Thank you for standing by, welcome to the GQG Partners, Inc. 2023 half year earnings release conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the one on your telephone keypad. This call will contain forward-looking statements, including statements of current intention, opinion, and predictions regarding the company's present and future operations, possible future events, and future financial prospects. While these statements reflect expectations at the date of this call, they are, by their nature, not certain and are susceptible to change. The company makes no representation, assurance, or guarantee as to the accuracy or likelihood of fulfilling any such forward-looking statements, whether expressed or implied. Except as required by applicable law or the ASX Listing Rules, disclaims any obligation or undertaking to publicly update such forward-looking statements. Participants recording this call may use such recordings for their internal business purposes only and are prohibited from making any part of such recordings available to the public without the prior written permission of the company. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Tim Carver, CEO. Please go ahead. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for our half yearly earnings earnings call. We're thrilled to be here. I'm joined today by Rajiv Jain, our Chairman and CIO, Melodie Zakaluk, our CFO, and Steve Ford, our Global Head of Sales and Marketing. If we go to the second page, I'd like to present the result for the half yearly period. We ended the period with a record $104 billion in funds under management on the back of $6.2 billion of net flows for the first six months. Net revenues achieved $237.1 million, an increase of 6.5% from the prior period a year ago. Net Operating Income grew to $176.4 million, an increase of 1.3%, the board declared a second quarter dividend of $0.0217 per share, a 90% payout ratio of distributable earnings. If we go to the third slide, there are a few highlights I'd like to share with you from this period. First of all, while our investment performance year-to-date was mixed, our long-term investment performance continues to be very strong. All of our strategies have outperformed their respective benchmarks on a 5-year basis. We have top quartile, 5-year alpha and Sharpe ratio on our four primary strategies, and 11 funds now carry Morningstar Gold Medalist Ratings. All of these are key considerations for clients when choosing to work with GQG. On the distribution front, we are now a top 10 U.S. mutual fund family. A remarkable achievement, and I give great credit to our sales team for achieving this. In Australia, our global equities net flows were first out of all Morningstar categories. In Europe, our UCITS complex has surpassed AUD 5 billion of funds under management. We continue to see strong sub-advisory momentum across the board. This demonstrates the breadth of our distribution capabilities and the global nature of our client base. We're achieving great success in lots of different places. Our team has grown to 170 people. We've added 20 new headcount across infrastructure and sales and new business opportunities. Finally, we've been quite active in looking at ways to add new talent to the platform, whether that be in lift-out opportunities, recruitment opportunities, and M&A opportunities. On the 27th of July, we announced an indication of intent to submit a proposal to acquire ASX-listed Pacific Current Group. If we go to the next slide, you'll see our investment performance across all four of our strategies, both on the short term, shorter term, 1 year, all the way through inception to date. I'd note that while we had mixed performance with our global and U.S. equity strategies behind on a one-year basis, EM on a one-year basis has performed quite well. All of our strategies over the long term have performed quite well. We're going to dive deeper into performance in a minute, I want to present this here early in the presentation, because as you've heard me say before, I believe this business lives and dies by investment performance. On the next slide, you'll see what we call our operational value added. That is, what is the management team doing to earn its keep? How are we adding value for our shareholders? This compares the real outcome for GQG as compared to a passive outcome. You see, we started the year with $88 billion in funds under management, and for the period, we added over $6 billion in net flows. We added $300 million in alpha, and if you look down, you'll see we also had the market benefit of another $9.6 billion from market returns. When you add our excess return plus our distribution, you see that the team added $6.5 billion of funds under management to the platform for the benefit of shareholders. When you combine that with a very strong alpha, sorry, beta in the market this year, you'll see that it drives FUM growth of nice double-digit growth in total FUM. With that, I'll hand over to Mel, who can bring us through the financial results. Mel, you need to unmute. Apologies. Thank you, Tim, particularly for telling me to unmute. Slide seven, please. We are pleased with our financial results in the first half of 2023. With our FUM continuing to grow, we believe we have nice momentum into the second half of the year. Looking at the revenue bar charts on the left side, starting with the first half of 2022, we were able to demonstrate solid growth in revenue. This was due to an increase in average FUM during that period, even as equity markets experienced downdraws of around 20%. In the second half of 2022, revenue declined modestly, as did our average FUM, as equity markets were unable to recover during the period, although we did experience positive net inflows. In the first half of 2023, we're able to deliver revenue growth once again, exceeding our previous six-month peak from the first half of 2022. Our Operating Margin for the six months ended 30 June 2023, remained strong at 74.4%, even as we continue to invest in the firm's infrastructure and client-facing teams. Comparing the half-year results of 30 June 2022 to 30 June 2023, net revenue, Net Operating Income, and Net Income After Tax all increased. As Tim was saying, in the first half of 2023, we crossed the $100 billion FUM milestone, ending June 2023 with $104.1 billion, a 20.1% increase from 30 June 2022. FUM growth in the first half of 2023 was driven by $6.2 billion of net flows, as well as capital appreciation as the equity markets rallied during the period. I would like to also draw your attention to the top right chart. In the chart, you see dividends paid per share of $0.0387. This represents, on a per-share basis in US cents, the actual amount we paid during the first half of 2023. We declared dividends based upon earnings in Q1 and Q2 of 2023 of $0.0417. Slide eight, please. Revenue remains high quality, comprised of 97% of Management Fees, with a competitive average Management Fee of 48.3 basis points, slightly higher than the six months ended 30 June 2022 and the year ended 31 December 2022. We believe a high concentration of management fee income is the foundation for quality earnings, creating stability, particularly evident in volatile markets. Costs during the period increased as compared to the six months ended 30 June 2022 by 25.2%, as we continue to grow the business with a mixture of ongoing and one-time expenses. More than half of the ongoing expense growth is related to investments to grow the top line, and the remainder focused on infrastructure to build, scale, and sustain a growing business. The timing of our investments in the business is purposeful, as we aim to capitalize on our historical, strong, relative investment performance, both as compared to the strategy benchmarks and our peers. We expect to continue making prudent investments in the business during the remainder of 2023. As expected in the human capital business, our compensation and benefit expenses are circa 55% of our total operating expenses. We believe the greatest investment we can make is in our existing and new talent. The increase in human capital related to expenses of 23.7% for the six months ended 30 June 2023, compared to a year ago, and are primarily the result of investments in new hires, annualized compensation associated with 2022 hires, and cost of living and market adjustments in the second half of 2022. The 27 team members added year-over-year were across the business, with approximately 55% market-facing and 45% allocated to the infrastructure. We expect additional talent in the remainder of the year to be similar in allocation. Third-party commissions, a FUM-driven expense, increased year-over-year by $1.8 million, driven by the increase of average FUM in our UCITS and our US 40 Act mutual fund complexes. We expect this expense to continue to grow with the success of our wholesale business in the U.S. and Europe. Comparing general and administrative costs for the six months ended 30 June 2022 to the same period in 2023, expenses increased by $3.7 million. Approximately one-third of these expenses were related to market-facing activity and half to infrastructure, while the remainder were one-time costs associated with various business activities expected to continue in the second half of 2023. Our increase in infrastructure-related costs is largely the result of leasing additional space in New York City. We recently entered into an agreement to sublet our previous space, which over time will reduce rent expense. IT and information service costs increased modestly, reflecting general growth in the business and GQG's continued investment in cloud-based infrastructure and cybersecurity best practices. As you would expect, the largest single expense is taxes. Our GAAP effective tax rate decreased from 27.59%- 27.44%. The fluctuation in GQG's tax rates are primarily driven by state taxes. In particular, the geographical mix of client FUM is a driver, as each state has different rules on how income is apportioned and unique tax rates. Slide nine, please. GQG's continues to have a strong balance sheet with no debt. Our revolving credit line with HSBC remains undrawn. Slide 10, please. The primary uses of cash continue to be for working capital and dividends or distributions. The dividends paid in the first half of 2023 were 90% of distributable earnings, as is the dividend we're declaring today of $0.0217 per share, a total of $64.1 million. Distributable earnings are Net Income After Tax, plus the tax cash savings from the goodwill deferred tax asset resulting from the IPO. Tim and Steve will give a business update. Thanks, Mel. I'm gonna start with performance, and then we'll turn it over to Steve to talk a little bit about the distribution strategy. If we go to slide 13, we see our performance again. This is this harkens back to the slide earlier in the presentation, where you can see our four key strategies, where we plot relative to the market and where we, where we plot relative to our peers in competition in a quartile basis. Again, you can see here in the short term, we've had mixed results. Long term, we're solidly in the top quartile across all four strategies and well ahead of the benchmark. If we go to slide 14, I think the most important thing to understand is the journey of our clients and why clients hire us. Here, we are the green line across this chart. As you see over time, this is our global equity strategy. As you see over time, that we are very solidly in the top quartile, and in most periods, at the very top of the top quartile of our peer groups. Importantly, the yellow highlighted sections are when we've had significant drawdowns in markets, and you note in those periods, we tend to perform far better than our peer group and far better than the market. That lower risk profile compounds over time and has driven us to this long-term investment performance, which it, it, which mixes high alpha and structurally low beta. If you go to the next slide, you'll see that across those four strategies, on every rolling five-year period, we are meaningfully ahead of the benchmark. Slide 16 depicts this in slightly, in a slightly different way. Here, what you see is, is long-term outperformance relative to the benchmark and our peer group with significantly lower volatility. Hence, our risk-adjusted returns are really what stand out. Because we've had such persistence in long-term performance, being both lower volatility and, and structurally above the benchmark, we view that our clients are continuing to be sticky, and we, we believe that this underpins the reason that we're able to raise money even in trying market environments. On slide 17, finally, we see that over time, we've had structurally high alpha. Here again, we are the green line at the top of the top quartile over time and persistently low beta on the right-hand chart. Steve, why don't you take it from there and talk a little bit about how you use that performance to drive distribution? Thanks, Tim. It's good to connect with all of you again, not only as the head of distribution at GQG, but also as a shareholder in the firm. Certainly affirm, Tim, your, your comments on what I think matters to clients, and it's very much about what their expectations of the performance pattern are. In our case, I think that's very much about downside protection. It's very much about high risk-adjusted returns and then the persistency of those returns. It is that foundation that allows us, as a distribution team, to go out and capture a market opportunity. So I want to start with slide 19 and actually talk a little bit about the diversification and the granularity that is our client base, and how our distribution is able to create, you know, this kind of moat around our business. So you see the diversification, which Tim has talked about by strategy, which is obviously very important. You see it, in the granularity of the client base, where in our institutional client base, where you might expect to see outsized exposures to individual clients, that is not the case. I think most importantly, you see it through the channel diversification, that we've been able to achieve. So, our core institutional business remains, you know, very much in a strong position. Our sub-advisory business, headlined by our partnership with Goldman Sachs, among others, constitutes a meaningful portion of what our opportunity set is. Then our GQG-branded wholesale business, being the fastest growing part of our business, represents, again, a meaningful diversifier to what we're doing. The one chart that probably seems a little bit less diversified on this slide is the bottom left, and looking at year-to-date net flows. You see a quite, quite a tilt towards the Americas, and that is representative of the opportunity that we saw in the first quarter. What you're missing there is there's some idiosyncratic behaviors that are going on in the institutional market outside of the U.S., in particular, that I think will abate at some point, that are causing lower risk appetites, et cetera. What you're missing is the picture of what the top-line sales opportunity looks like, which is much more equalized and robust across our geography. I do not expect that picture to remain the same. I would appreciate some normalization of that over time. Moving to slide 20. You see some granularity then of the time periods broken down. It's pure coincidence, but we did $6.2 billion in the first half of this year. We did $6.2 billion in the first half of last year. You see the strength in the sub-advisory business as we spoke about, you see the strength in the wholesale business. Our institutional business is still performing well, but seeing some pressure from client reallocations. If I look forward to what I think are likely to be anticipated, areas where we could see future growth, I think that's going to come from, again, the robustness of the wholesale distribution effort that we have built in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. We've expanded that opportunity set through the launch of retail SMAs, which we've addressed before. There has been minimal platform adoption of that at this point, so it creates a significant headroom for growth for us in that channel. Our sub-advisory business, not only will I, I think we, we are likely to see continued strength in our existing client base, but also potential new opportunities and other diversifiers there. Finally, in the institutional space, one of the things that we are seeing at this point, for new opportunities for us is replacement searches for managers who did not meet their clients' expectations, in particular last year, in terms of downside protection. That creates a new search opportunity in the institutional space, where we're well-positioned to capture market share. Moving to slide 21, I wanna take just a minute and highlight our U.S. wholesale distribution effort. Tim mentioned that we were a top 10 mutual fund family by net flows in the first half of the year. Here, you can see that breakdown, amongst some of the most largest and, and well-known, and well-resourced, firms in the world. This has been a big investment for the firm in terms of our, our distribution effort and infrastructure to support this business. Today we've got 27 platforms in the U.S. that carry GQG funds, many of which have our funds plugged into discretionary models, where it's not just a single GQG fund decision, but we're benefiting from the broader flows from those platforms, which is very powerful. We've got a nine-territory sales team and a total of 17 people solely dedicated to this channel in the U.S. We've invested significantly in our marketing and support of our wholesale business globally, not just in the U.S., but it very much matters as we seek to address a 300,000 person market of financial advisors here in the U.S. for brand recognition, for content and digital distribution and delivery. Ultimately, the data that we collect from that has value as well, and we are actively working on strategies that help us better prioritize that data to better engage our sales team moving forward. I wanna move to slide 22. As you've heard Tim and I speak before about leading indicators for distribution. The best leading indicator is performance, and in particular, risk-adjusted performance. So if you look at the GQG funds on a star rating, which is simply Morningstar's version of risk-adjusted performance, 4 and 5-star ratings, of course, I think portend very well for what clients will be evaluating. Then Tim mentioned the Medalist Ratings as well, which I think are worth revisiting. Again, Morningstar's proprietary way of doing this, but it's a mix of their quantitative and qualitative review of GQG's funds and the funds that they believe are likely to outperform the benchmark on a go-forward basis. Of course, 11 of the 12 available funds for rating at GQG carry the Gold Medal Rating, which I think, again, portends well for a leading indicator. The final piece is about engagement. As a team, we're out with the risk-adjusted return story and everything else that is GQG's performance pattern. Then it's our job to get the best allocators in the world to pay attention. eVestment Alliance is the world's largest institutional database, and you can see on slide 23, they rank the profile views of every product in every category. On our four primary products, we are the first percentile across the board. I believe that is a combination of the performance results and our team's ability to engage allocators around the world. It doesn't make anybody allocate, but it certainly puts you in the strongest position possible, so that if there are opportunities, we're allowed to compete and hopefully win those. With that, I'll pause there. I'm gonna turn it over to Rajiv Jain, our chairman and chief investment officer, and he's gonna share his thoughts on the current investment environment. Thanks, Steve, and thanks, everybody, for joining. You know, particularly this audience, is very well informed what's happening in the market, so I don't need to be redundant here. From our vantage point, I think, I think a few things have happened. I mean, if you were sitting here 12 months ago, we had significant overweight to energy, that had helped us navigate what was probably one of the worst periods for particularly the growth managers, especially quality growth managers, reasonably well. If I look back, interestingly now, on a 12th-month basis, we are ahead of all the strategies except the U.S. equity. Then the portfolio looks remarkably, you know, sort of, different, in certain ways, although we still overweight energy, but we're now actually meaningfully overweight tech in a lot of these portfolios. This just talks about the longer-term dynamic, the dynamic nature, which is very, very data dependent, where the corporate earnings are and reacting to that, rather than being dogmatic in particular, any particular area. We feel good with, with, you know, with the opportunity set is corporate earnings, by and large, on our book, has been reasonably strong. If I have to comment a few different things, is that, there seems to be a shift in favor of some of the emerging markets,- in terms of the just the fiscal discipline you've seen, and monetary policy, interest rates are already very high in a lot of these countries, which are likely to be cut. As we get closer to the end of monetary tightening, I think some of the emerging markets could be particularly interesting in the global context, at the expense of some of the other markets, maybe, you know, outside of North America. Our portfolios at this point, again, subject to change, are much more heavy in areas where we find fairly strong corporate earnings, particularly in North America, parts of emerging markets, and to the expense of Europe and Japan and so on, so forth. I'll just, you know, so leave it at that. I'm obviously happy to answer questions in the Q&A session. Great. Thanks, Rajiv. With that, we are gonna go to Q&A, but before we do so, I'm gonna read a quick, a quick statement about the questions we'll accept. As, as most of you are well aware, GQG Partners lodged an announcement with the ASX on 27 July 2023, noting its intention to submit a non-binding indicative proposal to acquire all of the issued ordinary shares of Pacific Current Group Limited. Our intention has not changed. At this time, it would be premature to comment further on the announcement or Pacific Current Group in general, and accordingly, we will not be taking any questions related to those matters on this call. With that, happy to open it up to Q&A. Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask a question. Please limit your questions to two questions at a time. If you wish to ask further questions, please rejoin the queue. Your first question comes from Gerardo Covarrubias from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead. Thank you. Congrats, guys, on a good result. Thank you for taking my questions. I, I guess, fair enough on the, on the acquisition. If we can just move on from that. Firstly, employee expenses. You've added several employees in the half. Can you give us a sense of the timing of the hires and how much of the full run rate is captured in the first half 2023 already? Beyond that, just what can we expect in terms of new hires into the second half, and at what point do you see this stabilizing? Thank you. Thanks, Gerardo. I'm gonna let Mel take the timing question, but let me before, before she does that, let me sort of give a general picture. We have added a number of people, and my expectation, as Mel indicated in her commentary, is that we'll continue to do so through this year. They're slightly weighted, more than half, both, both headcount and expenses, generally to what I would call investments, in opportunities that we believe will drive future revenue, and then slightly less than half in infrastructure that's required to keep up with, with the growth. And I think it's really important to make a couple, a couple of comments here. First of all, just to reiterate to everybody, we think first and foremost as shareholders. You know, for Rajiv and I, we are you know, the vast, vast majority of our, of our income comes through our ownership of GQG, where we, we are shareholders first. Steve and Mel are in the same, in the same boat, having very significant holdings of GQG. When we make these hires and make these investments, we're thinking as shareholders, not employees, and therefore, we are hypersensitive to making sure that we are, we are seeing a return for the investments we make. Second point is, we're an investment firm, we do think pretty, pretty tightly, pretty strictly about the investments we're making and having a tight ROI. For, you know, for those expenses that are related to driving new business, we do that, as Mel noted, because we think our performance is differentiated and there are new opportunities for us to pursue. If we're unsuccessful in that, we can unwind those expenses. I would take, as an example, the infrastructure costs of, say, for example, adding to Mel's finance team. Those are quasi-fixed, you know. They can be reduced if we had a massive, you know, redemption of assets, but you should think of those as more fixed. Whereas as we open new offices and we have one-time expenses related to legal or compliance or regulatory or accounting needs, those service provider costs that show up in G&A, for example, those are either one time or they can be unwound quickly, if we believe that the, the investment we made is not gonna bear fruit. Our view, of course, is when we're making those investments, is to the end of driving high-margin revenues in the future, that, that will have a high payoff, for, for the investments we made. Contextually, that's the way we look at it, Gerardo. I think, you know, my expectation, as Mel said, is that we will continue to have some growth through this year, but the growth is all very idiosyncratic, based on real-life opportunities like, you know, M&A opportunities and like expansion into new offices. It's not this is not a general high-level addition of people. It's tied, tied directly to specific opportunities that we're working on right now. Mel, do you want to add to that? Yep, perfect. Oh, Tim, I think you said that exactly right. You know, regarding timing, there's no specific timing. I mean, we have added people throughout the 12 months since 6/30/2022, and throughout the first half in kind of a not a ratable format, but just as we find the right people and are able to bring them on to serve the, the business in the capacity Tim was just discussing. Yep, great. Thanks very much. That's clear. Just I guess related to that, I mean, you know, we've talked about this, but you've made an important number of hires. I think, you know, last time we touched base, maybe, you know, I you had a distribution team of probably around 15, 16 here in Australia. However, in a net flows number, you disclosed today of $0.2 billion in the APAC region. You know, that kind of seems to suggest there still isn't a lot of traction. You know, can you share with us, you know, what, what are your main obstacles to date here in Australia, and just generally, how the business is progressing here? Thank you. Yeah. I... So, I respectfully think that, that's not the right thing to take away from the commentary. Our global equity fund is the number one, you know, number one flows, in all Morningstar categories in Australia. We continue to have, you know, be one of the top gatherers of assets in that market. I think as Steve explained, there are two factors. One is that the market as a whole has been softer, overseas relative to the U.S. in terms of fundraising. Number two, on the institutional side, it's obviously episodic, and so it's really hard to extrapolate one quarter to have sort of perfectly consistent growth quarter-over-quarter. We're very confident in, in the investments we've made in Australia, and I think we see real-time, success with the, with the distribution, efforts in, in that market. Perfect. Thanks very much, Tim. Thank you. Your next question comes from Brendan Carrig, from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Look, I didn't have too many. Just a quick follow-up, just on performance fees. I know we've talked about it in the past, that it's not a huge driver of the total fee income. Are you able to provide any additional context or, or details as to how we should be thinking about the performance fee as a percentage of total FUM or, yeah, are you able to let us know what proportion of FUM is exposed to performance fees for us to sort of better estimate performance fees, given the last few halves have been, you know, fairly, fairly encouraging at that sort of mid-to-high single-digit range per half? Yeah, what we've, what we've always said is, you know, I- my belief is you should expect performance fees to, to not exceed single digit percentage contribution to revenues. You know, I, I, I think I, I stand by that. I don't think that we, over time, will have meaningfully meaningful growth in, in performance fees relative to the business that comes in as base fee. You've disclosed prior that the, the performance fees come from a handful of large institutional mandates, and, you know, sort of geographically spread. I, you know, we don't give specific guidance as to exactly, for competitive reasons that are, that are probably obvious, exactly who those clients are or what, what the exact structure of the performance fees are. In aggregate, I, I continue to believe that it should be... You know, should not constitute more than, than sort of, single-digit contribution to revenues. Sure. Okay, thank you. On, just on the flows, just sort of following on from the commentary you, you just made there, Tim. In terms of geographically, looking ahead, just be interested in any, any sort of thoughts on whether you think the U.S. is likely to remain the stronger area or stronger generator of flows, or are you starting to see signs that, that maybe parts of APAC and/or EMEA are showing signs of improvement, you know, sort of post-Brexit over in the U.K. or, you know, any, any sort of thoughts, thoughts there? Yeah. I- i- if you looked at our last, last FUM report, you'll note that we, we continue to see outflows from the U.K. U.K., I, I would call out the U.K. institutional market in particular, is the, is probably the weakest, weakest market, and it's really hard to see when that ends. You know, this is, to my way of thinking, exogenous to us, or for that matter, other managers. It really is about, de-risking in, in the U.K. away from equities generally. I do believe that the U.S. will continue to be a very strong market. I think Australia will continue to be a strong market for us. I believe Canada will be, continue to be a strong market for us. We are making investments in the Gulf region, you know, that's been a strong market for us historically. I believe structurally, if I take a 10-year view, that, that could be a very strong market. You know, as Steve noted, we did have very, you know, disproportionately strong flows in the U.S. region. You know, I'm actually, if I take a long enough view, I'm pretty bullish on the Middle East, certainly on Australia, certainly on Canada, and we will, I think, continue to do well in the U.S.. Steve, is there anything you'd add to that? Yeah, no, the only thing I also would add to that is just on a bigger picture, if you zoom out, on a country-to-country comparison. You know, the U.S. market is, you know, somewhere on order of 8- 10 times bigger than Australia, right? Depending upon which channel you're looking at. There, there. You know, it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison. Doesn't mean there isn't a lot of headroom for us in Australia, there certainly is. Just by sheer, by sheer size and magnitude, I think the U.S. is, you know, likely to be a dominant market for us. Okay, that's clear. Then just a final one. Look, it says on M&A, but more broadly, so not, not PAC specifically, but I'd, I'd just be interested in, in sort of your overarching commentary in terms of how you're thinking about M&A when, you know, assessing opportunities and sort of when you're weighing up, yeah, so what, what factors are you weighing up, when, when assessing M&A opportunities? ... To, yeah, to sort of decide whether you're going after pure play asset managers or boutiques, and obviously, you know, how it fits into one of those categories. Just more broadly, you know, what are the sort of checkboxes that you're thinking about with the M&A strategy? Yeah. You know, first I'd note that we've been very, very active and increased our activity in looking at adding talent to the platform. You, you've heard me say this before, but I believe that this is a business where we want to attract as many, you know, key people and talented people to the platform as we can. In the long run, our ability to attract talent is what will perpetuate the value of this business. We are very active in looking at everything from recruitment to lift-outs to M&A. In terms of what we're looking at, it's sort of like our own business, where we say this business begins and ends with performance. No matter what we do, we have to believe that the investment talent is really deep and that there's a differentiated story that will add value for clients. So that, that is the, the key consideration, the first consideration, and the one that is sacrosanct, is that we have to believe that there's investment talent that's coming on board that will benefit clients. The second one is that will, will there be a strong cultural fit, where we believe that it will be additive to our team, not distracting to our team? If we have those two, then, then we're very open-minded about where we can source or find opportunities and what those might look like. We're happy to be very broad. We're not constrained geographically. We're not constrained by asset class. We're willing to look at anything that we think can benefit clients and be additive culturally to GQG. Okay, thank you. That's helpful. I'll leave it there. Thanks. Thank you. Your next question comes from Dylan Jones, from Ord Minnett. Please go ahead. Oh, hi, all. Thanks for taking my question. Apologies if I missed this in the presentation, but I, I don't believe you called out any new sub-advisory relationships during the half. Firstly, is, would that be a correct assessment? I think... We, we did not call out any new sub-advisory arrangements that were added in the, in the period. That's correct. Yeah, cool. Just, following on from that, I guess the presenter highlights some large opportunities in the sub-advisory channel. Can you maybe just expand, I guess, on the sort of lead time, these typically take to secure, and whether any of these, sort of larger opportunities are a bit further along in terms of progression? Yeah, and I'll, I'll let Steve elaborate on this, but what we're referring to there are really what, you know, the sub-advisory opportunities that are, that are in place, where we have more than 12 in place around the world today, many of which are, have, have very significant headroom for growth over, over time. When we take them in aggregate, we, we believe that there's a, a significant opportunity for us in aggregate in sub-advisory. You know, we've talked about this before, but part of what's so attractive about sub-advisory, is that it enables us to get into markets that are, that a small boutique would never be able to get into, where we don't have to build the infrastructure cost. You know, Steve can speak to, you know, for example, the variable annuity market in the U.S. or Canadian retail, but there are lots of different places that we are partnered with sub-advisory distribution partners. The largest, of course, being Goldman Sachs in the U.S.. But there are lots of different opportunities that we're pursuing, and when we look at those in aggregate, we see quite significant headroom for growth. Steve, do you want to, do you want to add to that? Yeah, for, for sure. I'm not going to speak to kind of timing of, of anything or specific expectations, but I would say that, yes, the existing relationships have their own distribution in many cases, and are in a strong position to continue to capture and/or accelerate flows. In terms of new opportunities, one I might have you think about is in the defined contribution market, often requires longer track records, more assets, et cetera. Some of those opportunities have not been as open to us as they were in the past. You know, would be one example of where there might be new opportunities and relationships for sub-advisory that, that don't exist today. That's not the only one. There are, there are many others that, you know, could avail themselves to us, and we're actively pursuing all of them. Got it. No, thanks for that. Maybe just one, one last quick follow-up. I know you just spoke about performance fees before, and, and I accept, you know, you obviously don't want to go too much into the structure, but are you, are you able to provide a bit of a sense, and then maybe just remind us if there's typically sort of a first half, second half bias, within performance fees and the timing around when those are accrued? You know, I don't believe we've talked historically at all about the, about the seasonality of the, of the Performance Fees. I don't feel that I want to comment on that now, but we'll take, we'll take that away as something we can look at. Actually, there is one comment I want to make on the performance fees. Just to clarify, because this is a big issue in Australia, as you know, is that this is not 6-month performance fee. I mean, it's much more longer term-oriented, so I don't believe, Steve, correct me if I'm wrong, there's anybody who pays us anything on a 6-month performance fee. Unlike most of the hedge funds, where 6-month bad performance, all of a sudden the wheels come off, you know, this, this isn't that story. Got it. No, thanks a lot. I'll leave it there. Thank you. You have a follow-up question from Gerardo Covarrubias from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead. Thank you. Just to follow on that sub-advisory theme, you know, there's been a lot of change at Goldman recently with several high-profile departures, particularly from the asset management business. Clearly, you know, GSAM has been instrumental for your growth, so just curious to hear your thoughts on, on the current state of that relationship and whether, you know, some of those recent departures, pose any risk to, to the current arrangement that you've got with them? Yeah, thanks, Gerardo. No, I, you know, we, we met with all the senior management of, of, of GSAM, particularly the folks that we interact with on our relationship. No, I'm very, very confident that that relationship remains strong. I don't see any risk at all to it, to, to our relationship with Goldman, nor do I see any risk to the team at Goldman not performing at the level they've performed historically. You know, the, the changes obviously make the, make the headlines, but I think the on the grassroots, on the ground activity, it remains very, very strong. We don't see anything in the data that would suggest to us that there's that there's risk in, in either their performance execution or their intent to, to work with us. You know, I, I just remind everybody, this is not only a very big relationship for us, but it's, it's one of the most important funds for Goldman as well in, in their lineup, you know, across their whole business. Very strong relationship. I'm very confident in it. I don't see, I don't see any, any risk at all. Brilliant. Yeah, that's clear. Maybe just one more. On management fee margin, you know, that was obviously one of the most pleasing elements of the half. Acknowledge some of your earlier comments, Tim, that it's, you know, hard to extrapolate, but given you're calling out continuous trends in wholesale, can we expect perhaps further support into the second half as your fund mix continues to shift towards wholesale? Maybe any, any comments on that? Sorry, Gerardo. I'm not sure I totally follow the question. Were you asking whether we expect our, our blended fees to increase if the mix shifts? Yeah, that's right. Your management fee margin, you know, increased. Yes. Slightly sequentially. Given that your mix you know, given that you're continuing to perform strongly in the wholesale channel, which is high margin, should we expect, you know, a little bit of a further sequential increase in the second half as your fund mix continues to shift towards wholesale? Yeah, it's, it's, you know, I think you've heard me say this before. I think if I were predicting, if I were, you know, trying to, to sit in your seat and predict this, I would use the most recent data point to extrapolate out versus trying to predict something different, because there's so many variables. It's not only channel, it's geography, it's, it's strategy. You know, I think you, you're seeing, you know, EM perform well. You know, to the extent that you have a mix shift that favors emerging markets and favors retail, you would expect management fee margins to expand. To the extent that it's developed markets and institutional, you'd expect it to probably contract a little bit. It's very, very hard to predict, and it's, you know, I, unfortunately, I can't give you any real meaningful guidance there. Your assessment is right to the extent that, that the, you know, the basis of it is right. If you see increased EM retail, one would expect management fee margins to expand. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Tim Carver for closing remarks. Thank you. Well, I just want to thank everybody for, for joining us today, and we look forward to continuing to deliver for you as, as shareholders ourselves, and right alongside of you, we'll continue to do our best to execute, and appreciate the time and the interest.