do you think the bigger, more diversified franchises maintain and do you feel like firms need fund-to-fund capabilities to provide more comprehensive and liquid solutions across asset classes?

Well, we can see a real migration from a limited partner perspective to firms that can provide pretty unique solutions across asset classes and we are, by far, the largest and we have been doing it the longest and each of our individual business areas is about as large as any business area in the alternative space.

So for many competitors, and no one has all of these businesses under one roof, what it allows us to do is to talk with the largest pools of capital in the world and solve a variety of problems.

We have some limited partners who just give us very large amounts of money and ask us to allocate a month our different asset classes simply because they know there's excellence in each of them.

Sometimes we do it with two areas.

When you have excellence across all the major areas, what happens is that the Board of Trustees of these large capital pools and the senior management of them know that they can migrate from asset class to asset class within our Firm with a real sense of safety and the liability and excellence of performances.

And so it becomes easier for these limited partners to allocate capital.

And as a result of that, as well as the fact that almost all of them have articulated the desire to have fewer managers that it puts our firm in a very unique position.

And consequently as, I guess, both I have reported and Tony has earlier, our asset raising capability has really dramatically increased, but also, quite fascinating, our performance has not degraded at all which is what most people would think would happen.

But it simply hasn't.

Yes and you asked about fund to funds.

I think in general, fund of funds are losing share and I think they tend to be -- get a lot of names, there's kind of [aggression] to the main terms of returns and there's an add level of fees and increasingly LPs are feeling like they can pick the best managers themselves.

So in general it is losing share.

Now our guys in our Hedge Fund Solutions if they were just as pure fund to funds would probably be losing share too, but as I mentioned before, they are manufacturing in their own returns as there are no longer a fund to funds in reality.

Got it.

Thanks for taking my question.

Patrick Davitt, Autonomous.

Good morning.

The balance sheet invest in your funds was about 23% I think year over year and, clearly, looks poised to really start generate more cash flow.

I think you said in the past that you would expect to be in a place where you have too much capital.

Do you think with that balance up so much we are getting close to that point and can start to expect gains on that balance to flow more to shareholders through the distribution?

First of all, the 23% that I gave you was the total growth in the assets on balance sheet.

So included in that are net performance fees as well.

The liquid investments are now at about $2.41 per unit, which is -- illiquid which is about $2.7 billion.

Right now if you look at the cash and liquid investments we have on the balance sheet, it is about $2 billion and we continue to retain when we have realizations the gains on those investments.

And we believe that is a prudent strategy because we continue to find places as the firm grows to put that capital to see more strategies.

So we don't see a change in distribution policy with respect to the gains on our own investment income imminently.

And by the way, this year we will have paid out about 85% of the realized earnings.

So about 15% relates to those gains on our investments and then some holdbacks related to returning capital -- recovering capital on investment acquisitions, sorry.

Okay, thanks.

[Brian Bettle], Deutsche Bank.

Good morning.

Question on fundraising.

Obviously, you are in a good position right now where as you talk about, Steve, again being in a position where the LPs are concentrating more (technical difficulty).

If you can just talk about the balance of that piece of fundraising versus the capital deployment opportunities.

You also alluded to that being pretty strong as well, but as you go forward, do you see the mix of -- or I should say the balance of those two areas changing to the point where you would prefer to raise less capital or, as you talked about before, the perpetual capital that you are raising and those types of products, do you see trying to orient the mix towards more of those openended products that are continuously raising capital?

Thanks.

Well, you know it's interesting that basically, I guess LT calls them episodic funds which is sort of a funny name.

I couldn't think of anything else.

For our drawdowns.

That basically almost all of them have been capped where we could have sold much, much more than we did.

Either we capped these funds because we think it is an appropriate amount of money for us to invest and still keep a really terrific performance for our LPs or, sometimes, our LPs tell us that they are more comfortable at a certain level because that is how they think.

You know the supply and demand for those funds (technical difficulty) and Tony mentioned this on the earlier call that we really -- I mean I guess I can't say anything -- my General Counsel is here -- and how much we could sell some of these funds.

Sometimes it is double.

People want to give us the money, we just don't take it.

So we are in this business for the long term.

And the way you become long-term successful is you produce great investment returns for your investors and you can almost always raise money in large amounts when you think the opportunity is there.

And so we sort of rightsize that and I don't think any of us here are concerned that we've got a misalignment there.

In terms of the products that sort of get sold on a regular basis, some of those go into liquid securities where the markets can take that, and so we are always sort of sensitive to never do anything that does not generate great performance.

And in fact, we, in our -- in fact mezzanine business and real estate we just really self-limited that -- probably incorrectly, given what the demand is.

But on the margin, we never want to get ourselves in a position where we have got too much money and feel under any pressure to do things that don't generate really good returns.

Let me just -- as Steve mentioned, these are episodic fundraisers, so it is a bit like a seesaw.

You will -- a particular fund will raise a lot of money in one year and then deploy it over time and not raising any more for three or four years.

So when you aggregate that, you get some lumpiness.

So we might have a very big year this year.

It might not be as big next year just because real estate won't be coming back for many of the funds it has come back with and so on and so forth.

So, yes you expect some lumpiness there.

The -- driven by the fundraising cycle and the investment cycle is really driven by market, too, goes up and down but on a different cycle.

So those things -- you can't look at one year and say is it in balance or out of balance.

You have got to look at it over three to five years to find the balance.

Right and do you feel you have a good balance going forward for that three- to five-year time span so that when realizations officially begin to crest you will have enough money in the ground to [reharvest] after that cycle?

Yes, we do.

We do.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Roger Freeman, Barclays.

Back on the retail discussion, just wanted to get an update on how products during the year selling through [FIFO] and what you have learned from that so far and how you're thinking about additional product rollout maybe this year.

The investment performance of the product is excellent.

Fidelity actually did of summer product with another manager and this is not performing there as well as ours, no surprise there, we find that to be a common occurrence.

But that money came directly from Fidelity so it is not like something they are out trying to market.

And they allocate a certain amount of capital to us which goes into some of their portfolios.

So we think they are very happy and we are hopeful that we will get more in the future, but we will see.

Okay.

Are there opportunities to expand relationships like these -- other (multiple speakers)

Yes.

(multiple speakers) platforms this year?

Big time, but we gave Fidelity an exclusive for a period of time.

They invested, we invested together with them three years to get this product structured and up and running and working and so they, in my view, perfectly legitimately wanted a period of exclusivity and once that is over we will be able to have discussions with other systems.

That's helpful.

And just in terms of your proprietary indicators, I don't know if I missed any comments on that, but what are they saying other portfolio companies at the -- I guess US European sort of economic outlook (multiple speakers) levels and (technical difficulty) --?

Yes, they are saying the US is gaining momentum.

So, each quarter by quarter it has gotten better and better and the expectations of our CEO is based on early indicators, they look at incoming orders and stuff like that, is for further gains.

And then Europe's bottomed out and is improving a little bit and China is slowing.

Great, thanks, Tony.

Chris Kotowski, Oppenheimer.

Good morning.

I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on what Steve was saying about the investments in core real estate, because it seems like it is a bit of a departure for you and just which funds is it being done out of?

Are these carry funds and how scalable is it and what should we be expecting in the coming quarters and years, and where would we see it in your financials?

We have requests.

We have the largest opportunity real estate business in the world.

Many, many, many times bigger than anyone else.

And as part of that business, we are also the -- we believe -- that we are the largest owner of real estate in the world.

And what happens when you are in that kind of pretty unique position you get to see a huge amount of deal flow and enormous amounts of knowledge in terms of what is going on virtually everywhere in the world because we operate globally.

What happens from time to time is we have limited partners who ask us to evaluate potential purchases and, from time to time, ask us to help them manage those types of situations.

And I think we -- I said today in our remarks that we had two of these situations which were of significant size and we are evaluating what to do in terms of further expansion in that area and that is where we are at the moment.

Yes and just to flesh that out a little, it would be -- it wouldn't be in any of our existing funds.

So it would be new capital from new investors often.

So and it would -- they would be additions to AUM and they typically have a managed fee and a carrier associated with it.

So technically it would be carry fund although the holding periods are longer, the returns are lower, so it doesn't have quite the same octane.

And if you look at what some other guys have done, it could be a real scale business.

Because it is huge.

Just to give you an idea, what we do typically in opportunity area is maybe 10% of the money that institutions allocate to be professionally managed in real estate so our basic business which is very -- it is high return with surprisingly historically almost no risk of lost capital.

I don't understand why people don't allocate way more money to that strategy because it has worked out over 20 years to be terrific.

But on the other hand, they don't.

They have limits, diversification requirements and the core area is massively larger than the monies that we have access to.

And the firm itself has a unique positive reputation in the real estate area and it is something logical for us to think about in a little more depth.

So you'll probably hear more from us over time, but we are looking at that area.

That sounds like a great opportunity.

Thank you.

Robert Lee, KBW.

Good morning.

I'm just curious, Steve.

You made a pretty impassioned case about how inexpensive you think the units are and the growth profile of the Firm.

So from a capital management perspective, given your long-term view, why not use some of the growing cash flow to buy back units in the open market?

We could have taken the Company private at $5.00 a share at one point and we have a lot of -- we didn't do that because I really felt that we are going to need our capital to grow our business.

When we raise new funds and expand the business, we have to put money into those businesses to show our good faith to our investors.

So, we have needs for capital.

In addition, we get presented with opportunities all the time to buy businesses.

Most of those ideas are pretty bad actually.

But from time to time there is a really good one like when we went forward with a combination with GSO which was over $1 billion.

And so basically using our capital to just shrink our equity base, which we could do, stops us potentially from taking advantage of some pretty unique opportunities and what we don't want to do is be capital-constrained.

We have a quite high payout for a normal company.

We pay out somewhere around 85% and that is way higher than a normal company.

So we like to give people cash.

I have always felt, I like cash, and I've always felt that that is a good thing.

And one of the reasons I like cash is I get paid $350,000 a year to work at Blackstone so I am a relatively low-paid employee here.

And if you are going to pay out a lot of cash, and you have a high dividend payout, shrinking your stock at the same time that you are rapidly growing, you have to put money in funds and you want the ability in all market environments to be able to buy things when they are available that are perfect fits, then using your money to grow to and to buy in stock and shrink your equity base thus far has seemed to us not as good as an investment alternative as growing the business.

And when we think that changes, we will change our policy.

But at the moment, the growth in the business is so substantial that we want to use our money for that purpose rather than buying stock.

Great.

That was my only question.

Thank you.

Marc Irizarry, Goldman Sachs.

Steve, when we think about the $265 billion in alternative assets, how can you grow the business off such a big base and you look at the private equity segment and it looks like you are moving beyond just the big global funds into other verticals, if you will.

I'm curious when you think about areas like EM, or a distressed EM private equity or maybe distressed investing, how should we think about how over time you build -- continue to build out the private equity verticals as you try and grow off this big base?

I think that is a great question.

And we think about that all the time.

And there are a variety of verticals that we can grow and how one attacks the emerging markets is sort of a logical question in large part, because the emerging markets depending upon how you measure is 35% to 40% of the global economy.

And so we have a variety of ideas that we constantly debate internally as to how to add different areas of -- we broke out energy for example where, as Tony reported our rates of return, our energy fund, are somewhere in the 50s which is pretty stunning.

And we could raise as much money as we wanted to, I think, in that type of sector.

And there are other sectors and other strategies we can do.

The reason why I am being slightly evasive is that I am trying to be evasive is because if I lay out some things we are thinking about then our competitors get to think about them too and we had rather just sort of pop things out and did them rather than talk about them.

So I am not being completely cooperative with you, but it is not because there aren't interesting things that we can do.

Great.

Thanks.

(inaudible), Royal Bank of Canada.

I want to go back to the topic of evaluation.

Obviously, performance is not an issue, Blackstone innovation is not an issue either.

Can just given where the stocks are trading right now and where you think fair value should be, what is the strategy to unlock value and from your perspective is it just -- wait and see, sit and wait and see basic distributions take care of valuations.

Is that -- what are you planning on doing going forward?

I think this is apparently a life's work, to put people in touch with what I think is appropriate valuation.

You can't keep growing much faster than other money managers and keep taking share and producing terrific results without getting recognized.

And in a way our job is to point out what is going on and if people want to keep us at 10 multiple, I simply -- I have been doing this for over 40 years and that stuff doesn't last.

It just doesn't last.

And if we point out what we're doing over time with enough frequency, then people will say, geez, that's pretty amazing and we will be appropriately valued.

But we can't make anybody do that in terms of unlocking value, other than doing what we do, which is growing our business over time and doing a great job and having more and more investors on the fund side, and whether those retail investors or institutional investors continue to give us moneys and as do a good job, I think over time that's the best way to do it and, also, just because we have lived through many cycles in terms of investment and realizations and so forth, for public investors, this is relatively new asset class.

So I think there's some type of embedded skepticism or uncertainty as to how this works.

We are not uncertain because we have lived this numerous times and once the public gets to see the magnitude and the earning power and the distributions that come from a rapidly growing manager of our type in this asset class, I think they will become believers too.

Those who figure that out late will make less than those who figured out earlier will make more.

And that is sort of the yin and yang of life.

So we are here to be open and transparent and it is up to others to figure out in their view what's that worth.

I have my own views and I don't think that will turn out to be wrong, but I am living this thing and everybody else just sort of checks in periodically.

So it's maybe a different level of passion or belief or whatever, but this is based on living through many cycles in this area and seeing how it works out and knowing that we are now in a situation that is a real breakout for the Firm and has been the last several years.

And you are seeing it reflected in stock price and I believe that, on an operational level, we will continue to be in a pretty unusual position compared to almost anyone in the world.

If that is worth 10 times earnings, so be it.

I don't believe it is.

I appreciate the answer and congratulations on a great year.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mike Carrier, Bank of America Merrill Lynch

A question on exit of realization activity.

So fourth quarter you were pretty active on both the IPOs and the secondary side.

I think you also mentioned that you have three portfolio companies in the process of being sold.

Just in terms of the outlook do you see the backdrop for M&A picking up?

And then when you look across cycles, typically what is the split?

When you think about activity between whether it is IPOs and secondaries versus M&A, and do IPOs typically proceed a pickup in M&A activity, so meaning is this fairly normal?

This has been a pretty -- Steve and Tony could answer this probably better than I could, but I just happened to talk first.

This M&A cycle is pretty unusual.

You have a huge levels of corporate liquidity, low levels of debt, high levels of stock price and what should be happening is that there should be a real dramatic increase in M&A activity.

What has held that back is basically political uncertainty, regulatory uncertainty and a whole variety of issues of that type that have really gotten in the way of a normal cycle.

I think Tony mentioned earlier and I agree with him that this is going to be a calmer US political environment this year.

Last year, everybody lost.

Whether it's one side politically or another side, by taking each other on and it has turned out to be unsuccessful for both parties.

It turned out to be unsuccessful for the United States.

And I think as some of those conflicts recede, then there will be more confidence in the business community and that typically leads to M&A activity.

So what you saw is markets getting ahead of economic prospects.

In other words, GDP growth in the 2s doesn't normally get you a 32% increase in the stock market.

I mean, why would it?

And so the reason why a lot of these realizations have gone in the public market rather than strategically is they are sort of -- not quite a buyers strike, but buyer caution and that will diminish in my view and we will be seeing more strategic exits.

Although as Tony mentioned, when we often put copies up for sale it is called the dual track and if the stock market looks better and the strategic buyers don't show up, that's fine.

We can make plenty of money.

So if you are asking us to predict what is going to happen, one, it is a little hard to do, but on the margin I think we both bet that there will be more of a pickup in M&A activity and it will provide us with options to sell businesses.

But we are like, we are happy either way in a sense because if we take it public and we own the company and the companies do really well and they continue to grow, we ultimately make a bunch of money for our investors that way too.

So it is not that we have to go one way or another.

Let me just add a couple of things.

In the M&A cycle there are some interesting things that have happened lately.

If you look at the companies that have announced big acquisitions, their stocks have traded way up and historically that's not what has happened.

And that is really causing Boards to be very interested and management to be very much more interested in being venturesome and going out and do things.

Similarly you have got kind of -- as stock prices run you have got two things that happen.

First of all, targets start to look more expensive particularly relations to cash is earning nothing and those coming to it want to use their stock as currency have currency that they are more willing to issue, if you will.

So all those factors together in addition to what Steve talked about in terms of the commerce seen on Washington, DC, and some economic strength, I think, are adding up to provide fuel for the M&A cycle.

And then you ask how like long-term what is kind of most of our exits and so on and that ebbs and flows.

I would say probably IPOs are -- equity offers are a little more than half, but in addition to M&A, you have got dividend recapitalizations which can sometimes be a very attractive way to lower the company's these cost of capital and take some money off the table.

And you have also got sales to other financial buyers and so I suspect actually you are going to see a lot of sales to other financial buyers.

Because there's a lot of money out there and some investors are being very aggressive in terms of prices they'll pay.

So, anyway, just round out Steve's answer a little bit.

Okay thanks for the color.

Patrick Davitt, Autonomous.

I know it is early days, but I am curious to get your thoughts on any opportunities from an investment standpoint that are emerging from the emerging markets' pullup over the last week and, conversely, if any investments have been significantly pressured by the volatility?

That's a good question.

I think the emerging markets goes through a variety of cycles and clearly there's sort of a concern about currency which tends to destabilize these types of economies if that currency problem develops.

What do they say?

One person's tragedy is another one's comedy.

And if there are difficulties in some of these countries, in our real estate business, for example, what normally happens in those situations is that credit dries up and then the normal sequence of real estate development that there are always a number of real estate owners are real estate developers who find themselves unexpectedly under enormous pressure.

And when capital dries up, it is hard for them to find solutions to those -- their problems and that provides an enormous opportunity, for example conceptually, for us.

And that works in our private equity business as well.

A little less in the credit business because we tend to stay away more from emerging markets because the rule of law is often not as equivalent as it would be.

In the states it provides opportunities in our hedge fund solutions business of various types and so illiquidity and crises provide potential opportunity for us.

We don't we should anyone ill in that sense.

It's better if the world moves along in a good healthy way, but that is not the way the world is constructed.

There are always periodic dislocations and we can do quite well in those situations.

Let me just add a couple of things.

Obviously we carry a bunch of our investments in other currencies and so when the currencies drop those investments are often marked down.

I would say we looked at this earlier.

So far it has not been a material impact.

Secondly a lot of the entities we invest in whether they the malls or companies or whatever, have cost denominated in local currency and revenues denominated in dollars so, ironically, in that kind of scenario they do very well earnings-wise when the currency weakens.

And then you have got to offset that against the fact that the companies might be carrying the local currency.

But it mitigates, softens any impact a lot.

And then in terms of the opportunities that have jumped out of that I think as Steve touched on, so far the early ones that look attractive are real estate because that tends to move the quickest because it is kind of credit bubble-driven so to speak, [credit market-driven], and because it is hard assets, it is a little bit easier to -- for someone like us to jump into that when times are in turmoil than a company where you are trying to make projections on the business conditions and that is a little more uncertain.

So the first opp -- you asked what the early opportunities to emerge are and I would say those are primarily real estate related which could be real estate equity or real estate debt.

Great answer.

Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time we have now for questions.

Therefore I should like to turn the call back to Joan Solotar for closing remarks.

Great.

Thanks, everyone, for joining us and we look forward to speaking with you after the call if you have any follow-ups.

Have a good day.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your compass call for today.

You may now disconnect.

Thank you very much for joining.