Patria Investments Limited (NASDAQ:PAX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024

Patria Investments Limited misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.21 EPS, expectations were $0.34.

Patria Investments Limited isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Patria First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session [Operator Instructions]. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference call over to your first speaker for today, Andre Medina from Patria’s Shareholder Relations. Andre, please go ahead.

Andre Medina: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And welcome to Patria's first quarter 2024 earnings call. Speaking today on the call, our Chief Executive Officer, Alex Saigh; and our Chief Financial Officer, Ana Russo. We're also joined by our Chief Corporate Development Officer, Marco D’Ippolito; and our Chief Economist, Luis Fernando Lopes, for the Q&A session. This morning, we issued a press release in earnings presentation detailing our results for the quarter, which you can find posted on the Investor Relations section of our Web site or on Form 6-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This call is being webcast and a replay will be available. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call may include forward-looking statements, which are uncertain, do not guarantee future performance and undue reliance should not be placed on them.

Patria assumes no obligation and does not intend to update any such forward looking statements. Such statements are based on current management expectations and involve inherent risks, including those discussed in the risk factor section of our latest Form 20-F annual report. Also, note that no statement on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Patria fund. As a foreign private issuer, Patria reports financial results using International Financial Reporting Standards or IFRS as opposed to US GAAP. Additionally, we would like to remind everyone that we'll refer to certain non-GAAP measures, which we believe are relevant in assessing the financial performance of the business but which should not be considered in isolation from or a substitute for measures prepared in a accordance with IFRS.

Reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable IFRS measures are included in our earnings presentation. Now I'll turn the call over to Alex.

Alex Saigh: Thank you, Andre. And good morning everyone. The first quarter of 2024 marked a great start for the year, and I'm very pleased with the performance we delivered. We generated $35.1 million of fee related earnings in the quarter, representing a 13% increase from 1Q ‘23 with only 20% of this growth coming from acquisitions. We delivered more than $31.3 million of distributable earnings or $0.21 per share, and announced a quarterly dividend of $0.18 per share. We raised $1.1 billion year-to-date through April and over $5.1 billion in the last 12 months. We are confident we are on track towards meeting our $5 billion fundraising target for the year. At the portfolio level, we generated solid investment performance, which helped offset the impact from realizations and FX movements.

Generating strong investment returns for our fund investors remain our primary objective and this strong performance continues to support our healthy net accrued performance fee balance of $514 million or $3.41 per share as of March 31st. Total AUM and fee earning AUM have grown more than 17% and 20% from one year ago respectively with only one third of this growth coming from acquisitions. This past Monday, we were thrilled to announce the closing of our acquisition of Aberdeen's private equity solutions business. As previously announced, the acquired platform, when combined with Patria’s existing global private markets vehicles, will form a new vertical, global private market solutions, or GPMS, with aggregate fee earning AUM of over $10 billion.

We believe the breadth and scale of this new vertical positions Patria as a premier gateway to global private markets for underserved investors in LatAm. Also on the M&A front, we are marking good progress towards closing the pending acquisition of Credit Suisse’s real estate business in Brazil with up to $2.4 billion in fee earning AUM as of 1Q ‘24. We now have owed the required regulatory approvals in place and expect to hold the necessary fund shareholder votes to approve the transfer of the management contracts. Driven by strong organic growth and our accretive acquisition strategy, we remain confident in our ability to deliver our previously communicated 2024 FRE target of $170 million and our 2025 target of FRE in excess of $200 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of 15% and over 17% respectively.

Digging deeper in our expanding platform and pro forma for acquisition, our 1Q ‘24 fee earning AUM reached over $34 billion, representing over 4x growth in the three years since our IPO. Notably, pro forma for the acquisitions permanent capital comprises about 20% of our fee earning AUM upfront in significant levels at the time of our IPO. The expanding breadth, scope and earnings power of our platform is highlighted by the fact that, number one, we have grown from a two-product asset manager at the time of our IPO into a diversified alternative manager with pro forma $34 billion of fee earning AUM spanning across a range of strategies and investment vehicles, including private equity infrastructure, credit, real estate, public equities and global private market solutions.

The recent launch of our infrastructure private credit fund highlights how we are leveraging our expanded platform to bring new and differentiated investment solutions to our clients. Two, we offer an expanding range of product structures in order to meet investor objectives and with permanent capital draw down funds and SMAs representing over 70% of our fee earning AUM, underscoring the inherent stickiness of our management fee revenues and fee related earnings. Three, we are diversified across currencies and importantly, 70% of our pro forma fee earnings AUM is denominated in hard currencies, US dollars, British pounds and euros. As we think about our path forward, it's important to emphasize that organic growth of existing and acquired investment platforms post-acquisition remains our top priority.

This is highlighted by the fact that from year end 2018 through 2023, our fee earning AUM, excluding the initial influx of acquisitions, grew at CAGR of 17%. While sensible organic growth is our top priority, diversification through inorganic expansion remains a key component of our strategy. We believe in the ongoing consolidation within the asset management industry, and at many times, M&A is the most efficient way to capture new avenues of growth. It can speed time to market and allows us to capture the opportunities we see in the region through the addition of skilled and culturally aligned investment teams with strong investment track record, complementary and differentiated investment strategies and new distribution capabilities. In some instances, buying may also be cheaper than raising equivalent amounts of capital through placement agents.

Overall, we are very proud of the differentiated and diversified investment platform we have built both organically and inorganically, making us the largest alternative asset management platform in the region in terms of direct assets under management, revenues and fee related earnings, as we remain very excited regarding our future growth prospects. Now let's have a closer look into our investment verticals. This past March, Private Equity International released its 2023 PEI awards ranking Patria Private Equity as the firm of the year in Latin America. This was our second year of participation and the second win in a row. The award reflects the market recognition of consistent performance sector knowledge, commitment and leadership in Latin America.

Investment performance excellence is highlighted by the 20 year pool net IRR in US dollars of our flagship private active funds of 17.5% as of the 1Q ‘24. For comparison purposes, as of 3Q ‘23, the latest available market data from Cambridge Associates, our pool performance was 18.3%, which represented 11.9% of excess returns over the past 20 years relative to Cambridge Benchmark returns in LatAm. Over the same period, Patria Private Equity also generated excess returns relative to Cambridge benchmarks when compared to emerging markets, Asia and the US, with excess returns over 7.1%, 7.2% and 3.3% respectively. In what remains a challenging private active fundraising environment, the strong track record helps our fund fundraising efforts.

In 1Q ‘24, we signed a new $65 million co-investment in our new vintage private active fund, which is currently in the market. We have secured approximately $1.2 billion of commitments as of 1Q ‘24 for our new vintage buyout fund with fundraising outperforming in LatAm, Asia and the Middle East as the private active fundraising environment in the US remains challenging. Nevertheless, we continue to see a path to reaching $2 billion of commitments. Beyond our flagship funds, our private equity platform currently with $11.7 billion in AUM also offers growth equity and venture capital funds, strategies that we did not offer at the time of our IPO. With regards to our infrastructure, vertical and new product development in 1Q ‘24, we raised over $60 million for one of our infra corporate funds with focus on mature energy distribution and transmission assets.

This was the third capital raise for this specific vehicle and it closed above our initial targets. This strategy, which represents permanent capital AUM, continues to gain scale and now totals more than $310 million in AUM. In contrast to the struggles many managers have been facing with regard to generating realizations, our flagship draw down business has seen a pickup in realization activity for LPs, which is crucial driver of fundraising for our latest vintage flagship Infrastructure Fund, which is now in the market. As of 1Q 2024, we have already secured over $1 billion of commitments for the new fund and are making progress towards our goal of raising $2.5 billion. We believe the investment opportunity within Infrastructure is very attractive and have already started to deploy this capital.

To illustrate, in 1Q '24, we announced $110 million commitment to a greenfield solar plant in Colombia with a 360 megawatt installed capacity, representing the largest solar farm in the country with $300 million of projected CapEx. Also, the first announced investment from this fund, a toll road concession in the south of Brazil with a 30 year contract protected against inflation and a 20 year traffic history, began operations during 1Q 2024 ahead of plan. Looking at investment returns. As of 1Q '24, the pooled net IRR in US dollars for our two latest vintage funds was 12.3%, outperforming the Hamilton Lane Global Infrastructure medium benchmark and the Dow Jones Brookfield Global Infrastructure Index by 4.1% and 12.4% respectively. Finally, in 1Q 2024, we contributed BRL50 million or approximately $10 million out of a limited capital exposure of BRL100 million or approximately $20 million in order to provide fee capital to [Tria], our new and separate energy trading company.

[Tria] was created to access a high growth opportunity we see in a fragmented sector with compelling fundamentals. We believe Patria's investment team has the skillset and expertise to help build this business, which has significant synergies with our infrastructure portfolio companies. Patria through its seed capital investment holds a 67% stake in [Tria], which began its operations this April. Other shareholders include four well respected minority partners with recognized expertise in energy trading. Overtime, our goal is to develop [Tria] into an asset management business with the intention to raise private credit vehicles to fund both power generators and consumers with energy backed contracts. Our credit vertical continues to generate strong and consistent returns to our investors.

As of 1Q 24, our three largest strategies, LatAm high yield, LatAm local currency and Chilean fixed income have each outperformed their relevant benchmarks for all reported periods; 1Q ‘24, one year, three years, five years and since inception. Specifically, our LatAm high yield strategy with $3.6 billion in AUM has outperformed its relevant benchmark by more than 370 basis points since inception in early 2000. In the last 12 months, we raised over $900 million for our credit products, including approximately $300 million in 1Q ‘24. Fee earning AUM grew more than 19% organically from one year ago and more than 4% sequentially. In addition to the three aforementioned strategies, Patria's diversified credit platform with approximately $6 billion in AUM offers funds in private credit, infra private credit and receivables.

Private credit strategies continue to see strong momentum globally, and expanding this vertical both organically and potentially through M&A remains a key priority. To illustrate, we are currently raising a US dollar denominated LatAm focused private credit fund with a first closing expected for the second quarter of this year. We hope to have more news on this soon. Turning now to public equities. Let me take a moment here to congratulate Pablo Echeverría, Moneda's Founder and Head of Patria’s Public Equities for our Pionero fund, for which Pablo has been the portfolio managers since its inception. Focus on small and medium sized companies in Chile, Pionero reached its 30th anniversary this March with impressive performance along the way, including a 19.6% return in the past 12 months and a 13.5% annualized return since inception, which translates into a 45 times multiple for capital invested in day one.

This investment platform with $2.8 billion in AUM offers a range of products, including pan-LatAm large and small caps, as well as Chilean large and small caps and private investments in public equities or PIPE. With regard to PIPE, we were very pleased to launch our PIPE Chile this quarter and closed and fund with an initial $55 million raised in 1Q ‘24, and which we believe is well positioned to scale. Focusing on our next vertical, real estate fund raising continues a solid path. Over the past 12 months, we generated over $1 billion of organic inflows and total AUM reached $3.8 billion. For perspective, as of 1Q ‘23, AUM totaled $1.6 billion. This organic growth included a strong 1Q ‘24 with $235 million of new capital raise. Beyond the attractive organic growth, we continue to pursue what we believe to be great opportunities to consolidate the real estate investment trust market in the region.

In November, 2023, we closed our new partnership with Bancolombia, adding $1.4 billion real estate investment trust and best in class distribution capabilities in the Columbia market. One month later, we announced the agreement to acquire Credit Suisse real estate business in Brazil or CSHG real estate, a platform with $2.4 billion in assets under management. Altogether, we have grown our real estate vertical to pro forma AUM of over $6 billion with approximately 90% being permanent capital. Finally, let's do a quick overview of our newest platform, Global Private Markets Solutions or GPMS. This new vertical focuses on serving clients as a gateway to private markets on a global scale through proprietary and third party products. On the proprietary front, we currently offer primaries, secondaries and co-investment strategies across various draw down funds and listed vehicles, which are permanent capital in addition to separately managed accounts or SMAs. With a 10 to 15 year track record, these three strategies, primaries, secondaries and co-investments have generated consistent and strong returns with pool IIRs in euros of 18%, 20% and 20% since inception and as of 2Q 23 respectively.

On a pro forma basis, it manages over $8 billion in fee earning AUM. In addition to the recently acquired business as 1Q ‘24 Patria managed $1.9 billion of fee earning AUM in third party funds, of which $1.5 billion were through feeder funds that direct Latin American capital to global private markets, a business we have been active in for over a decade. The feeder fund business has raised over $300 million in the last 12 months with approximately $60 million raised in 1Q ‘24. In aggregate, our GPMS platform is being launched with over $10 billion in fee earning AUM and represents a complimentary pillar of growth as we serve as a gateway for Latin American investors to private markets on a global scale. Before I hand the call over to Ana to give you more details on the numbers for the quarter, let me take a quick moment to give another perspective on the diversification of our vectors of growth.

Prior to our IPO, close to $7 billion of our total $8 billion of fee earning AUM or over 85% served global clients looking to invest in pan-LatAm alternatives. Today, pro forma for the pending CSHG Real Estate deal of our $34 billion in fee earning AUM, approximately 35% continues to be sourced from global clients looking to invest in pan-LatAm alternatives. 35% is sourced from local clients seeking to invest in regional strategies. 25% is from local investors focused on local alternative products and finally, 5% comes from local clients investing in global alternatives. I believe this clearly illustrates the amazing job this team has been doing on executing our growth plans and diversifying our business. Now, I turn the call over to Ana.

Ana Russo: Thank you, Alex. And good morning, everyone. It was indeed a great start of the year as Patria continues to deliver steady and strong results. As we grow and diversify our platforms, it is important to maintain and enhance the comparability of our KPIs and metrics with those of our peers. And with that in mind, we reclassified two line items on our non-GAAP P&L, which had no significant impact on our reported results. First, rebates originally under the expense line placement fee amortization and rebates are now directly deduct from fee revenues as a contra revenue item, making our fee revenues more comparable with peers. This has no impact on reported fee related earnings but does slightly increase our reported FRE margin by around 2.3 percentage points in first quarter 2024 and 1.6 percentage points in 2023.

Second, unrealized gains and losses were reclassed below distributable earnings, and this move makes our DE even closer to a cash based metric. Further details on these two reclassifications can be found on our earnings presentations, which, among other things, highlight that $1.5 million of unrealized gains that were moved from net financial income and expense to new line called unrealized gains losses on investment below these would have decreased 2023 distributor earnings per share by only a penny. As mentioned by Alex, following the completion of the acquisition of the Private Equity Solutions business from Aberdeen, we have now launched a new vertical, Global Private Market Solutions or GPMS. This vertical with pro form fee earnings AUM over $10 billion also includes $1.9 billion from our third party distribution business, which was previously under advisory and distribution.

As detailed on our earnings presentation, the remaining assets in advisory and distribution will be reallocated to other asset class. With that, Patria's platform will be based in six verticals; private equity, infrastructure, credit, real estate, public equities and global private market solutions. Let's now review the results for the first quarter. Q1 2024 fee related earnings of $35.1 million was up 13% versus Q1 2023 with a margin of 58%, reflecting an increase of 2.3 percentage points compared to last year after adjusting for the expense reclassification noted earlier. Q1 2024 FRE was inline with Q4 '23 when excluding the seasonal and 1 time impact from fourth quarter of 2023 as our FRE continues its growth path. Total fee revenues in Q1 '24 increased by $4.5 million or 8% from Q1 '23 to $6.6 million.

This increase was mainly driven by growth in credit fee earnings AUM as a result of net inflows and appreciation in our credit funds, which drove an approximate 20% increase in related fee revenue. Higher year-over-year fee revenues also benefited from the November ‘23 closing of our partnership with Bancolombia and new commitments and deployments in Private Equity Fund VII, which continues to fundraise. Excluding Q4 2023 1 time impact, our fee revenues continue to grow sequentially. This one time impact were; one, crystallization of incentive fees of $4 million in our credit and public equity verticals; and two, one time management fees catch up of $2.5 million for private equity funds. Total operating expenses for personnel expenses plus G&A were [Indiscernible] [$24.8 million] for the quarter mostly in line with Q1 ‘23, adjusted to reflect the reclassification noted earlier.

Patria delivered distributable earnings of $31.3 million in Q1 ‘24, equating to $0.21 per share, $7.7 million lower than the first quarter of 2023, fully driven by $10 million of performance related earnings in Q1 ‘23. We also crystallized $26.6 million of performance related earnings in Q4 ‘23, which drove the variance versus the current quarter in addition to the 1 time impact of FRE mentioning before. Additionally, corporate income tax rose this quarter to $2.8 million when compared to $1.1 million in Q1 ‘23, mainly due to the larger contribution from our business in Chile, Brazil and Columbia. We declared dividend per share of $0.18 for Q1 ‘24, which reflect an 85% payout ratio. As mentioned previously, beginning 2024, we expect to distribute 85% of our distributable earnings excluding performance related earnings and realized gains from energy trading platform net of taxes up to a $100 million in order to fund M&A obligations and pay down debt.

Going forward, we will continue to evaluate our distribution policy with a focus on; one, paying a stable and growing dividend driven by fee related earnings; and two, maintaining our balance sheet strength with an appropriate amount of leverage and ability to pursue acquisitions and [reinvest] on the [Indiscernible] [business]. Our March 2024 balance sheet shows $83.4 million of debt with the majority reflecting our long term financing line and $10 million from our revolving credit facility. This debt was incurred to fund the first trench of our acquisition of real estate business Credit Suisse, including related expense. Future obligations will be funded by a combination of cash, debt and/or equity. In regard to equity, based on our pending closing M&A, we expect to issue less than 4 million shares throughout the year, which would result in less than 156 million shares in aggregate at the year end.

Based on our FRE targets for 2024, this implies an FRE between $1.08 and $1.12 per share, between 10% and 12% higher than 2023 FRE per share of $0.99. However, the full year benefit of the closing M&A will only take place in 2025 where our FRE target ranges between $200 million and $225 million. That give us an FRE per share between $1.25 and $1.40, already including any additional expected share issuance. Therefore, our compounded growth between 2023 and 2025 in FRE per share could be up to 40%. Net accrued performances were up almost 20% versus Q1 ‘23, reaching $514 million with over $300 million coming from our two most mature funds. Infrastructure Fund III currently under catch up phase and Private Equity Fund V also under [Indiscernible].

Despite strong underlining performance, quarter-over-quarter net accrued performance fee decreased by 4%, mainly by share price of our publicly listed companies and currencies. These [Indiscernible] [accruals] now represent $3.41 per share. As we progress in the year, we expect our management fee revenues to be supported by ongoing fee earning AUM inflows across the platform, particularly in credit, driven by inflows and performance, fundraising and real estate, deployment in [Infrastructure V] [Indiscernible] in addition to new acquisitions. As a result, we remain confident in reaching our [Indiscernible] [$117] million FRE goal for this year, assuming a margin between 56% and 58%. This slightly lower margin reflects the nature of our newly acquired and pending acquisitions.

We expect FRE growth to be back end loaded towards the second half of 2024 due to the combination of organic growth and the timing of the closing of our acquisitions. I will now turn back to Alex for closing remarks.

Alex Saigh: Thank you, Ana. One last thing before we start the Q&A. In light of our great 1Q ‘24 results, multiple organic growth initiatives, the closing of our acquisition of the Private Equity Solutions business from Aberdeen and the good progression towards the closing of the CSHG real estate deal, I am even more confident we will reach both our financial and AUM target. We are comfortable in getting our fee related earnings to at least $170 million this year on the way to more than $200 million in 2025. As we embark on our next chapter of growth, we look forward to sharing more details with you at our next PAX Investor Day expected for later this year. We thank you for your time, and are happy to take your questions.

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