To this next segment, our Capital Markets Day. Maybe we'll call it a Capital Markets Morning. A quick couple of hours, but I think some important updates from the Capital Markets Day that we held last year. We'll kinda take stock of where we are today. We laid out for you some long-term medium-term objectives that we wanted to achieve at last year's Capital Markets Day, and I think it's a timely point in the market to come together and talk about where we stand. I'll give you a brief introduction before handing over to some of my colleagues. I'll start high level. Partners Group is one of the premier private markets firms in the industry. We have somewhat of a different heritage. We come from Switzerland as opposed to from New York or London, where many of our peers hail. I think that different heritage shows up in a different type of DNA. We're built differently, and you see that differentiation come through in the way that we build our client portfolios. Much more custom, much more bespoke. You see that show up in the way that we build companies with a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves industrial approach, and you see it show up in the way that we build people. Many of our leadership team that you'll see today joined us as analysts that have come up through the ranks. We are a client-centric firm. We have long-term approach that we take to taking stewardship across cycles. A little bit more industrial DNA. You'll get a sense for that if you ever visit us in one of our campuses. You get a little bit of a feel for that here in London, but in particular, if you visit us at one of our campuses. We have a one firm, no silo integrated approach, and I'll talk to you in just a minute about why that's so differentiating for our clients. Here you see the trajectory of our firm from our IPO in 2006, the first major private markets firm to go public, until where we stand today. We have had an uninterrupted pattern of asset growth and of building client solutions. We now have five asset classes. 75% of our assets under management are in equity strategies. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about the scaling credit opportunity. We have a very attractive credit business, but it is 25% of our asset base as opposed to the majority of what we do. Out of our $185 billion in assets under management, $125 billion of that are bespoke solutions, and we'll talk about why that's so important. First, the way we build companies. We have a transformational approach to building businesses, and that comes down to two things. Number one is the way that we research spaces. We have teams that will spend oftentimes years scoping out a sector, meeting all the management teams, understanding the dynamics at play within that particular space before ever making an investment. We call that our thematic approach to industry research. We also have a very large network of industry executives that have been there and done that, and that help us to navigate the complexities of each sub-segment that we're researching. After we take control of a company, we have an entrepreneurial approach to how we run those businesses. We have a standard way that we onboard those businesses. We go up a mountain together, oftentimes in Switzerland, and we hold strategy off-sites. It's not uncommon for us to spend the first few board meetings, not in the numbers, but in the strategic dynamics that are likely to impact that business over the coming years. We wrestle over the appropriate value creation strategy to establish with each business that we invest into, and then we hold that up in all of our future board meetings as the key topic. You will spend a lot less time in a Partners Group board room in numbers and a lot more time in strategic topics. As a result of that, we tend to have transformational outcomes for our clients. You see our portfolio show up in two main ways. We build platforms. We take a niche space, and we help a platform to grow and to develop, and then we take mid-size companies and help them to enhance to global leading organizations. That approach has shown up in attractive realized returns for our clients. Within our private equity business, $86 billion of assets today, about 11% CAGR over the last five years. We've been able to generate a realized outcome for our clients of about 19.8% historically within those businesses. You start to see many of those platforms emerge from medium-sized companies to really global leaders today. What used to be the mid-market that you found in public markets is now found in our portfolio and in the portfolio of many of our peers. These are businesses, many of which that would have been public companies in a prior era that are now, I think anchoring the portfolios of many of our clients. Our private credit business is a $40 billion business. We tend to build portfolios in a very bottom-up way. This has not been a stamp-it-out, scale-it-up type of an approach to private credit, but rather an asset-by-asset approach that has been able to leverage much of the industry expertise that we have built on some of our equity strategies. With an infrastructure that has been a business that we have grown organically. We launched that a number of years ago, and now it's $36 billion of assets and has been one of our fastest-growing segments with a five-year CAGR at 18%. We build next-generation utilities, and you've seen that play out in a very attractive way. Returns, interestingly, that have echoed that of our private equity business, because of the development that's taking place within many of those platforms, and we've never had a realized loss in that segment of the business. Downside protection with pretty meaningful upside, an attractive value proposition, and you can see why that asset class is growing disproportionate relative to some of our others. Our real estate business, $22 billion in assets under management. You do see a shift in real estate demand for clients, and it's going from broadly diversified real estate allocations to much more niche and much more specific allocations. As a result of that, we're acquiring vertical integration in order to help build out that platform. We made an acquisition in 2025 in a vertically integrated platform called Empira, and that's the first of probably a few vertically integrated acquisitions we've made, and we're quite pleased with the impact that that has had. In addition to that, our royalties business, which is scaled very nicely within Partners Group, is now $1 billion of assets under management, and we see a tremendous amount of potential. Not only on the client side, where you see clients going from maybe a traditional credit allocation towards nichier types of allocations, maybe credit-like allocations. Alternative credit is what some clients are calling it. But the ability to buy into a revenue stream as opposed to participate in a capital stack, that opportunity is something that many clients find attractive right now, and we believe that we'll be able to continue to scale and grow that business. In addition to that, looking through our investment committee topics for royalties, I'm just telling you, it's really interesting stuff. Every single one of those things that we've looked at recently, I say, "I would invest in that. I would invest in the next one. I would invest in the one after that." It's just interesting, attractive content that our clients tend to agree has a lot of upside. One of the key things that has differentiated Partners Group, okay, has been our client- centricity. The most common approach to growing within private markets is to have a financial product and to go out and to sell that financial product and try and convince the market why your product is better than their product and better than that other firm's product. People tend to push product within our space. We are different. We sit down with clients, and we try and understand what their objectives are, what solutions they need, and we build custom solutions for our clients. As a result of that, we have been among the most innovative firms in our space. You see here, on the screen behind me, a number of firsts that our firm has had. We have been a firm to launch some of the earliest types of structured products, whether that's evergreen solutions in the U.S., and that's now a broad topic. We were one of the first firms to look at that on the private equity space, in particular to many of the European structures that we've launched in a very creative way. The impact of that is twofold. Number one is we have a very loyal client base that we've been able to solve problems for a long period of time. The second is we have among the most diversified revenues in the private markets landscape, with our revenues spread over 350 different solutions. That is different than a firm that has flagship funds that they're somewhat dependent on, right? If you have a flagship fund that has some challenges, it might be tough to raise the next one versus if you have a solution building capability. You have much more diversification within the track record side of things, as well. If we look at the industry that we operate within, we have largely benefited from significant tailwinds of increasing allocations of institutional investors over the last 30 years. Years ago, you saw institutional investors with a 1%, 2%, 3% allocation to privates, and that has steadily increased. We're now at a place where many institutions have a mature allocation to private markets, and that has presented fundraising challenges for many firms that have more of a traditional fundraising approach. Now, there still is structural growth within the private markets. It's actually very attractive. We believe that this industry has the potential to go from $15 trillion today to about $30 trillion in the future. But that growth is coming from new places. It's coming from institutional investors that are looking for more customization, like the insurance space in particular. They have a very different set of needs than maybe a traditional institutional allocator would have, and it's coming from individual investors. The types of firms that can cater to the needs of individual investors and investors that need more customization are different than those who were able to meet the needs of institutional investors as those allocations were expanding. That's one of the reasons why you see this bifurcation in the industry between the haves and have-nots. Partners Group is clearly one of the haves in our industry and have been able to grow disproportionate to many of our peers in recent years because of how innovative we've been, and because of the fact that we have many structures, and investment capabilities that cater to the needs of this growing segment of the market. 67% of our assets today in bespoke solutions. If I think about the must-haves to be able to cater to that segment of the market, you need to have a platform that's global in terms of your reach and in terms of your breadth. You need to have multiple asset class capabilities as opposed to providing an individual fund. You need to be able to provide solutions. You need to have portfolio management capabilities and the ability to navigate complex needs of clients and to be able to provide liquidity as a part of the offering, as opposed to structures that just tie people's capital up. You need to be able to create bespoke mandates, you need to be able to solve private wealth needs, and you need to be a platform. I think Partners Group checks all of those boxes. One of the keys to how we manage is by having a portfolio management team that sits at the center of our business. We have investment content manufacturing on this side, right, of the house. We have our client and structuring teams on this side of the house, and we have a portfolio management team that sits at the center of our organization and helps to serve as the CPU steering traffic across these two segments of the business. As it relates to our ability to build these private markets allocations, we have access to individual single-line transactions, which is highly differentiated. The building blocks for many within our space as they think about mandates are limited partnerships. Limited partnerships are structures that are very hard to steer. 15 years, in some cases, capital will be locked into a single trajectory, versus if you're using single-line allocations, you have the ability to steer portfolios on a much more dynamic basis. We have a client that we recently set up a secondary mandate for, and I remember talking to their CIO, and they said, "You know, in the past when we wanted to add secondary content, you know, I would make a decision, right? Get that ratified by the board. We'd instruct our team. Our team would spend six months or nine months meeting secondary managers. They'd make a proposal. That secondary manager would finish fundraising, nine months later or 12 months later or whatever it was, and that capital would get called down gradually over four years." That position that they made a strategic decision to get built would happen sometimes four years, five years after the decision by the board to invest into that topic. Versus with the Partners Group mandate, we have the ability to ramp clients the next week. They can be on the next allocation sheet the next week. So that access to single-line mandates is really, really important, and that gives us the ability to build these custom portfolios in a way that's highly differentiated. We also have a risk management approach that can be overlaid because of having portfolio management at the center in a way that's differentiated. We see time and time again, when you have these topics that creep up within the industry, there is a difference between a disparate set of teams, you know, that are out there stamping out investment content on their own versus a Partners Group more centralized approach with centralized risk management, centralized investment committee. We tend to get much less exposed to these hot topics that tend to ramp very quickly but also have a downside risk. You see that with software more recently, where we had the opportunity to scale in software in years past, but from a risk management and portfolio management perspective and in consultation with our clients, we chose not to do that. Here's a little bit of an illustration of what this means in practical perspective for us as an organization. Most of our peers are set up around funds. You will have a fund and even though you might look at that organization and say, "Okay, they've got similar asset classes that they play in, they've got similar geographies that they operate across," the organization itself looks completely different if you're organized around funds versus if you're organized as a single platform. We don't have any of our investment professionals that are tied to a specific fund. Our investment professionals work for our clients collectively, and that gives us the ability to feed through portfolio management all of these different structures. We have 350 vehicles running right now, as we talked about. We can add number 351, 352, 353 without a lot of drama because of the way we're set up. We don't need a new team to manage those because we slice our investment content up and distribute it to our clients pro rata. With that approach, we have the ability to build these custom solutions. We've actually taken our mandate capabilities, where you used to have to have a $500 million account with Partners Group in order to have a separate account, and we pushed that minimum down to $350 million, and then we pushed it down to $200 million, and then we pushed it down to $100 million. We're building separate accounts at $50 million and below, and we can do that because of the way that we're set up. Many of our peers would struggle to do that, because they need to hire a new team for each new product that they bring online. Our ability to slice and dice investment content is highly differentiated. Now, given some of the dynamics that we talked about in terms of the changing landscape, the changing fundraising environment, you had for years and years and years this dynamic where institutional investors were constantly increasing their exposure to private markets, and now those allocations are more mature. You have thousands and thousands and thousands of firms that had emerged to meet the needs of those institutional investors. We have entered a phase of structural consolidation within our space. We talked about that a little bit last year. We have two means of growing in the current environment. One of those is through strategic initiatives, and one of those is through developing, let's call it organic initiatives. Now, on the strategic initiative side, we have some topics that we categorize under consolidation, and that could be consolidation of clients, or that could be consolidation, physical consolidation of investment content or investment manufacturing. Then we have the opportunity to do de novo launches. I'll focus just a little bit on the consolidation side of things. As we, as a leadership team, have reflected on where to prioritize resources this last year, we have thought a lot about consolidation of manufacturing content because that is naturally going to happen where you have our market previously serviced by all of these independent investment engines. We have had people knocking on our door constantly over the last year saying, "You guys have differentiated access to this wealth channel that I can't get. Let's align forces. I have some differentiated manufacturing capabilities, you have differentiated distribution capabilities. Let's put those two forces together." We've thought hard about that. We've also had opportunities to build partnerships on the distribution side of things. We have many partnerships that we form. In fact, that has been, we think, the most timely area to spend time on this last year, is partnerships on the distribution side of things. Why? Because, that is, you only have a set number of distribution partners that you can partner with, and once those partnerships are formed, you're pretty well locked in. Over this last year, as we spent time really on where to focus, we think that the opportunity to consolidate manufacturing is one that's going to exist for a very long period of time. You have thousands and thousands of firms that exist out there, and we have done one acquisition this last year, and we think that that opportunity continues to exist. The very most strategic and timely topic that we could focus on as a leadership team is forming strategic partnerships on the distribution side of things. Indeed, out of the 30 or so partnerships that you have seen announced within our space, we've had, I think, 1/3 of those that we have been a part of. I think that speaks to the fact that we have been very, very focused on securing distribution partnerships this past year, and that has been a much more pressing topic for us than acquiring manufacturing. Both strategic, both very relevant, both we'll see play out over the next decade. I think once those distribution partnerships are secured, there's not gonna be an opportunity to, you know, to get into those again for many, many years. That's where we spent our time. Now, as we think about the agenda for today, we're gonna talk a little bit about some of these new strategies. Okay? We're growing our infrastructure business with new income strategies. We're developing our private equity yield strategy. We're launching special opportunity strategy. On the investment side of things, we've been very, very active on some of these de novo launches, scaling up new initiatives within the existing platform. For our existing strategy, we're talking about how we vertically integrate within real estate, how we roll out our multi-sector royalties portfolio, and how we're advancing structured credit and our secondary strategies. On the client side of things, these strategic relationships are really, really key to how we take Partners Group investment content to a broader segment of the market. We're gonna spend some time helping you guys to understand those partnerships and the impact that they could have on our distribution capabilities over the coming years. We're talking about how we're scaling our mandate offering across our client base, how we're growing in some of the regions where we're currently underrepresented, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East being two of note, and using traditional funds to capture new clients. You actually saw a meaningful increase in North America traditional fundraising, of course, this last year, and that was very deliberate. Because we're underrepresented in North America, and we've been using traditional funds to build new relationships and to form first-time engagements with some clients there. On the private wealth side, we'll talk about some of our strategic JVs for wealth management, DC in particular. Then, expanding distribution with our Evergreen platform. Those are some of the key topics that we wanna talk about in today's Capital Markets Day. With that, I'll hand over to our executive chairman, Steffen Meister. He's gonna talk about some of the Winning Investment Strategies for the current environment. Thanks, Steffen. Thanks, Dave. Good morning, everybody. First of all, also from my side, it's a privilege to have you here in London or on a call in different regions of the world. It's fantastic to have the second Capital Markets Day here. Actually, talking about that, I know that some of you asked that question. You know, you guys, I mean, didn't do a Capital Markets Day for, like, 20 years or so. Now it's the second in a row. Why is that? I could just give you my personal opinion here. I think we're currently seeing probably more change, you know, in the last two to three years than we saw actually 10-15 years prior to these last two years. You know, Dave alluded to some of those. I mean, we see the client environment changing with, I would say, more stagnation in certain pockets, but then there's an amazing opportunity set in new pockets in institutions, insurance companies, DC, but the whole wealth retail, which we only started to actually cover. We see some wealth funds, you know, that grow very significantly with different kind of relationships. Also on the investment side, you know, we have a very different environment. I mean, we had 10, 15 years that were kind of a little bit more of the same. Now after COVID, we had inflation coming up, growth questions, rates. Now we have this wave of AI technology-driven change, so that produces a very, very different environment. Obviously that had, of course, an impact then on our industry, and Dave talked about the consolidation industry. All of these things, I think, mean that the environment ahead of us is very different from the last 10, 15 years. This is why I think we feel we need to give you a good sense of what we're doing. Sometimes it's about the nuances to understand them. I can just tell you from my side, I mean, you see probably me being more excited about the next 10 years than ever before in the last 10, 15 years. I think the setup that we have is so differentiated on the client side and on the investment side in a way that it will have massive positive impact in the next five to 10 years. We talked a bit about the fundraising side, and we'll go a little more into details with Roberto and Juri later on. Last year, we talked about this 2033 strategy. We're completely on track, maybe even slightly ahead of track here in achieving that. What I wanna do is maybe today is talk a bit about the investment environment and so have a little bit of a bold title here, Winning Investment Strategies in an AI Tech-Enabled Transformation. There's a lot of talk, right? About this new environment. People talk a lot about software and other things. I wanna just take a step back and give you a bit of a sense how we look at that, why we are again quite excited about this environment. The starting point is something that we have told you for years, right? It's not new for us. We talked since years about our hypothesis that there is a very significant transformation of the economy ahead of us. It's driven by three waves. In the first wave, that is essentially technology enabling these, let's say, support systems that help us on processes. It's not a big deal yet. That's very important to clarify. The second wave is probably a few years out. We start to see certain efforts, but probably three, five, seven years out. This is really towards more autonomy in certain business systems. That's a much, much bigger deal 'cause if you change end-to-end processes, you really need to think about transformation. Then maybe 10 years+, that's typical in economy transformation. You'll probably see certain business models collapse and others opening up with tremendous opportunities. Okay? This is a little bit of starting point of our thinking here. What I wanna do is just go a little bit through, like, I would say one main topic per asset class that we see as something that is really, really fundamental, that's guiding our investment activities, our thinking, and where we see tremendous opportunities, but of course also areas where we wanna be very, very mindful about because of that significant change that is ahead of us. Let me start with private equity. I would say in private equity, the story is quite simple. The story is the following. Business transformation wins. Full stop. And especially the companies in all the ecosystems. It's not only about technology, not at all actually, right? In all the ecosystems, the companies that are better than others in using AI and technology in a smart way, better than other people, they will outperform. Data strategy is absolutely fundamental, okay? For every business, for every ecosystem. There's three reasons why we have that hypothesis, and I think there's three, I would say, pillars to that. One is the acceleration of pace, also something we talked about for a while. I think a very easy way to make that visualized is by looking at what happened to the digital backbone for businesses, business services, but also for manufacturing, for instance. In the last 10 years, if you look at slides here, we have come out, I would say, of a situation where we used the data in a relatively integrated way. Data were sometimes a bit unstructured, but there was a relatively good integration I mean, along the lines of the processes and the systems. Today, I would say in many cases, we have a bit more cleaning of data, a little bit more structured. We start to use these pilots, but if you are very honest about it, I don't think that for most businesses we have seen this fundamental transformation. The last 10 years, to some extent, were much more about incremental wins. If you take our hypothesis as a basis, there's a good chance in the next five years there will be much more need for transformation because you see now the start of these more autonomous systems, end-to-end processes that get replaced in certain instances that you cannot do with incremental changes. It doesn't work. You really have to work on that business. The second point is a little bit connected to this, and we see this already today in numbers. There was actually a PricewaterhouseCoopers study on this, which I found interesting. They measured the impact of transformation work. What they look at essentially, like they have these coin toss, and they look at how much effort have you done and what's the outcome. What that chart says in simple terms is, if you do a little bit of transformation, you get not much upside. You do a little bit more, it doesn't give you much more upside. If you go all in, if you really think about changing your company in a way that makes it much more effective in the long term, this is where you get the upside. This is what we call this winner-takes-all dynamics and platform transformation. By the way, that's exactly what we've seen with many of our most successful exits. PCI last year, ISP, it's exactly a case study for that kind of transformation, where you don't grow like 15%, 20%, but you get these extraordinary IRRs. The third point is also a very relevant one. You know, transformation in the past was seen a little bit like, okay, I mean, I have a turnaround situation, things go really, really badly, so I need to do some transformation, or I want to really go all in for the upside. I don't think we have any of that anymore today. It's offense, it's defense, and there's this other PricewaterhouseCoopers quote, I think that's independent actually. It's not that we only use PricewaterhouseCoopers because they're auditors, to be clear here. They have this interesting survey they do for many years actually, right? Where they survey CEOs on a non-public basis about, you know, how they look at their businesses going forward. Look at this number here. I thought this was shocking. Nearly half of the CEOs, they will probably not tell you publicly the same. Nearly half the CEOs essentially say, "We're really worried about our business essentially, being toast in 10 years from now." We just don't know. Technology disruption, but also the macro environment, the economic disruption has reasons. There is much, much more of that thinking like, "Okay, we have to do something either way. There's nothing like defensiveness or resilience just because we have a good business." That's a thing of the past. How do we invest? I mean, in that period of winning business transformation, I think we do actually employ our normal approach, and Wolf talks about that later on. You know, we have done transformation investing for many years. Now, honestly, in the last 10, 15 years in a bull market, you know, where the tide is coming in, all the boats are lifted, I think it's actually much less differentiating than what we'll see in the next 10 years. Selectively growth capital investing, sometimes we see these ecosystems in a thematic approach. We see businesses that are just an ecosystem that is so new. For instance, we have a network simulation systems for utilities, a company called Neara, very, very successful growth business. We have businesses in other more AI-applied fields of legal services, for instance. You know, they have more growth capital. This is probably something that could become more relevant. Then on the secondary side, we'll also hear about that. That's very important. I mean, we have this value creation-based secondary approach. We're not going for the biggest sizes. I mean, we have a pretty good business. I mean, the size of the business is about $10 billion-$15 billion equivalent program size, but we're not going for the largest transactions. We're really going for those where we have a bottom-up direct style underwriting of the assets that are consistent with our thinking about the themes. Let me talk about infrastructure also here. Infrastructure, you will hear from Esther, growing massively. Incredible needs. Governments don't have the money. In itself, that's a great start, right? There's a lot of, you know, tailwind which is helpful. There's one area that will probably be the absolute amazing opportunity for the next few years. We call this the next generation utility opportunity. What is this about? It's often about platforms we build centered around some form of energy power production. Of course, again, that is a lot related to this economic transformation because of the need of technology and computation power, but the electrification of manufacturing and the near-shoring, which changes how these manufacturing sites work. All of that, I mean, leads to an amazing demand for reliable, affordable energy. The good news is we have now the technology to actually address these, okay? Because the output is, I mean, much higher than a few years ago with renewables, with other forms of storage, with batteries, transportation, distribution, but also management with energy efficiency, very AI actually based, is much, much more efficient. Now, the question you might ask yourself is, I mean, that's all nice, but you know, we have utilities. So why are you so excited about it? I mean, utilities will probably take that, you know, part of the meal. Well, the thing is the following here. The utilities that we have, that's both in Europe, in U.S., also to a good extent in Asia, they are set up in a different way. They're very defensive. They're service-oriented. They have limited CapEx in most cases, actually. They're very country kind of set up, so they're not really integrated. That's exactly not a setup that works. The setup of the private markets platform of the PG platform, and we've done a couple of those already, you know, in smaller size, and we'll grow them now, are these highly integrated platforms. You combine all these technologies for production, for management storage, and for distribution in a highly effective way. What you do with that is you essentially bring down the cost from $0.08, $0.07, $0.06, $0.05 per kWh. That's how you create these efficiencies, okay? This is exactly what we're doing, and if you look at some of the math that's somewhat simplifying here, but I can tell you that's quite an arbitrage actually. You build these platforms for around 10x free cash flow with a nucleus, with some add-ons, and you exit at something that is much more core or core plus. Super interesting, something that really excites us and is probably from a size perspective, something that can really bring our infrastructure business to a very different size in the next five to 10 years. How do we invest? We create these platforms. They've talked about that. We buy core. Sometimes it's actually ground up development. But increasingly, especially with these next-gen utilities, we will also buy more developed assets whereby the new CapEx is less than 50% of the total size, maybe 30-40%. They will be more income-oriented. They're great for insurance businesses, for DC, for discount investors. That's an initiative we're working on. This has, I think tremendous upside. Platform side, very similar to private equity. If we do a secondary, this is really with a direct style underwriting. We avoid these diversified funds where there might be all kind of things in there that might not work well in the new environment. Let's move to real estate. With that transformation that we've seen for a while and that is ahead of us, real estate in itself, the industry, is undergoing a massive, very profound transformation. The reasons are the following. It is mostly driven by demand by tenants or by owners of real estate. It goes really back to these factors of, like, new working styles, which has, of course, a lot to do with digitalization. It has to do with decarbonization. Electrification has to do with digital services, AI. It has to do with a generation rent, which looks for different setups than maybe the past. I could probably add a couple of others in logistics and so forth. What they asked in common, that's maybe the more relevant point here. It really changes the way you have to think about real estate because the operational intensity of real estate assets, the dynamic demand of what they look for in student housing, in active adults, you know, in the young generation renters in the cities, it's super dynamic. Okay. The old system where you had in real estate, you know, a long process between someone that created some ideas with the planning, and then there was maybe some engineering coming in and a developer and eventually would be taking care of a property asset manager, an overall asset manager. That just doesn't quite work anymore. It's this dynamic change to operational intensity which makes that very, very hard. This next generation model that we are so excited about is vertically integrated by essentially the single platform in-house services. What's very important is you have one data stack. You know, you can only apply technology. There's a lot of technology actually for real estate, but often it's not used that effectively because you don't have that one data stack. You need to have data flowing through from the planning through the property asset management, then becomes very, very effective. You address all these concerns, and if you think about what that means, how these real estate platforms look like, essentially businesses, you know. Instead of R&D, business development, you have acquisition development, and you have one part is manufacturing production. We call this construction project management, and service customer support is property and asset management. This is exactly the reason why we bought Empira as the backbone, as the platform to build our living and some of the the office activities on it, because they have exactly that integrated setup, very strong technology and in and in data. What do we offer on the real estate side? We'll hear about that. Essentially two main verticalized approaches. That is to living, so that's residential, that's student homes, that's active adult, that's hospitality, but then also industrial platforms, and also on the secondary side, it's a way to diversify this portfolio in a more global way, but again, with a very, very strong focus on these underlying themes rather than buying just diversification here. Let's talk about credit. Credit had clearly its headlines in the last few weeks. There was no shortage of that. My sense is that some people have not fully understood, I mean, what the whole transformation is about and what it means to credit. You know, the selective credit headlines around, I mean, SoftBank, there was a lot of talk, we talk about that. There was a lot of talk about, you know, some of the technical topics like this more payment in kind and things like that. I'm not sure whether they really address the real topic. The real topic in our view is that we are at the beginning of an incredible bifurcation of private credit outcomes, okay? And that actually, for probably the first time since 10, 15 years, a real alpha selection-oriented approach really outperforms. You might be surprised to hear that, but the reality was between 2013 and 2021 or so, maybe, well, start of COVID or so, the loss rates across the industry were so low, frankly, it didn't matter so much, right? I mean, maybe we had with our very low loss rates extremely low. Maybe we had an outperformance of 50 basis points, but it's not something that was actually so visible, and we think that will change. What's happening in credit? Wanna give you here quickly two or three pieces of, I think, thinking in the big picture. The first one is there's something happening at the large end that we just need to be aware of. This is essentially some form of convergence of public and private market style credit transactions, okay? BSL and direct lending come together in these very large transactions, and we've seen many, many more of these large transactions than in the past 10, 15 years. There is a spread difference that is maybe 100 basis points. There's hardly any difference in terms. There's a lot of funding actually coming from insurance businesses, traditional asset management business. We just have to be aware of that, okay? That makes that part of the space a little bit more complicated. I wanna be just careful. The second aspect here is probably the one that is really key. This is this transformation that drives credit bifurcation. This is actually a very simple thing to understand. It's nothing complicated. What happens if there is rapid economic change? You've seen that in industrialization. You've seen this in the last 25 years, that's not new. What happens is that the distribution of outcomes, think of some form of normalized distribution, okay, will essentially have just longer tails. Okay? That, that's just what disruption means. It's dispersion of outcomes. More winners, but probably also more losers. Some winners do extremely well, but some will just lose their shirt quite quickly. Which for the equity strategies in itself is not that much of an issue, because if you have a portfolio and you win often enough with outsized returns, you can probably cope with the fact that maybe on some of the bad ones, you lose your shirt. The problem in credit is, you know, if you have a great asset, you're capped in terms of upside at the rate. The worst case, the asset is so good it gets refinanced after 18 month or 24 month. We call this the negative convexity. You have actually a lower return. Then if it goes the other way around, I mean, you're essentially hanging it there. That means that credit will probably see different outcomes. That in itself is not yet a problem. It simply means that there's a good chance that the default rates go up. We expect it will probably about double. That's what our team believes. The recoveries might also come down, but arguably we should also expect the spreads go up somewhat. The only thing that it does, what's really important is it does really require you to focus again on very hard work, direct style credit underwriting. Because what happens if you buy these beta portfolios, we have seen many, many of these portfolios in the market in the last 10, 15 years. You look in the right-hand side of this chart, you know, in the past 10 years, let's say an average large end portfolio was 300-400 basis points above the short-term rates, because there were very, very low default rates or loss rates. If you take away about 100 or 200 basis points to cope with the fact that you see that dispersion of outcomes, you see that negative convexity, you end up with something that is just not that attractive. It's not the end of the world, but it's just not that attractive to the basis points. It was very fundamentally. In the past world, I mean, all these structures were highly leveraged. If you end up with something like 200 basis points over, you wanna be careful how you wanna leverage that because the leverage will cost you actually as much, if not even more than the spread you have. We believe, and I'm of course simplifying here, credit is more complicated than three slides here, but what we are clearly seeing is that there is a change how you have to go about private credit. Private credit is not bad at all. We think actually with spreads going up, especially in the wider middle market, we can create very attractive returns. It is a little bit different investment discipline going forward. It will be a little bit more equity-like in terms of how you have to approach credit in this environment. We approach this with our direct middle market lending strategy with extreme low loan loss rates, so we think that that's a very good setup for this environment. We will launch a new strategy and my colleague Josh will talk about that or the credit team. Special opportunities is very obvious to us that in this environment, dispersion of outcomes, you know, big refinancing wall in the markets ahead of us the next three, four, five years, and actually very limited special situations capital for these, that this is a tremendous opportunity. Then adjacent opportunities, when we speak to our clients about more diversified plays, we recommend to do this in different formats with, for instance, you know, structured credits, CLO tranches, where there's more relative value, credit securities has more relative value, and the same for NAV financing. As a last asset class, our youngest asset class, you know, the team has done it for five to six years now very successfully. The strongest growth, and I believe personally this will be the asset class with the strongest growth for many years to come. Let me explain our hypothesis here, what we believe will happen. We call this royalties financing revolution. It's about an unprecedented opportunity because royalties is not only an asset class. It's very important. It's not only an asset class, it's also a financing technology. Let me explain that. What we see here is three things happening. The first one is what we call this rise of the intangible economy. In simple words, just means that if you look at businesses and you look at balance sheets, there's just not so many hard assets anymore, okay? The intangible assets, IP, is just growing massively, right? I mean, if you think, for instance, about pharma services or pharma businesses, it's growing like at 20% or so, much, much faster than hard assets. That means that very often you don't have a traditional hard asset to finance. In the absence of doing something against the P&L risk, I mean, the only way to get, I mean, reasonable financing is actually by doing essentially a royalty financing, right? You have someone that is buying your IP effectively, giving it back to operationalize and getting a share of the revenues, right? That's what the structure is about. Think of this a little bit as maybe what happened in the sale and leaseback market maybe 40 years ago. I mean, this is something that doesn't only apply actually to these typical situations today, like pharma, for instance, or natural resources. This is a much broader application. This brings me to the second point, which is we see in this environment a lot of businesses that have much more quickly than ever before, very solid revenues. The P&L visibility is just not good enough. It will be very hard for many of them to get traditional bank financing or private credit financing. However, what they can do is they can give the revenues as a collateral, so they can get financing and pay you a share of the revenue. Effectively using that royalty technology, but not in a traditional IP format, but essentially for other businesses with strong revenue visibility. Very similarly, there's a third category here. These are businesses, incumbent businesses in some form of transformation. You will see that very often next five to seven years. Incumbent businesses that need to spend quite significant CapEx to make change, to go and achieve that transformation, that will make it very difficult for traditional financing because you don't have the visibility of free cash flow. Again, here, this is where royalty financing will come. It's a wonderful tool because you're not actually focused or worried about the net cash flow line. You're actually only worried about the revenue visibility that in many, many of these businesses you will have. That will, in our view, mean that there is a tremendous opportunity next few years. Dave could talk about that. I mean, we see amazing transactions, and there's just not so much capital in that space. There's some specialized pockets, but there aren't a lot of generalist players that play this relative value across the sectors as we do it. It's the traditional royalties, that's the existing business or natural resources, pharmaceutical IP, things like that's growing at like 20% or more. Increasingly, we use the same technology, as I said before, to create synthetic royalties or have like what we call the royalty-backed demands, right, the royalty-backed notes, for instance. Also here, I mean, there's an integrated way of playing it. If you wanna have access to certain niche strategies, if you wanna have more diversification, play with the relative value across these sectors, then we use the secondaries and advance. Overall, a lot of change ahead of us. This change in many ways will be brutal for parts of the economy. I mean, will not always be easy for business to address that change. We believe that with the right approach, I think there's an enormous potential. There's an amazing opportunity ahead of us. I'm super excited about these different areas, and we'll hear a little bit from Wolf and the colleagues, I mean, more specifically how to go about it, but also then talk of course about the challenges, problems. As I said, it's not easy at all. Let me just leave the stage with this one comment I made before. This is a very complex environment. It would not be the first time that Partners who've been in a very complex environment, you know, has massively outperformed. It was the first time in 2001, then in 2008, 2009, through the European currency crisis, 2013, during COVID. I think that is an extended period ahead of us where this differentiated approach, I think, will serve us extremely well. Very excited about that. Thank you for being with us, and with that, handing over to Wolf. Thank you, Steffen. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me kick off this investment section here with private equity. Actually, 2025 was a year of headwinds, yeah. We had the tariffs, we had macroeconomic or geopolitical topics. Our teams, they stayed with their thematic research and stayed disciplined. Actually, we invested $11.2 billion in private equity. In both areas, direct and partnerships almost at the same level. Actually, even stronger were our realizations, our exits last year. You know, the industry was talking about exits a lot. You see we had realizations of $13.4 billion, which was actually for private equity, one of the best years we had. If you look at the performance on the right side here, we had 44% uptick in investments and 46% in realizations to previous year, whereas the industry was more flat. How do we do that? Our investment strategy consists of these two pillars. Thematic sourcing, Dave talked already a little bit about that, yeah. Our teams go into 40, 50 sectors very deep, two, three years, trying to understand every detail, creating conviction, and finding the right assets. For example, right now, we're going into the future of modern manufacturing. There's so much change in manufacturing going on, and we try to identify the second and the third line that provides to that future success, yeah, and invest there. For example, physical and digital security, both. Robotics will be a huge field of growth, yeah, but it's pretty crowded in the first line. Look at robotics parts, for example, yeah, and how they are connected, those technologies. That is an example of what we do. Once we own the companies, the second pillar comes into place, the entrepreneurial ownership. It starts in the onboarding that we have a strong team. Our boards with industry experts, because we always say, yes, we have studied the sector deep, but however, there are people that have worked in it for 20, 30 years, and those are our board members, yeah, that we bring to these businesses. Yeah, combined with a strong management and our investment team, what we call the triangle. We deploy the Partners Group business system. What is that? It's kind of a framework, how we onboard companies, then how we manage value creation in the course of our ownership period. It's just a framework because every business is different, but it's our playbook. We measure the progress with a bespoke software solution that is unique in the industry. It's PG Alpha. PG Alpha doesn't have only financials, it has the strategy in KPIs. So we can monitor. It's actually for the management and the board, but also for us. We can monitor the progress of the strategic initiatives. That led, in the course of the last 10 years, to an average of 13% increase year-on-year in EBITDA on our portfolio. That represents an almost 20% IRR in the course of these years. Importantly, it was mainly driven by operational value creation. How do we transform? The technology comes into place. I said earlier, let's first look at technology in our portfolio. Actually what you see here on the left side is that we were always underexposed to software. You see that last year we even de-emphasized software. It is due to our strong AI know-how that we have internally at Partners Group that we went that way, and you see on the graph where the industry went. However, AI and technology is for us the main driver right now to transform our companies, to take it into the core of their business models, as Steffen said, and transform them with technology. 90% of our companies have deployed AI in their core business models, and the industry standard is more 30%-35% right now. How do we do that? We formed three years ago, and there was a time when ChatGPT-3 came out. We formed an AI in-house team, expert that came from the industry for Partners Group and for our portfolio companies. Then after they kicked it off, we hired an external board of advisors of five people that come from AI that have done that all their life. Yeah. As Steffen mentioned, we start with the data layer and then how to weave in into the vertical, the AI software. What we see on the top layer here, the user interface, will be totally disrupted by AI. The differentiator is in the lower levels, and that's how we built that. Let me show you an example. Our company, International Schools Partnership, was built from scratch in the last 12 years. Today, it's 100,000 students, 111 schools in 25 countries. Very successful company that you see on the numbers here. Actually, we partially sold it last year and also reinvested because we're so convinced of the business model we have created. The value creation in the last years was basically quality of schooling. We invested into that. That brought the confidence of parents to bring their students to our schools. In the last two years, we invested into an AI platform, EdTech. Actually, 93% of our teachers already use an AI platform to actually plan their whole curriculum, to plan their next day, their next week, yeah, based on the curriculum that we actually put in centrally from ISP corporate, yeah, according to the country. The students have now an individual learning module. Every student is by AI trained individually. In the morning, you are in the school, get the lesson. In the afternoon, you can practice, and the AI doesn't give you the answer. It, it asks you questions, actually. Yeah. You can imagine we gather tons of data of that. Schools love it. Why do we see huge growth for ISP in the future? Think about an individual school. They cannot afford such a system. Only such a company like ISP can program, an AI engine. We believe we can collect even progressively more schools to join that ISP network in the years to come. Let's talk about the secondaries market. The secondaries actually was a record year. It was almost $230 billion invested in the industry. Partners Group invested $4 billion, and we took the same approach as in direct. We went deep on the businesses, wanted to understand the value creation plans inside the portfolios that we bought of each company, and went deep actually with our research. $4 billion invested, and you see we screened $208 billion, went into due diligence of $37 billion, and we invested into $4 billion, which represents 1.9% of investment rate. Very thorough, deep, based on our playbook, investing, and that leads to these results. On revenue and on EBITDA, you see an over proportional growth to the Russell 2000's benchmark. If you look at the middle chart here, it is mainly based on net value creation, so performance-driven, and only to a very small portion based on discounts, real value creation. On the right side, you see that our very, very experienced and one of the largest private partnerships teams in the industry outperformed the market in the course of the last years. Overall, private equity direct here on the left, and secondaries on the right, we have a strong record, and we continue to build on that using thematic research, more technology, more AI into that, as I've shown, as well as very thorough investigations of secondaries with the same methodology. With that, I would like to hand it over to my colleague, Esther, for infrastructure. Esther. Thank you, Wolf. Esther Peiner. I'm responsible for Partners Group's Infrastructure business. 2025 has been a year that you might call exceptional, yet we call it consistent, to harness and hang together. In infrastructure, what matters not only is the ability to drive outsized returns. What matters at the same is to deliver to clients' portfolios a stable and reliably performing portfolio, no matter how complex or volatile the market environments are. We're particularly proud that in 2025, as in prior years, we've been able to fully fulfill those expectations from our clients in our activities. On the investment side, we've invested $7 billion into very interesting, very well-priced, from a buyer's perspective, assets that will continue to drive performance over the next five to seven years. We've also been able to realize around about the same amount of capital, so just about $6 billion, on behalf of our clients. Again, looking at both the direct and our portfolio investments, standout outcomes that underpin what is one of the strongest track records in the industry. Last but not least, a quick word on the industry. Those results on the deployment are stronger than what the industry has delivered, and on the realizations are particularly strong. That matters, and it matters today more than potentially over the last 10, 15, 20 years. Where infrastructure has always been something clients have added to in their portfolios, today they're in a world where they need to make choices. Even an asset class like infrastructure, where a lot of portfolios are still net-net growing, our clients are becoming more selective which manager they trust and which manager they continue to work with, intensify their working relationships with. We wanna be one of that small chosen group. Bear with me one second while I get my order right. Looking at the infrastructure market overall, it is a very, very deep market. Over $100 trillion of investments to come up, so a lot of space for managers to grow and develop. I think importantly, selectivity and the ability to identify the right risk return and grow and scale within that market will become absolutely essential to help us fulfill our ambition to be one of the leading players in the market in the years to come, and to help underpin the $100 billion+ AUM ambition that you heard us talk about in last year's Capital Markets Day. As I look bottom up at the transaction activity, the fundraising activity, the conversations we have with key strategic clients on the one hand, and our ability to put infrastructure content into dedicated evergreens and make those available to a more diversified client base on the other side, all of those conversations give me great confidence that we're on a wonderful path to reach or hopefully outperform that goal. What helps there is the fact that we're a generalist, very deeply resourced across the globe, not just from a presence, infrastructure after all is a local investment, but also from a broader thematic perspective, which helps our team really navigate different sectors and subsectors, identify opportunity early, lean in with conviction, but then also pull back and take a more cautious approach when capital starts crowding in. That's helped underpin the results on our direct control strategies and our secondary strategies, and that will also underpin our newly launched active income strategy, which should grow quite strongly over the years to come. Let me take you through an example of what that means in practice. Data centers. Couldn't possibly talk about infrastructure without talking about data centers. Now, importantly, that is a market that is classified by something infrastructure investors in principle like a lot, which are really, really big CapEx plants, and they keep growing. On the other hand, I think one of the biggest questions, and we certainly have seen quite a bit of market volatility around that, is the question of, will the revenue come that will allow for that CapEx to earn a profitable return? And how fast will it come? While one might think in the first instance, the data center operator is somewhat insulated from that question because they get the benefit of long-term leases from big creditworthy counterparts, we have learned over the last two to three decades in infrastructure that one has to ask the second and third derivative question in addition and make sure that the underlying business models are sustainable, but there is ultimately also credit risk you take on the off-taker side. Not any asset will help underpin great performance. You have to find a specific assets to specific platforms that will also in volatile environments where there is more of a risk of overbuild, will continue to perform. Our thematic journey on the data center space has been informed by that thinking and has actually been power-led. We were thinking in megawatts, and 98% of the industry were thinking in square meters or square footage. That really mattered for us in making some of the very distinct and conviction investments we've made around the globe. In atNorth in the Nordics, in EdgeCore in the U.S., and more recently in Asia Pacific through an Australian and a Southeast Asian platform. That is a portfolio today that really helps deliver one of the aspects that Dave talked about earlier in his part, and that is assets that are scaled, assets that are profitable, but assets that also enjoy the benefit of a large buyer universe. Because you need to be able to mobilize financial investors, strategic investors in order to get the best outcomes for your clients. There's also another aspect by which we can address and access interesting returns in the data center space that's maybe not so obvious to everyone, and it's through our activities on the secondary markets. Because the secondary markets allow us to be very, very selective bottom-up in the type of exposures we want. When you look at the relative pricing by which you access those opportunities, it tends to be at a discount to the transaction, the direct transaction, levels in the markets. That's really been a tool that we've been using very, very selectively, and I really want to underscore that because data centers, whether direct or secondary, is probably the easiest infrastructure asset you can acquire in today's market. Now we have the benefit with all of the relationships and the knowledge that we have, that we can really pick and choose out of that very large investment universe and make sure that what we back also indirectly are the best positioned assets at very, very attractive prices. I think the final point, and that is always the proof of the pudding. Of course, it's, you know, beyond the identification and the thinking that we're putting in during the origination phase as to value we're creating during our ownership. We've been also able to monetize on behalf of our clients accordingly. I'd like to cover one of our most recent exits atNorth. Technically not a 2025 event, but I think we can confidently look forward as that being a good example of what's to come, and that's the Nordic Data Center platform atNorth, acquired by a consortium of CPPIB and Equinix. Probably one of the largest infrastructure investors globally, teaming up with one of the two very, very large listed data center operators in the world. Competitive process remained competitive even though, you know, it also coincided with the big AI and neocloud wobbles. I used to track the credit default swaps of the core risks of this world on a daily basis. I think what is important for atNorth is really, again, looking back at the underlying business foundation fundamentals and the intrinsic value. That really allowed us to run a competitive process and deliver a great result for our clients despite the surrounding complexity. It's really around the ability to take a small platform and help it scale very, very fast. We knew the Nordics was gonna matter in a global data center world because you've got relatively cheaper power, you've got relatively more power, and a fact that many people don't realize so much, it is structurally cooler than in continental Europe, which means you need less energy. That means if I'm a client to a data center operator, I can operate much, much more economically in the Nordics. If I care about the sustainability of the sourcing of my power, I do get the added advantage of very low carbon power in that region. For us, it was really around identifying the right business, the right team, the right initial set of assets. We did that in atNorth, and then we went to scale it very, very quickly. Moving from about $20 million of recurring EBITDA at the time of acquisition to north of $200 million at the time of exit, quite a capital intensive growth process. We also tapped the debt capital markets on a regular fashion, raising way over $1 billion worth of financing in the interim. I think importantly, we also diversified the client base, and we materially lengthened the customer relationships that atNorth was able to enter into. Then last but not least, and this is I think what CPP and Equinix are hugely excited about, and so were a number of the unsuccessful bidders, was a lot of further runway to grow by way of having secured power and land and the ability to allow the incoming consortium to now choose how fast they wanna accelerate on the capital deployment to access that $25 billion contract value pipeline. All of that comes together to ultimately deliver what I think is a standout result for our clients, and one that we will look to repeat as we look to monetize some of the other platforms we have in the portfolio, whether those are data center specific or broader energy or infrastructure platforms. Taking therefore a quick step back to the overall portfolio, about 40 investments globally on the direct control side, well diversified across sectors and geographies, and that does matter on an infrastructure portfolio as well, because infrastructure will be exposed to local regulatory changes, policy shifts, macroeconomic headwinds. For us, it's really important to continue a global approach and one that is focused and dominated by developed economy sort of investment focus. That again gives the blueprint for the portfolio we'll continue to build. I think on the control value add side, it'll be around those 40-50 assets that we're looking to build out, and then we will add through the active income strategy with a lot of additional depth to that portfolio. Very excited therefore so to grow and develop the team. I think in lockstep with what Wolf said on the infrastructure side, we're also quite active users of artificial intelligence, and that can really help drive on the infrastructure side, fantastic incremental margins that will ultimately translate across the portfolio to our clients. With that, maybe a quick word finally on track record. As I said, track record is what underpins our ability to grow our business in a much faster and accelerated fashion compared to the market. We do have a top quartile track record across our control and secondary strategies across multiple vintages of funds. We have delivered on the realized side north of two times net TVPI and over 20% net returns to our clients. Importantly, it's a very stable distribution. Which is skewed towards the side you want it to be skewed at, so towards the right side of outcomes. Importantly, on the secondary side, we've also been able to maintain that same exceptional track record of performance against our peers, really around both a very attractive 1.6x net and 18% net IRR. Those figures will help underpin what I believe will be a fantastic decade for infrastructure to build one of the largest infrastructure platforms in the world. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. My name is Chris Bone, and I head up our Private Credit business in Europe and Asia. I have the pleasure to talk to you a little bit about what I think is the most exciting business area we have. In the last sort of three months or six months, it's been one of the noisiest periods for private credit. Indeed, most days as I come in on the train from into work, I see something on the papers of some sort. We've been, you know, words such as contagion and insects and bubbles and all sorts of things being used in the same context as private credit. It's sort of a pleasure then here to talk about what we see through our eyes. What is it we think about the market at this point in time? In short, we believe that a lot of the risks that are described in the market today are oversimplified. I just want to spend a moment just to describe what we mean by that. Now, a lot of the headlines have talked about defaults, you know. I think it's fair to say that defaults indeed have risen recently, particularly on the junior debt side and particularly in some more cyclical sectors. I want to comment, first of all, the default rate of Partners Group is much, much lower than the market, 10 times lower. Again, defaults I don't think is the main topic. There's been a lot of discussion around more of sort of KPIs or technical issues, things like geopolitical tensions, valuations, protection. Let me spend a moment on each of these. PIK, or the sort of non-pay, non-cash pay element of loans has taken a lot of the headlines at the moment. If you look at some of the BDCs in the U.S., what we see is about 7% of the income in general is now being PIK. Just to put that in context, the peak was in 2020, around 10%. It's not at abnormally high levels, although we acknowledge that it is higher than the long-term average. The PIK in our portfolios is between 30%-50% lower than the market average, around about 4% or so. Points to our strong selectivity, which I'll come to in a moment. I think inconsistent valuation is another theme that has emerged in the media. It's certainly we do observe some inconsistent valuations in portfolios. I think our approach to valuations is very important here. We have an independent external valuer who values bottom up all our lines, line by line. They don't do it quarterly, they do it monthly. Very important. We've done that for our funds for decades, more than a decade or so on our open-ended equity fund. Loss of protection. I think Steffen mentioned about it before. Certainly at the upper end of the markets, the large cap, there has been a blurring of the lines between the BSL market and the direct lending market. Some of the protections which you might associate with a loan, with a debt instrument have been eroded away. I think what's important here to recognize is that we target predominantly the middle market, the core middle market, where the protections are much better. In particular, 90% of all our loans last year in Europe benefited from a leverage maintenance governance. A number about 80% in the U.S. still have a very strong number. It's much higher than the broader market, by the way. Go back to the slide. Steffen talked about this earlier. Actually, I nicked this slide from him, so I hope he's, if he's still here, he'll certainly, you know, challenge me later. It's a very important slide, right? What we're saying is that return outcomes in the credit market in the last 10 years have actually been in quite a narrow range. Really, you could go back to those 2017, 2018, 2019, and defaults and losses in the markets have been rather benign. Interest rates in Europe were around zero, even negative sometimes in some jurisdictions. We see that's going to change. We are seeing it live changing. Our view is that default rates are actually gonna double in the coming years. Probably even more importantly, but less pressed, is that recovery rates, the amount of recovery on those defaults, we think will fall to around 40% compared to sort of 50%, an equally important measure. What that leads to ultimately is you're gonna have winners and losers in the credit market. Steffen described it very well with the bell-shaped curve. It simply is the case in credit that you're gonna see that. All that means is that you just got to be more selective. You've got to be more careful. There is no upside in investing in private credit. If I get it right, nobody calls me and congratulates me. If I get it wrong, I get the call, right? I need to make sure that it's right. I need to make sure that the credit due diligence holds firm. Now, let me touch on software and AI. It's a topic that is, of course, touching many parts of the media and broader industries. Our view in the private credit side of Partners Group is consistent with what we're doing across the platform. We've talked about it and on the equity side. at Partners Group, we run a very integrated platform. We're very we benefit from some of the thematic thinking, some of the research they do on the equity side to ensure that when we think about private credit, when we think about investing in individual loan, we're benefiting from that. That means that we can very thoughtful about some of the risks, and as well as some opportunities as well, but I worry more about the risks in these various sectors and industries, that we touch and that we look at. Look, you know, what does that mean? Well, we look at over 3,000 companies in the last five years or so, 600 or so per year. We invest in about 10% of those, is a 90% decline rate. The majority of what we look like, the vast majority, we decline. That's very important, and it comes down to what we call internally our private equity style mindset. The view is we're not investing in a debt instrument. I'm not investing in a loan. I'm investing in a company. I'm investing in a management team. I'm investing in a business model. That's ultimately the way we think about investing on the private credit side as well. That, we believe, is very important, particularly going forward. Taking a step back, what do we have here at the Partners Group? Well, we have a $40 billion AUM split rather evenly between directs and the liquid side of our business. We also have a very evenly split AUM by region, roughly North America, Europe, 50/50, little bit in Asia Pacific. We run very diversified portfolios. Our largest flagship fund runs at 0.5% average concentration. It's very diversified over hundreds of names there. That delivers what we believe is very, very proud of our returns, 6.7% return. That includes as of a loss rate of 0.08%, which is in our mind market-leading. We think about the, you know, the growth of the business, where we come from, what we're doing. It's important to recognize that we've grown our private credit business organically, right? We started a liquid loan business 15 years or so. Today, we run that at $22 billion. It's a very fast-growing business line. Last year, we started our credit secondaries business in a partnership with Generali. We also launched a NAV financing or fund financing initiative. It's also proving to be very successful. I also want to pass it now finally to my colleague, Joshua, who's now explaining our latest initiative on the special opportunity side. Thanks, Chris. Special opportunities can mean lots of things to lots of different people, and obviously in the press recently, it's getting a lot of attention. Thought today I'd just take a few minutes to describe what it's gonna mean to us at Partners Group. First of all, if we take a step back and we looked at, you know, our pipeline over the last several years and the opportunities we're able to really execute on, there was a segment of risk reward that was really attractive, but we just didn't have the dedicated capital to really take advantage of it. For us, that dedicated capital pool is gonna be special opportunities. It's gonna be, you know, strategically aligned capital at its core, focused on downside protection and really participating in the upside. What we've talked about here, particularly Chris, has talked about sort of not getting it right and not being able to capture any of that upside. We're gonna do the underwriting and really try to take advantage of that as well. It's gonna be a downside protected credit. We're gonna look to participate in the upside more than credit has beforehand, and it's gonna have a deal velocity somewhere in between the two strategies. What that's gonna do is gonna create a narrower return profile with underlying downside protection similar to private credit, but really a return profile that gets closer to private equity. Why now? Well, we've talked about the increases in the demand for bespoke capital. The economic transformation that's going on is really gonna require bespoke capital to help fund this transition. Talked a little bit about maturity wall coming. If you think about the growth of private credit over the last five years, done in a very low interest rate environment, that's now coming to maturity wall. We're gonna refinance that at a vastly different economic period. You think about what solutions are in market today. From what we've seen, we think only about $300 billion of opportunistic capital has been raised, and that's far smaller than what the opportunity set's gonna be. We think it's a really ideal environment for us to be investing. You think about a little bit, so why Partners Group? Well, we talked about the mid-market platform, and there's a great mid-market platform here at Partners Group, and we've accessed great credit risk. Overall, the opportunistic sector, the capital that has been raised has been raised at a much higher bulge bracket rate. We think it's really underserved that we can take advantage of. If we think about the broad platform, and Wolf talked about our real understanding of thematic trends, we're gonna take that too and use that to focus on areas where we want to invest. Importantly, we're differentiated through our 350 key relationships with GPs, through which we allocate capital that we think is gonna be much more aligned with our stakeholders. Finally, being able to leverage the valuation playbook with a really active stakeholder that doesn't exist in the mid-market space for special opportunities. We think that really differentiates us and gives us an edge to win with our stakeholders. A little bit of how we're gonna invest at Partners Group. We have three archetypes we're gonna focus on. We've got capital solutions, where it's really great companies with short-term constraints. This can be de-leveraging, or this could be providing capital for other shortages. Below here, I've got just a few examples to try to really bring that home. These are examples in our pipeline right now. We're working with a renewable energy asset with long-term contracted cash flows. We're gonna help fund their new projects. Our growth solutions are really to work alongside founders and sponsors alike to help them take that next step and expand their platforms. Right now we're working with a really fast-growing quick service restaurant chain to fund their new rollout strategy. Asset solutions, we're really focused on sort of assets, companies, all real assets with deep underlying value. We're gonna use that, the diligence on the underlying value to lend against them. Really what makes this different is our ability and different for me. I'm really excited about it. It's our ability to pull the whole platform in. When I think about capital solutions and what we're looking at, I get to work directly with the infrastructure team. They've already got a vast understanding of renewables to help me underwrite that asset. In the growth solutions, I can work with PE and really understand their rollout strategy. Asset solution, well, we have a real estate team that helps you really understand the line of sight to construction and the value of the end asset. In short, what we're gonna do is, I think we've got an ability to create a really differentiated product at the time where the market needs it most. With that, I'll hand over to Mike. Thank you. I'm Mike Bryant, Co-Head of Real Estate. I really wanna pick up on the topic that both Steffen and Dave talked about, the changing real estate business model, the fact you need vertical integration to manage that changing world. I've been in the real estate industry over 35 years. I think one of the key things that I felt the last three to five years is an increase in operational intensity, and I wanna sort of talk about what that means. What does it mean in practice? Look, I think there's a lot of data to support why real estate is operating more intensely. Leases are shorter. There's more leases, more rent rolls are more granular. Tenants are more demanding, whether it's about amenity, whether about service, whether it's about energy performance. Technology needs to be managed and real estate's not doing a great job. A lot of different systems that don't talk to each other. Real estate has become operationally more intense. As you've heard already, we believe very clearly you need vertical integration to manage that operational intensity. What does it mean, vertical integration? I think euphemistically it's about boots on the ground, local capabilities, strong local relationships, and we see real benefits for our clients in terms of investment performance. It means you can go faster because you've got those relationships. Faster to lease, to build, to get your permits. It's a lower fee leakage. We think about Empira's boots on the ground. What are they? 270 people in the German market, focused on the living sector, all stages of the real estate life cycle, from sourcing to building, to leasing, to selling, to managing. Our strategy's very clear. We want to gain that vertical integration and the operational capabilities both in-house and through M&A. I think we've talked a lot about already, you know, how good we're feeling about the Empira acquisition. We know what we bring to the table, those great client relationships, those bespoke solutions, and we know what Empira brings in terms of its track record, its focus, and its vertical integration. You know, thus far, things are going really well. I've been in client meetings. It really resonates when you talk about what Empira can deliver, and I think the trajectory to grow their AUM more than double in the next four or five years is very, very attainable. What is the investment concept that's getting clients excited? Here's the, one of the key strategies, which is German transition to green. It's a very simple thesis. 75% of residential stock in Germany needs energy retrofits. These are stranded assets. What do I mean by that? There's regulation coming that will at some point say that you cannot operate these assets unless you improve them. They're unloved by the current owners who don't have the capabilities to execute the business plans, so they can be bought at very attractive prices. If you've got the capabilities to execute the business plan, the boots on the ground, you can get good rental uplifts from the green CapEx. This is in a market where rents are regulated. You need boots on the ground and sourcing capabilities and execution capabilities. Going a level deeper, what is the operational value creation? Very simple. Houses have energy performance certificates. This is an A to F rating. A is good, F is bad. Typically, they're buying assets with a D rating. Through life of ownership, you take it to a B rating, so you improve it. What are they doing to deliver that? It's about changing the heating systems. Sounds simple. It's complicated. It's about CapEx to improve installation, the roof, the facade, the windows. You do it with the tenants in situ. You need good technology to talk to them. The German government's very supportive of the initiative, so there's a lot of green financing to help you get there. Putting it all together, I think you've heard it, and I'm gonna repeat it 'cause I think it's really relevant. The winners of the next real estate cycle will be vertically integrated. It's what matters. It's what matters to deliver, to have those boots on the ground, that sectoral focus, deliver on the value creation. I think it is a contrast to the past, where perhaps managers was more about horizontal diversification. It was about risk spreading. It was about financial engineering in a low interest rate environment and a more static ownership. I think the data in the middle column here really proves it out. I think LPs are already telling us what they want. You can see that vertically integrated managers are getting more growth in their AUM. LPs know what they want, and they're voting with their feet for the vertically integrated managers. What does it mean for us? Comes down to the three platform offerings that Steffen talked about earlier on. Living platforms, we know that there's a structural undersupply of houses globally. Empira obviously is our key platform for the living. It's not the only platform, but it is our key platform. Industrial platforms, we have a great track record on urban logistics in North America and Europe, and we're building out our vertical depth in those strategies, and it's about secondaries as well. Across all of these offerings, you, when you look at the actually how we're managing the real estate, you will see vertical integration because that's what we think is relevant and important. Thank you. I'll now hand you over to Stephen to talk about royalties. Thanks, Mike. Hi, good morning. This time last year, I actually introduced you to the royalty strategy at Partners Group. I'm delighted to say that over the last 12 months, we've had huge success launching royalties as the fifth new asset class of Partners Group. Firstly, we built out a dedicated investment team to royalties. Secondly, we've integrated seamlessly into the broader Partners Group platform in two ways. One, we've leveraged the expertise of the other asset classes in the sectors that we invest in. Number two, we've adopted the core PG DNA in terms of relative value, dynamic asset allocation, and very importantly, for the first time, global investors can now invest into royalties through our dedicated evergreen offerings. To give you some numbers, this time last year, we were around 15 people in the team. We nearly doubled the team size. We've gone from $200 million of AUM to over $1 billion of AUM. I can't give you updated numbers, but it's fair to say that $1 billion is in the rear view mirror of the car. On the investment side, we've made 17 new investments. We deployed over $500 million, and similarly, we are very excited about the pipeline that sits before us today. In terms of some notable investments we made, in 2025, we invested into the Warner Bros. music from film and TV catalog, which is very timely given what is going on with Paramount and Netflix at the moment. We also invested into The Weeknd and a number of high-quality direct investments. As you can see from the page, our investors come into immediate diversification across the core sectors that we invest in, so life sciences, entertainment, and energy transition. Just as importantly, they're also diversified across the way that we invest. Diversified across buying royalties, lending against royalties, creating royalties, and the royalty fund investments that we have made. Now our strategy is built to be resilient through market volatility. How is that? Well, number one, we're focused on producing de-risked assets, so we're not coming into development assets. Secondly, we are focused on products which have clear USPs, i.e., standalone in their markets. Number three, and this is very important, we underwrite everything on a yield basis. For us, exits are an upside. They are not a requirement to hit our base case returns target. Last but not least, we have a lot of diversification in our portfolio to reduce down idiosyncratic risk. We look to make 20-30 new investments a year into our evergreen portfolios. In addition, unsurprisingly, in royalties, the legal and the IP side of things is a huge concern and risk you have to spend a lot of time with. We have built dedicated teams of lawyers with IP and royalties experience to really dig down into those key focus areas. As you can see on the page, it means that our direct and our royalties portfolio are trending above the target return. We underwrite to a 12%-14% return. We're actually outperforming those metrics. Now, 2025 was very important for us as a strategy because if you think about the thesis of royalties, it is to have low correlation, not be impacted by market volatility, be very consistent, stable, and deliver the uncorrelated yield and returns to our investors. Our target return for our global institutional fund is a 10%-12% net return. For 2025, we were very close to that 12% net return. Notwithstanding everything that was going on in the market around Trump and tariffs and market volatility, our royalties portfolio continued to perform as expected. In addition, we made a number of high-quality investments. I don't know if any of you in the room use the EpiPen or know somebody who uses the EpiPen for anaphylactic shock. We bought a royalty on a product called neffy, which we believe will replace the EpiPen. Every time neffy is sold, we get 6.5% of the revenue. The asset is performing very well to date. Secondly, we invested into The Weeknd, the number one artist globally on Spotify. To give you some stats, two reasons. One, because it's a bit of fun. Two, because it actually continues to make my mind boggle. Less than 0.01% of all songs on Spotify achieve a billion streams. To give you some references, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elton John, in their entire career, each of them have less than five songs with a billion streams. Anybody brave enough to guess how many The Weeknd has in terms of number of songs with a billion streams? Any guesses? There's no bad guess unless you say zero, 'cause I wouldn't be asking the question if you say zero. Okay, so we have 10. The Weeknd has just under 30. No other artist on the planet has 20, other than Taylor Swift. He has 29. It's whether you like his music or not, no one can dispute that he has built the most diversified, high-quality IP in the music space. This is just one of 20 investments that went into our portfolio on an LTM basis. Now, very timely, and this often gets overlooked because people think it's the boring part of our portfolio. We also invest in energy transition, so U.S. natural gas, scarce commodity. Very topical at the moment, given Russia and Ukraine, the Middle East. What is powering data centers, which is often overlooked. We now own royalties of more than 3,000 producing gas wells in the U.S. It's so diversified. There's very low volatility in the volumes. We hedge out a lot of the gas price exposure. It sits in the portfolio. Some people see it as being boring, but it just generates very attractive yield for our investors. If any of you in this room can find a correlation between how much people use neffy, how much people listen to The Weeknd, and how much people consume Henry Hub gas price, I will buy you a drink. There is no correlation between the sectors that we invest in, which is what helps to generate the low volatility that we see at the fund level. Last but not least, Steffen's already touched upon it. We're very excited about this strategy because we see this as a $2 trillion market and growing. That is not just the sectors that are expanding and new ones coming in, it's also the structural way that you can invest into royalties. As mentioned before, we view this as a $30 billion+ AUM target, and each day that goes by and the pipeline that continues to build, we are more and more confident of delivering that scale. With that, I will hand it over to the next presenter, Juri Jenkner. Thank you. So far, we mainly discussed the investing platform, investment activities. We're gonna shift gears now to the client side of our activities. I see a lot of familiar faces here. Most of you, I think, have visited us last year in Switzerland at our headquarters. In other words, we're moving from the factory that was the building on the right side of our campus. That's the investment factory. We're moving over to the foundry. Foundry being where the client activities do happen, where we create those bespoke solutions. That's where we have the portfolio management team, the structuring team, client solutions teams, et cetera. Excited to discuss with you our momentum that we see on the fundraising side. In other words, these 300 client solution colleagues you see behind me, the Partners Group sort of world map, sit in those offices, share the culture, speak the languages, and do understand, a very deep understanding of what the clients actually want and need. That's the starting point, to listen. Out of that originates one headline being 1,200 institutional clients. It's typically more on the mandate side of things. You see the pie chart at the upper right. We're talking here sovereign wealth clients, pension funds, insurance clients. There's also a very well-diversified pool of 65,000 evergreen type of clients. Again, back to the pie chart, those are mainly private wealth distribution type of clients. Just to give you the footprint, as a starting point here. Now another perspective of. I wouldn't call it the packaging, but sort of the access to the invested content. You see it's about 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. So we're talking 30% evergreens. Let's zoom into the institutional clients, as a starting point here. What we clearly see the highest growth is for mandates. Also mix shift, where you see over the last 10 years, we started with 22%, and that has increased to 37% exposure. Now, that's good news because those are the most sticky clients, the most sticky cash flows from a shareholder perspective that one can generate. For the traditional funds, again, diversified across 100 traditional funds, 100+ funds. For traditional funds in 2025, we have raised $7.5 billion. That was a strong fundraising year for traditional funds. I would sort of look at it with two headlines. One being established strategies. These are long-term track records. This is, for example, the direct infrastructure fund that as we mentioned, fund number four, we are expecting the final close towards the end of Q2. The private equity secondary fund, for example, again, established, proven, tested strategy with Fund VIII, 25+ years track record. The infrastructure secondary fund as well, great market opportunities in this market environment. Again, 20+ years track record. That's where the lion's share of the fundraising happens with proven, tested, reliable strategies. Putting my business development hat on the right-hand side, it's about expanding into strategies like the de novo strategy of royalties that we heard about. By the way, I'm wholeheartedly convinced that this will be $30 billion by 2033, possibly even earlier than that. We have tremendous traction, and a great risk term offering here with our fifth asset class. Talking about the credit side of the house, expanding that into secondaries. Again, a strong industrial logic. We've done it for 25+ years for private equity. The next sort of market cycle happened in infrastructure. When I say cycle, I'm talking probably two cycles last 20 years. Now in the credit markets, you sort of capitalize on the current market volatility, but you also have a credit secondary market that will be doubling, tripling over the next five to 10 years. I think here, again, with our joint venture partner, Generali, I think a compelling offering to further expand the platform with traditional funds. Regarding royalties, to give you some additional color. Sorry, not royalties, real estate. Of the $2 billion that was raised last year in 2025, the lion's share came through cross-selling of Empira distinct platform type of strategies. There's more to come into 2026. Again, expanding our footprint and our strategies. With that, I'd like to move on to the most exciting part of the Capital Markets Days. It's the mandate strategy and the mandate growth, and give you some additional color why this is such a superior offering. Why it's a win-win for our clients, but also from a shareholder perspective. Again, last year, a record year, $9.4 billion raised. You see here some context where we come from. I gave you the percentages. Here we have the absolute numbers, and again, broadly diversified across our asset classes. Now, to give you some additional context here, Dave spoke about this, call it the friendly competitors that typically use the fund technology. I wanna do some compare and contrast here. When you're in a typical SMA, they would put you in two, three, four funds. Call it a mandate. De facto, you're in two, three, four closed-end funds. Then you're in for 10, 15 years. Like, there is no dynamic allocation whatsoever. It's a mini fund of funds. That's what it typically is. What does that do to you? You go J-curve over J-curve over J-curve, fund by fund, if you keep up with your exposure. With our, what we call line-by-line technology, with this open architecture, where the clients come in pro rata, and they can get going immediately and implement the strategies, what that does is you have a compounding effect within your mandate to the NAV level steering. That's now really key because over five, 10, 15 years, you compound more value than going J-curve over J-curve while you can react to those market dynamics. It's clearly a superior strategy that we've built in technology and operations over 20 years that cannot be copied that easily. Frankly speaking, oftentimes it's not even allowed in those existing LPAs if you have built it that way to offer pro rata allocations, just as a starting point. Let alone the hundreds of resources that it takes to manage the cash flows, to have the FX hedging in place, the risk management, the deployment, et cetera. So clearly a superior, and much more sticky offering for our clients, from a shareholder perspective. If we put the slide to the side, maybe for a second. In other words, if you think about it's almost crazy as an industry to go back to your clients in a traditional format every three years and sort of ask to pitch again. Do you want our offering? Or do you wanna have a look at the other competitor or the other one? If you would be a mobile phone operator, you wouldn't go back every three years and go, "Are you really sure you don't wanna maybe change to Vodafone? Maybe they have a low price. Maybe there's something else." That just illustrates you the more sticky nature of the assets if you have a superior offering where you outperform and where you have a very low single digit, if at all, churn rate with that stack of capital. Sorry to go a little long, but I felt we wanna illustrate that properly. Maybe another way to illustrate it is to work with real examples to make it tangible for you what that exactly means by asset class. Let's first start with sort of, let's call it a part of the Chinese menu. You pick as a client by asset class to build up the desired exposure. In the middle of the slide, you might add in some diversification that helps you to diversify, but also to address market cycles. That could be direct, could be secondaries, could be some primaries if desired. You wanna be specific, especially in this market environment, about the geographical exposures, the sector exposures, et cetera. I think Steffen outlined it so well. It's changing market environment, it's transforming. You want to be, as a client, dynamic to face those changing market environments. I'm telling you, I'm spending a lot of time in Asia these days. There are some Asian clients, maybe some Danish clients, maybe some Canadian clients. They have a view of the world where their geographic exposure should be these days, and then they have tools to manage towards certain allocations. That gives you a part of the Chinese menu. Now, in the following, let's bring it alive by real-world examples. The first one is a private equity example that started in 2008. It's a pension fund. It's an all-weather private equity strategy. Meaning, the client started with a $1 billion NAV target and said, "Let's go with direct and secondary, so we can adapt to market environments." What the bar charts show you is that we started in 2008 with a 13% exposure to secondaries. Then came the global financial crisis. In consultation with our mandate clients, we dialed up secondaries to 76%. 2009, left at 66% and captured highly discounted secondaries in that market environment. Thereafter, the rates came down. Benign environment to capture the value creation for direct exposures. You'll see the direct exposure has been dialed up for a number of years, capitalizing that environment. In the more recent years with the volatility that we have seen, we have increased the secondary allocation again. That's just one way to look at relative value in the mandates with the dynamic steering that only this technology allows for. Another perspective, moving on to an infrastructure client, an insurance client. Here the target was very clearly it's a German insurer. Life insurer. You got the next generation coming. They want clean, they wanted green. The ask was, can we define 50% clean energy as part of the portfolio? We wanna have that global, maybe 40% U.S., the rest on the back of our global platform. There was literally zero competition there for tailor-making a very bespoke solution to that insurance company for infrastructure clean energy with those diversifications and specifications. That was the ask, and that's what we delivered. A very strong competitive edge and a bespoke solution here. Moving on to some credit examples, maybe twofold. One on the left, it's an example that originated out of a private equity mandate. It's a pension fund. We had a target of 8%-10% net for the client. We've been outperforming that target, so the discussion went into, can we take down the risk profile a little bit? Could we add some credit, some cash yield? I think it was about 70 credits they wanted to have nicely diversified, and you know, balance out the portfolio to some extent. That's what happened here. On the right side, it's a credit-focused mandate. By the way, we have out of the 180 mandates, 30 of them are credit-focused, 20 of them are insurance-focused. The right side, where you can address capital charge topics, etc., for insurances, again, very bespoke offerings. The right side, the insurance company said, "We need to ramp this up within 12 months." We used our BSL syndicated loan capabilities. The next ask was a leverage between 4-6x. No excessive leverage, more sort of mid-market exposures, less than 1% per loan. We, over the years, built up exactly to those specifications a broadly diversified credit portfolio, 80% with covenants, downside protected, what we're known for, low loss rates, bottom-up analysis, covenant-heavy portfolio with senior loans. Last example here is the diversification of royalties. I was just wondering why the right side of the slide doesn't show. It doesn't matter. I'll talk you through it. For royalties, similar to what you've seen with credits, it's a diversification into existing private markets exposures, clearly low correlation, barely correlated to sort of GDP or inflation type of swings and/or royalty-only mandates. There we have it. Magic done in the back. Thank you. Or a focus on income, sort of an alternative income yield, which especially in this market environment resonates well. Gives you typically a cash yield of 6%-8% through the royalty stream with an equity upside and very long-term cash flows. Also works well for some of those insurance type of clients. With that, I hope we brought it a bit alive with real examples, the different perspectives, and why it is so differentiated, why it is so bespoke, why it is built so differently, and what that leads into is a six-fold growth rate over the last 10 years. It's growth that in my book will further be fueled by accessing additional mandate clients. What does that mean? So far, until about 12-18 months ago, we have been targeting mandate clients from $100 million to a few billion upwards. Let's not forget it takes a lot of technology, a lot of operations, a lot of resources. We had to, you know, cut it at a reasonable level where it makes sense for the clients, what makes sense for us. Now we have increased our technological capabilities, our operational capabilities. Over the last 12 months, we have started to access clients between $50 billion and $100 billion as well. You can imagine the pyramid goes a bit like this. There's a whole new field where we have gained over 10 clients, sub-$100 million, over the last 12 months, and that's additional client segment that we will go for. With that, we covered the institutional side of our activities, the mandates, the traditional funds, and I'll hand over to Roberto to dive into the evergreens. Thank you. Thank you so much, Juri. Good morning also from my side. Seems I'm one of the last major milestones to pass, between us and lunch, so I'll try to keep it concise. Now, over to the private wealth side of things. We've been one of the early movers, as you know, in private wealth, a market that has been consistently growing, delivering us more than 20% of growth in the last 10 years. More recently, we've seen a lot of new entrants coming into the industry, leading to an acceleration of the overall growth then. A lot of that growth was driven by private credit. As a matter of fact, 70% of the U.S. private wealth assets under management are private credit-driven. At Partners Group, I say this with the highest respect for Chris Bone and the credit business, we're an equity investor at heart. Whether it's private equity, infrastructure, royalties, but also within private credit, we underwrite with a private equity mindset. For us, 85% is actually in equity-related strategies. To be clear, there's no private equity only that covers private markets, private infra, and royalties as well. There are a lot, obviously, we've been benefiting from that positive market dynamic. We've concluded 2025 with a record year in fundraising, and I think the notable point around this is that today we've broadened the platform achieving this success to more than 30 different evergreen vehicles. Most importantly, those newer evergreen vehicles, the broader evergreen platform, has actually been responsible for almost 60% of the fundraising in 2025. The other element was mentioned before. The industry is 80% U.S. and 20% non-U.S. Partners Group. In many cases you would have, in the space, people having one, two, maybe three very big funds and mainly focusing on the U.S. Partners Group is much more than that. We're global. We're going into numerous countries across the globe, to familiarize ourselves with the regulation, how you tap the market. We have client teams on the ground, structuring teams that help creating evergreens that work in specific markets. We have about 40% in the U.S., while 60% of our private wealth business is actually outside the U.S. Hubert had a question before for the 2025 fundraising. That split is rather similar. 35% was in the U.S., and 65% was non-U.S. Now, the key to build the evergreen business and to grow it consistently is building a long-term track record. By track record, we really focus a lot about consistency. What you see here is the track record of our U.S. Evergreen Fund. That's 11% per annum since inception in 2009, and notably without a single down year, so all positive years. That compounding feature is something that our clients value a lot and leads to tremendous multiples. Here we are at the 5.5x that an initial investor who came into the fund in 2009 will have experienced. The real difference also, if you think about all the new entrants, 81% of this track record is realized. That's not about valuations in private markets. That's actually based on what we have invested, held, made better, and then realized again. In this space, we're very unique in that sense because that needs time to build track record. If you look at the industry, it's actually the other way around. Only 23% is realized, and the majority is based on unrealized, based on valuations. What can you really tell about the track record after two, three years? You can't tell a lot. You have a good start. You have a ticket for round two to continue, but you can't really judge the performance of a fund yet after such a short time. What's a key element in building evergreen portfolios is that you always create a balanced mix across vintages. You need to have some assets that are in the midst of value creation drive your performance. Just because Partners Group buys a business and owns it, doesn't mean it magically starts growing faster. It's actually, hopefully this morning, my colleagues from the investment side were able to illustrate to you how you actually need to do things to make companies grow better. It's after a couple of years that you drive performance. The new investments you make are typically driving performance in the future. The ones you made a couple of years ago are driving performance in the now. The more mature investments create upside through exits, but also liquidity, so you can reinvest and keep a balanced portfolio over time. That is a dimension you have to be very careful about when you run private equity, private markets, private infrastructure offerings. It's less relevant for the e-com, for the private debt space. Now, that's the point where I wanna quickly comment on redemptions. Dave made some remarks before. The first statement I want to make is that we have seen an improvement in the fourth quarter on redemptions. The dynamics that we've seen in the private equity space are very different ones from the private credit space. Dave has outlined in the past couple of updates that we gave that there was a rebalancing. There were new entrants last summer that came into the market that took some market share, so we had that rebalancing, having a peak in our redemptions somewhere around September. Since we have seen a drop in the fourth quarter and a further drop in the first quarter of this year. That's very, very different from the dynamic that you observe in the private credit space. It happens to be somewhat an overlapping times, but it's a very different dynamic. When you look at private credit and private wealth at Partners Group, simply spoken, it's a non-event. Only 10% of our evergreen AUM are in private credit, three private credit funds. Of those three funds, 90% are institutional investors. So you're literally talking about 1% of our private wealth AUM that are in credit evergreens. By the way, those funds all have positive flows, inflows vastly outsizing outflows, and that has been the case for every single quarter last year. It's simply something that doesn't affect us. Let's move to the new funds. The new funds that we've been talking about a couple of times, in the last few updates. Happy to confirm they continue to start with a very strong performance. I wanna single out the infrastructure one, which specifically has been leading the pack in its segment and also had quite some commercial success. I think maybe that's the point where we should take a step back and have a deeper look at private markets evergreen performance. Yes, we see those fantastic numbers, but what is really the potential? What is really the long-term return? How should we think about evergreen returns through the cycles? For that, I start from the closed-ended world, traditional funds as you know them. White space, 15%-20% IRR are numbers we're familiar with. Oftentimes that ends up at a multiple after 10 years for investors of 2.8x the initial investment. If I take that same portfolio, the same investments with that same that produce that IRR and put them into an evergreen fund. I'm changing the structure from something where you call capital over four years and you're not fully invested all the time to something where you're fully invested on day one, and then you're just compounding until the last day of your investment. The return that matches those 15%-20% in an evergreen context is 10%-12%. That gives you the same total gains after a 10-year period. If we look under the bonnet, taking private equity here as an example, where it really starts from what the basis of the value creation is the profit growth, the EBITDA growth at the company level. Think of it as 10%-15%, part of it organic, part of it through acquisitions. With the use of leverage, you get that up by a few percentage points. Secondaries can help increase your return. But at the same time, liquidity will dilute your returns somewhat, and fees will as well. You end up at a long-term return target of 10%-12% for private equity evergreens. That's just what we find in the economy. That's just the type of business that we invest as an industry. Then that obviously varies over time, right? If you have rising interest rates, the 10%-12% become more of an 8%-12%, an 8%-10%. If you have tailwinds, because of favorable market environment or strong economic growth, that can go into 12%-14%, but it's for sure not 15%-20%. The long-term target return you should think of is really you compound at a 10%-12% rate. That's quite in line with what we also have achieved with our track records. Then obviously all depends on currencies and different settings that you have, different asset locations. I think that is a good way to think about it. If you take those 11% and take a step back and think about it personally. 11% is a fantastic rate to compound when you save for your retirement. It might not be a fantastic and appealing return for those who speculate. Dave mentioned this morning, those who tend to park cash somewhere, those who see a trade and a theme they wanna follow because they have a conviction that so medical or healthcare is the flavor of the month. It helps you for your core allocation, 10%-12% is a fantastic return. This is why strategic partnerships have become such an interesting part of where we're going with the growth in our evergreen part, and I'll get to that in a second. Juri talked before about mandates on the institutional side. On the institutional side, we come from a world where it was mainly about funds, picking funds, switching funds, to building partnerships, to building mandates that are more bespoke. Nowadays, more than half of the institutional business is actually in bespoke mandates. We think there are some parallels in the private wealth space. Could very well imagine that on the private wealth side, we see a similar development, where if you're a long-only asset manager, if you're a distributor offering one-stop solutions to your clients, you need a reliable partner for your private markets allocation, someone who does the core allocation in their private markets portfolio. We expect bespoke JV partnerships to become a bigger and bigger part of our private wealth business also on this side of the business. The way how we do those, there's probably two archetypes you can think of. One is a new dedicated vehicle, where Partners Group offers its investment content as part of the vehicle, but there's also an open architecture for third-party funds. In many cases, those are one-stop solutions. Those are single lines, very much like the mandate technology that Yuri described before, but in an evergreen context. Deliver to a client with the additional wrapper with evergreen funds around it, allowing to have the comfort and ease to subscribe and redeem and make adjustments in their portfolios. The second approach is a building block approach. Here you use Partners Group's evergreen, but you might also use content or funds from your strategic partner, providing in-house content, and therefore teaming up, providing a successful mix covering private and sometimes even semi-private or public asset classes. The portfolio is structured by an umbrella, and clients have their way to individually subscribe to portfolio funds. Let me make a couple of examples. Some of those you have heard about already in the various updates before. The BlackRock one is obviously one that is very interesting, a first of its kind. Here you take the fund selection job, the needing to deal with picking individual funds of the advisor, of the client, by offering different mixes of underlying evergreens from growth to balance to income, and doing that all with one subscription document. That's what you're used to from the public side, where you wouldn't wanna pick managers with a lot of idiosyncratic risk, but you wanna get good exposure to the asset class with a high quality managers. You've heard our announcement throughout the first quarter. This one has been starting in this quarter after a good preparation time last year around. Moving on to Europe, Deutsche Bank, here we created a one-stop solution across private markets. That's also a first of its kind because it uses LTIF structures which make affluent clients eligible for investing this. Partners Group is not only being appointed here to manage a good part of the investment, but also to be the overall portfolio liquidity and risk manager of the construct, and that includes third-party LTIF evergreens that we're managing here because of our leading track record, especially in managing evergreen structures with semi-liquid features. This one went live last year. We announced that the first commercial success was more than EUR 500 million in funds raised in 2025. This allows us to access a client potential of 20 million clients across Europe. It's something we're very excited about. The partnership with Prudential, with PGIM is, I would say, a bit different. It's kind insofar that you have two managers with asset management capabilities that are very comprehensive. Partners Group on the private equity, private infra side mainly, Prudential on the various parts of the credit spectrum on the other side and the liquid strategies. That allows us to offer an integrated portfolio, one-stop solution here again, in the form of an interval fund to access broader potential client bases than the more restricted qualified purchaser targeted funds. That's something we're very excited, and we believe will deliver a good multi-asset risk-adjusted return. Not every strategic partnership, though, is about creating bespoke portfolio mixes. In some instances, it's launching dedicated funds, launching dedicated programs with partners that can help us on certain client channels. Via the insurance channel, for example, here with Lincoln, or on certain regions and segments within markets like Mediobanca in Italy, where we access a client segment that before, we didn't have, a way to get into. Now, summarizing the strategic joint ventures, we've got seven in 2025 that raised about $1 billion. We've announced that before. We expect this to grow considerably. We expect more than $2 billion of contribution from those JVs in 2026. Needless to say, the number of those JVs is also going to grow. If you think about the white space, it's quite enormous. There's five asset classes. There's three, four different client segments per country. That's not a thing that focuses on the U.S. and Europe only. Think about Asia, a very heterogeneous market, very different market microstructure in Australia and Japan, the Middle East and the like. All of those really have the potential for being a good contributor to the next leg of growth in our private wealth strategy. With that, I'm coming to the end of my section. 2026 onwards, a lot of excitement in the private wealth space, a lot of things to do. Handing back to Dave to wrap it up for today. Thanks, Roberto. In summary, we have what we believe is a conservatively constructed platform that is somewhat apart from the current headlines that you see so much attention on today. You should have gotten quite a sense from our credit activities that we have a very different platform than many that are out there. With regards to technology, our thematic approach and the fact that our clients have largely been steering and dictating to us the exposures that they want has kept us out of some of the software risk that exists out there. Second, markets remain complex, people tend to move from traditional types of solutions into solutions that are more custom-built for them. That's one of the reasons why I think we've been able to outperform the industry in 2025, and I think we see that continuing into 2026. Number three, as we think about strategic initiatives, you'll probably see us continue to focus in the near term more on distribution than on manufacturing. We think that is the key priority right now. The opportunity to consolidate manufacturing will be a long-term opportunity with without a lot of time pressure. There is indeed time pressure to secure these partnerships that Roberto spoke to. With that, we'll conclude the prepared sections, and we'll move to Q&A. Steffen, why don't you join me on stage actually, and the Partners Group colleagues that presented. Why don't we actually just have them sit, just hang out. Let's pull the chairs. Why don't we have them sit on the couches here? The various presenters and then I'll quarterback and take those questions to the different colleagues. With that, we'll open up the floor for questions. AP, do you wanna circulate the microphone? Hi, it's Hubert Lam from Bank of America. I've got three questions. Firstly, I know you talk about focus near term is on distribution rather than acquisitions on the manufacturing side. We've recently seen quite a few deals in the space. Just wondering what your thoughts are on the market environment or potential for opportunities, I guess, in the near term. Second question is on BlackRock. I know you're just, I guess, starting the partnership. Just wondering what the feedback's been so far, traction, what response you're getting from clients initially. I guess last question, I think there's been some recent press around how some manufacturers are giving more fees to the distributors, even on the performance fee side. Just wondering what your thoughts are, around that and whether or not it's something you would do as well. Okay. Why don't I take the first one, and then Roberto, why don't I toss it over to you to talk about the BlackRock partnership and then the fees to distributors? First of all, on the M&A side of things, there is no shortage of conversations to be had right now. We have people that approach us on a very regular basis. We've had our own outreaches to managers that we think are particularly capable and complementary to the investment capabilities that we build. You know, our industry for a long period of time was governed by the amount of investment capacity that a firm could generate. You saw a tremendous amount of investment into investment resources and organizations building up large investment teams and constantly investing into it. For the last number of years, we've operated with excess capacity. If you look at our collective investment engines as an industry versus the, you know, the capital formation side of things, which has been the governor for growth more recently. We do think that this is going to be a market that is poised to consolidate, and you will see the leading investment talents operating underneath consolidated platforms. We do believe that. Again, I'll just reiterate that our priority as we think about how to allocate our time right now in 2026, it's more on the distribution side of things than it is on the manufacturing side of things. There's no shortage of conversations to be had there. Maybe if I quickly answer that. I mean, the challenge with these things is that people kind of try to generalize, right? I mean, like, is M&A good or is it bad or whatever, right? I mean, just take a step back. Think about financial services M&A in the last 40 years. By the way, this was on average not too successful, as we all know. The problem is, at the end of the day, I mean, you have to ask yourself a very simple question. You know, does this particular opportunity make you better with clients? There could be several reasons why it could do so. It could be that there are very strong relationships. It could be that there's so amazing content that we don't have on our platform. It could be that it adds in a way that maybe combined we show better performance, all of that. That's exactly the work we do. I think there's sometimes a little bit of sense in the capital markets. I hope this is not taken the wrong way here, that it's looked at a little bit mechanical, right? I mean, like, okay, there was M&A, and so now they have two companies. They have more AUM now in total. That is not the approach that we have. I mean, of course, it's nice to be bigger, but it is nice to be bigger if you are actually more successful. One and one is three or more than that. That is just something where honestly, we had a number of discussions, and we kind of did come to that conclusion. I mean, either it was a question of price. Sometimes it was a question of that we felt we will do all the work essentially with these distribution partners and funds and all of that. So that's why I think we start a little bit slower. As Dave said, I mean, the race at the moment, we just have to be clear about that. The race is on the fundraising side. You know, it's not just only on the wealth management side, where a number of these institutions, like in the first step, they want to have the stuff on their shelves. We had our product there, and other people came in. But now there's second generation, right? I mean, those investors or institutions, they wanna have their product. This is where we want to get involved very early because they will not have five products. They will have one, maybe two products. Even, you know, with some of the large insurances, some wealth funds, they're cutting back the lines. They wanna have some people that, I mean, provide solutions in a much more comprehensive way. This is where we spent more time, maybe not enough time on some of the other stuff, but I don't think. I mean, you said, like, there's thousands of these firms. I do think these opportunities on the engine side, they will not completely go away. Let me add a last point here. We talked about all the changing investment environment. It's not too bad to maybe observe a little bit, you know, what's the outcomes of these portfolios and how will they weather actually the next 12-18 months to have a good sense, you know, what are the engines that are future-proof in this environment. Roberto? Maybe with regards to fees first. Look, I think there's a couple of things. I think first of all, the trend is clearly going towards fee models where the distributor's fee is charged on top for a mandate, for example, rather than in the form of retrocession. Depends largely on jurisdiction, but certainly something that we clearly observe as a trend. I think one thing that we always look at whenever we set up those type of relationships is what is the total fee load on all levels to the end investor, making sure that what results on the bottom line is something that we believe is an attractive risk return. There was a BlackRock question, but I did not hear it. Yeah, maybe just quickly on the BlackRock relationship. You know, it reminds me a little bit of, you know, what we have seen in 2009. You know, 2008 and 2009, we started with this 1940 Act fund in the U.S. wirehouse industry. People essentially said, "This is amazing," but it took quite a bit of time. My sense, maybe, Roberto, you can talk to it more concretely, but my sense is we actually experience a little bit of that kind of situation. This is a very new way of approaching investors with private markets, which allows us also to go much lower than, I would say, the traditional ultra-high net worth and, I would say, brokerage kind of channels into much, much more retail-oriented allocations. This idea of essentially taking to some extent away the decision to make the allocations is something totally new for wealth management in private markets, you know? I think it will take some time. The feedback is very good that we get. I mean, every day they have in the meantime meetings between BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, the platform. I think the typical SMA discussion, a bit like, by the way, on the institutional side, is something that is a much longer discussion than a typical fund investment, where maybe a client has a meeting one hour, then make decision. I think it will take some time, but from what we see at the moment, I think the feedback is very positive. I think there's a very good chance we see a real paradigm shift for these, SMA allocations in retail. Yeah. Does that have the potential to be our largest partnership, right? Of all the things that we went through, yes, it probably does have that potential, but it'll, there'll be a ramp associated with it. Anything you wanna add, Roberto? No, I agree. Okay. Next question. Hi there. Oliver Carruthers from Goldman Sachs. Three questions from my side. First, I know we've touched upon it at various points in the presentation, but could you just address the topic of the pickup and redemption that we've seen in the non-traded BDC space in the U.S.? Really, it sounds like you're seeing kind of very little kind of direct recourse or read across to your business. I think, Roberto, you actually talked to a step down in redemptions you're seeing for Q1. But can you just maybe big picture, how is it shaping how your distribution partners think about the whole space at all? That's the first question. The second question, specifically on private credit. I think in Chris Bone's presentation, he talked about over the next decade, a doubling of the default rates and a falling of the recovery rates. Really kind of two parts. Number one, what's driving those assumptions? It would be helpful to get some color there. Really, are you seeing what kind of level of pickup on that are you seeing in the here and now at the moment, if you could talk to kind of the current backdrop as we move into those new assumptions? Three questions there. Maybe, for the first one with regards to redemptions, you have a couple of things that are happening at once. Number one is, you did see in the middle of last year, almost all of the larger incumbent funds, as we were dealing with more competition, new products coming online, we all had a quite similar level of redemption activity, and that came from having more options on the shelf, a competitive dynamic that was evolving and changing. You saw whether it was an equity fund or a credit fund, everybody dealing with a similar dynamic and everybody dealing with a similar level of redemption activity. We have seen that change with the more recent quarters, and it does look like the private credit funds have seen a pickup in redemptions. We have had a decline in redemption activity from that Q3 time period heading into Q4, and we're projecting a further decline into Q1. I do think that some of the things that we're facing or that competitive dynamic are similar. There are some specific topics related to private credit that is not impacting people's allocation. Usually, when somebody makes an allocation to a multi-asset strategy or to a private equity allocation, they think about that as a long-term allocation to private markets in a way that you might not think about in some other asset types. I think that's the key. Yeah. I think also if you have seen how fast some of those credit funds have been growing, it points to people having shifted allocation quite dramatically. We've been building our large private equity evergreens literally over 15, 20 years. There's a lot of people that have been long-term investors. I have never heard that someone would tactically park money in a private equity-focused evergreen to then move it elsewhere afterwards. I think there is much less tactical, much less speculation in spaces like royalties, infrastructure, private equity, things because people understand the underlying is a long-term investment you need to make. Chris, do you wanna speak to some of the assumptions that you went through? Absolutely. I think the question number one was around assumptions regarding the default rates, looking forward. I think second of all, regarding what are we seeing today live in the market concretely. When thinking about default rates, I think we do take a longer-term perspective. We have data going back 10, 15, 20 years or so, where we can see also by industry what are the default rates. Today we are running- 2%-4% in the range. It is increasing in the market we observed, but it is within what we say a normalized level today. We do think that will increase going back. We looked at previous, you know, sort of liquidity crisis 2008, 2009. We have seen the times we modeled that out bottoms up about what we think will happen. I think the recovery rate is actually, as I insinuated or pointed to before, is also very important. Recovery rate looks at on a default, how much actually will be recovered. We think recovery to be lower today, in particular because we think that some of those assets that will default probably in the industries that more impacted by AI and the like will see more disruption or higher level of disruption, and a lower recovery rate as a result. More binary outcomes for sure. I think the second topic with what we're seeing today, if we look at our watch list as a data point, we do observe that has remained static actually in the last few recent quarters. We don't see an uptick in our watch list. We do think we haven't seen any sort of core data that points to or correlates much with the noise that is around software and AI. Our view is actually more simply that the AI and the technology will actually impact other aspects of the real economy more than, say, the software. We've not seen it in our software portfolio. Maybe just to add quickly on that first point. You know, I mean, the reality is, I mean, there's always some assumptions behind that. There will be a lot of other external factors that will have an impact on, is now, is it doubling, is it 250%, 150%? I'm not sure whether it matters so much. I think what's important is that we understand that credit is just much more directly impacted by a wider dispersion of outcomes. I think that's the key thing. That means spreads have to go up, and you have to be much more selective. It's probably the first time that it really pays off to have these super low loss rates that we have in our portfolio. It's just a little bit of different environment. I think we'll be needing a little bit different investment discipline in the next 10 years or so. One other just thought quickly on the wealth management side, on credit side. I mean, one reason why I was asked actually in the interview this morning, I mean, why haven't you focused more on the wealth side of your credit business? I guess the answer was, at that time, when we looked at our credit portfolios and the way we run credit portfolios, probably a little more conservative with less leverage, if any leverage, actually. It's really a little more addressing, I would say, conservative insurance portfolios, high single-digit returns. That's very different from what you find in the wealth space. Often these wealth products, I mean, they have more junior in there. They're quite leveraged. They try to achieve something like more like 9%, 10%, 11%, 12% net net. With all the fees, that's probably more like 12%, 13% asset level. I think that's where also there's at least a debate. I mean, in this environment, I mean, until at least three weeks ago or so, people thought that rates will come down even further. You know, so there was a question mark, but can you actually achieve these? Because I don't know that wealth management clients will invest in a private credit product that gives you, on a net basis, 6% or 7%. I don't think that's a big sell. That's why I think also equity might be a little more insulated from some of these dynamics. Thanks. Sorry, I thought there was someone before me. Nicholas Herman from Citi. Thanks. Thank you for the update. A lot to dig into, for sure. I'll go for three questions, one please. Seems to be quite typical. Maybe just take one at a time. Sure. We'll. Absolutely. We won't take the floor from you until we're. The first one, just coming back to the BlackRock offering. I appreciate that portfolio solution offering is super unique, very differentiated. It looks very attractive in theory. I mean, but I guess you also need the performance. You need, I guess, the demand as well. Can you talk about the initial feedback as of, like, a month or since the launch? Part of that, are there advisors who have shown reservations to commit capital based on current returns or if a component fund within the solution becomes gated or what have you? I guess I'd be interested in anything you can say on that, please. Yeah. I would say, again, when someone makes an allocation to a multi-asset strategy, they're making a long-term commitment. Actually, if I look at, you know, the BlackRock fund that was recently gated, I mean, they had positive flows. $800+ million of inflows in that same period that they did receive a pickup in outflows. We've done work on that fund. We think it's a very attractive fund. You have 92% of investors that are staying with that fund. I per se don't have a problem allocating out of the broad multi-asset strategy to that credit fund. I don't think that private clients will either if they're looking at the allocation appropriately. You know, we'll test that out. I mean, it's obviously brand-new topic, but we have not received any feedback from investors in the short time since that news has come out that they would think differently than how we're thinking about it. I think there is, there's sort of, I think a positive perspective on there, but certainly also a bit of a negative. I mean, I do think that, I mean, just broadly speaking, the more we see in headlines of that space, open-ended, whether it's credit or not, I mean, it will clearly lead to longer discussions with some of these advisors, with the end clients, and the conversion will take more time. I don't think it changes the end game of it, but I do think it can take more time. I do see, though, also a positive element here. Now, we've been voicing that concern for a while, that, you know, you have to know how to run these open-ended funds and how to construct these portfolios. I think with what's happening, I think it's the first time at Schanz that we can have that discussion. Say, look, we do this since now 25 years for the first one, Roberto, our first open-ended product in Switzerland, I guess back in 2001. Well, the institutional product was 2001. You know, I think we learned quite a bit. I mean, how we do this, I mean, it's not completely trivial how to manage liquidity and foreign exchange and all of that. In that sense, I think it might be one of these periods where you take a bit more time. It is a bit of a more comprehensive discussion. In a bull market, everyone just buys something new, okay? I don't think that's happening now. I think people are reflective on these things, but I really believe that is for the long term, this is the time to differentiate, to explain why they should probably go with, you know, those managers that have done it for a while, that have like BlackRock certainly has incredible operations to run this because it's pretty tricky actually, the technical side. I see this in the mid to long term as a positive, actually. Thank you. The second one, on the strategic partnerships and evergreen outlook. Just could you confirm how the blended fee rate from the strategic partnerships in 2025 compared to the group blended average and the expectation for those going forward? I guess just more broadly, it seems like you are highly constructive on the evergreen growth, given that the growth runway with the strategic partnerships. Are we still talking at least 15% annual evergreen growth, annual growth from the evergreens business going forward? Roberto? Yeah. The strategic partnerships are one element of it. They wouldn't alter the overall growth rate that we project. I think with regards to pricing levels, this is very much like the relationships we had before. I wouldn't make a difference there on our content on our part. This will be like for like. Thank you. You've seen that mix shift take place gradually over time, right? You've seen a mix shift towards mandates and a mix shift towards evergreen solutions without a broad impact on management fee margin. I think that's expected to continue. Thank you. The final question I had, I don't know if this is for you guys or for Will, but so on the private equity portfolio, showed how the EBITDA growth on that portfolio has averaged about 10% over the last 10 years. Or sorry, 13% over the last 10 years. I think it's about 10% over the last four years. If its current levels are at, looks to be around 6%, I mean, how do you see the outlook for the EBITDA growth of the private equity portfolio, I guess, particularly in the context of a more challenging macro outlook? And how does that play into your expectations for returns that you can deliver to your clients in the coming years? Thanks. Well, 2025 certainly had some elements where multiples in some sectors came a bit down. Also, the headwinds from some markets that gave kind of a new base. For 2026, we are looking in the companies very intensively right now with the budgets, and we see that we have a good opportunity for a rebound. Daniel? Thanks. Daniel Regli from ZKB. One question I have is on the fundraising for 2026. You're guiding for $26 billion-$32 billion. I just wondered whether you could give me some color. What do you expect to come from evergreens and what kind of macro impacts you're having or seeing 2026 versus 2025, for example? I've already asked this once, I think, kind of recovery a bit from the traditional channel, but maybe also the BlackRock partnership coming on top and everything. And then also maybe putting the fundraising guidance in relation to assets under management compared to the long-term history, it still looks rather conservative. Maybe could you kind of discuss a bit what are the challenges in this year for the fundraising? Well, I guess the answer that I'm gonna have on this is actually quite boring, but it's because we went through and did our business plan. It's actually across the three segments. It's across private wealth, where we see growth, where we believe that strategic partnerships will play a bigger role. It's for the mandates where we see an increase in momentum, an increase in need for our clients to build out their private markets allocation after a few years where many clients were overinvested because the distributions weren't there. There is a pickup there as well. Then last but not least, on the more traditional side, we do have the infrastructure fund, which heads into its final close, which is having great momentum. We're also launching our private equity sixth strategy, which will contribute, so there we will also expect a pickup. Maybe the one nuance I can give is that, similarly to the second half of last year, probably private credit will be a slightly smaller part of the mix, which certainly has benefited over the last two years in an outsized way. If you drill down, not just in category, but also in geography, there's some interesting dynamics at play. In Europe, for example, this was a very strong year for us from a private wealth perspective. We saw a very meaningful pickup in activity for wealth within Europe in particular. Within the U.S., that's a market where we're not as penetrated as some of our peers from a client perspective, and we use traditional funds in order to start new relationships. It's easier for them to make a commitment to one of our limited partnerships than it is to have a comprehensive mandate. We had quite a pickup, leveraging the strong track records that we have in secondaries and infrastructure in particular, to start new relationships with institutions in the U.S. You had quite a meaningful pickup in traditional funds in North America and then in Asia, where the geopolitical dynamic has really shifted people's perspective on where they want to invest from a geographical perspective. We had about a 3x increase in mandates in Asia this last year. It's not just you know, each category grows in a straight line, but every year we have the ability to cater to the needs of individual segments of the market, leveraging the different tools that we have. Even though it seems like, okay, every year it's just you know the same thing, kind of a greater mix shift of mandates and everything, it's actually very dynamic. Maybe it's just on the growth. I mean, the times when we had, you know, when we kind of after the IPO had these growth rates of 30, 40% a year, of course, I mean, they're over, okay? That's just not the way the industry grows, and it's just the industry is too large and too mature for that. I think this target that we announced last year, we said we wanna have about 10%, no more than 10% organic growth, and there might be some M&A we pick up here and there. I think that's very realistic in the long term. Let's just not forget, I mean, last year, this year so far, when looking at the industry was pretty bad actually, right? I mean, the industry is massively below 2021 where it was. We are above 2021. I think also this year, I mean, looking at a goal that will be quite a bit above 2021, which was the absolute record fundraising in the industry. My sense is the industry again will be massively below 2021 fundraising. I think there was a market share gain since I think 2023 or so, like 60% or something. I think we'll continue in that trajectory. I do think that low double digit in average over the periods, and hopefully there will be some better years again. I think that's a realistic assumption. You saw that medium-term objective, you know, that we've outlined. We achieved more than the expected amount in 2025. As opposed to that, you know, 10%, 11% organic growth with some acquisition activity on top of it, we outperformed the kinda straight line assumption for 2025 with the results that we just presented. Can I maybe just quickly follow up? Can you give me a little bit what kind of needs to happen to kind of you just reaching the lower end of this guidance? What needs to happen for you to reach the upper end of the guidance? What are kind of the headwinds you're still seeing, which could make you only 26 and yeah. Well, I think it's a bit of a question of momentum and environment. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I mean, we are not insulated from like the sentiment of, you know, pension fund managers or insurance company managers and, you know, some of these headlines. So on the assumption that we have a somewhat benign environment, we don't expect like an incredible bull market, not at all. I would say with a somewhat benign environment, we should easily achieve the goal that we have given ourselves for 2033. If you continue to see, I mean, 10 years ahead of us, like in the last two, three, four weeks, I mean, I think there's a good risk that we don't achieve that. I mean, I hope that's not the case. I mean, there is very clearly a momentum. I give you a little bit of an answer that's more connected to market. Why do I do this? I really believe that purely from a content perspective and from the solutions that we offer, I'm not so worried. I'm absolutely convinced. I mean, we have the differentiation. We have the right strategies for private equity. We have the right strategies on credit, where, I mean, the low loss rates now I think play a real role the next 10 years. I mean, world is an incredible instrument in this environment with the low correlation. You wanna have these infrastructure investments, and also these new real estate platforms. I think that content is perfect for the next 10 years. I think the solutions are perfect. At the end of the day, I mean, this will be, you know, lifted more firmly or not so firmly based on, you know, sentiment and environment. For sure. Arnaud? Arnaud Giblat, Exane. Two questions, please. Firstly, can I ask about mandates? Over the last five, 10 years, we've seen a lot of your large peers go multi-asset, consolidate a lot, and they've woken up to the opportunity in private wealth and went in big and have had some success in the U.S. I'm just wondering, are you worried about them thinking the same thing about mandates as a big opportunity set and them going there? What are the moats around that? The mandate opportunity, if you think about the entire private markets landscape, is, you know, single-digit market share opportunity. It would require many of our peers to completely re-engineer their business models, their setups, their incentive systems, the way they run carry plans. It is not as simple as just waking up to the opportunity. In order to go from allocating investment content from originator, you know, to fund to originator to portfolio management to a distributed set of products is a major transformation. I think our setup is quite unique to us because of the heritage that we have coming from an organization that's always been innovative in terms of structures. It had more of a portfolio building heritage than a deal doing heritage. Again, they might look similar from the types of asset classes that they cover or the types of geographies that they invest into, but from a business model perspective, they are quite different. The private wealth opportunity is a huge segment of the market that's going to become over time, a major segment of the market. It is today a major segment of growth. Firms are willing to re-engineer how they do things to, you know, address that segment of the market. For a more niche-y segment of the market, the work, the transformation that would have to take place at those organizations in order for them to go after that, we just haven't seen it. Instead, what they're doing is they're taking their products, their limited partnerships, they're assembling them together under a common investment access vehicle. They're throwing in some free co-investment, and they're saying, "Here's our mandate," right? "And we compete with them." We do have competition, certainly from peers that have mandates that are attractive, more or less to different clients. They are not the same as a line-by-line dynamically steered mandate towards clients, NAV portfolios. We have not seen pressure from competitors moving into that space. If you think about our business, you know, there's really kind of two businesses in PG. I mean, there is the typical GP business, which is our investment engine and our sales force, okay? That's in terms of staff, that's a little bit less than half of the overall global workforce, so a little bit less than 1,000 people. There's another part of the business that is pretty unique. I mean, you don't have that in most other setups that is really this operational backbone. It's more than 1,000 people. It's a much smaller product ship to cost. It costs us probably around a little more than 10 basis points of our revenues. That's an engine, you know. That is essentially comprising the platform side, the portfolio solutions, the structuring. There's a lot of technology around it and operations, you know. Dave, you had in your slide these, the structure overview that shows how we actually invest, which is by direct investments in single assets. That's very unique in the industry, right? That's a huge operational engine behind it to essentially take these small pieces in individual underlying investments and allocate them to about 300 funds or whatever. This is something that wasn't built overnight. I mean, this was essentially built since about 25 years when we started with these mandates and with insurance companies, they suddenly said, "Well, you need to have IAS 39 valuation." At that time, no one in private equity had an idea what that was. We started to build up that valuation team. This just continued in the way that we built up more and more for these open-end funds, for these mandates, technology. We had insurance companies, they were looking for ratings of individual loan tranches, and we built up that team. In a way, this was always a bit of a hassle for us, right, to be able to actually address all these topics. In hindsight, it was a blessing because we built up operations, and I think in some ways very effective from a cost perspective that really carry all these activities. I don't think that it is something we'll be exclusive on. I mean, others would say there will be mandates, some of the investors in funds, some might invest in single asset when it comes to credit. But I do think that there is still a bit of differentiation for a while to come. By the way, there was one large firm that had a big effort internally to build up the operations to run something similar. We know that the senior leadership team of that team actually left about six weeks ago because the company apparently decided it was just too complicated. My second question was on M&A. Clearly your priority right now is on partnerships and that may be down the line more M&A. I mean, from the M&A you've done and from the M&A we've generally seen in the industry, a lot of the upside has come from distribution. I'm just wondering, rather than go and acquire a private equity manager and leave them alone to do what they do, is it advisable to have a distribution deal rather than just outright M&A? Well, one of the things that is interesting is given the heritage that we have, the clients that we serve, the more European centric client base that we have. If we look at many of the more traditional funds, we actually don't have a lot of overlap with regards to clients versus some of the other firms that are out there. There is a significant distribution cross-sell opportunity, even with more traditional firms that are out there. A lot of the distribution deals that you're talking about or distribution opportunities, you don't need to mingle equity in order to achieve. That's one of the reasons why you see so many joint ventures. You can have complementary organizations with complementary distribution and complementary investment engines that have a common joint venture that they establish in order to address a market segment that can be very attractive for both parties, that can be incremental for both parties. You don't have the complexity and noise that comes from trying to merge two organizations together. I think that's primarily where you'll see us focus on the distribution side of things is on those type of ventures where we don't have to mingle equity, but we can link arms and address the market opportunity. Thank you. Go ahead, Sharath. Thank you. Sharath from Deutsche Bank. I have three questions. Firstly, thank you for the detail on the software exposures. Can I have an idea for the diversification for the other 86% of your private equity portfolio in terms of the sectors or what more can you say about the portfolio? The areas that we've invested in. If you look across, it's pretty broad across services, industrial, healthcare. It's a very broadly diversified set of portfolios. Wolf, anything of note that you wanna share with regards to the rest of the portfolio outside of software? Well, you know, for example, very strong asset is ROSEN, an inspection company for pipelines. Yeah, that's kind of industrial and services. Or we have, sometimes, you know, simple businesses like hygiene papers, you could also say toilet papers. The transformational story is there, that we just grow this company that has an excellent operations engine. They are just outperforming their competitors in being better in cost, and we just scale them across Europe. In health and life, we have quite a fascinating CRO company that is doing drug discovery, and actually they have invented a new opportunity, also AI-based, to reduce drug discovery from hopefully, we are not yet fully there, but that's the ambition from 10 years to three years, and that is then sold to Big Pharma, actually. Yeah, those are newer investments. Another one in our goods and products area, it's cat food and luxury cat food. That company is tremendously growing this year, also outperforming. You see it is a very, very broad portfolio across these four sectors: health and life, goods and products. Goods and products, very vast. Goes from industry to Bridon-Bekaert. Then, technology and services. You see we cover in these four areas, 40 themes actually that the teams are working on. Diverse portfolio. Thank you. There's no concentration that I would note though, across that. It's pretty diverse. Thank you. Second one is on royalties. You previously set out a target of reaching $30 billion AUM by 2033. We are currently at $1 billion. How should we think about the phasing of this growth? What sort of growth expectations are baked in near term? Also if you could comment on margins for the strategy team. Thank you. Yeah. In terms of the ramp curve, Stephen, do you wanna comment on that? In terms of where we are today, how open can I be in terms of numbers? Very transparent. Okay. You have been open, I think, on real numbers anyway. We're already over $1.5 billion, so we've seen a lot of growth in the last couple of months. I think by this time next year, we would aim to be somewhere between $2.5 billion-$3 billion. We think we can then ramp to about $4 billion-$5 billion of fundraising, and towards the end of the decade, be raising somewhere between $8 billion-$10 billion. We actually think we'll get to the $30 billion target before 2033. Thank you. My last question is on operating leverage. I just want to square your comment. You said that you have excess capacity in your investment teams, and versus you maintaining flat guidance or maybe even can be considered as a downgrade now that IFRS 18 is implemented and the portfolio income would be in the numerator. Just wanted your clarification on that aspect. Thank you. On leverage within the team? Yeah. Yes. You having excess capacity in your investment teams, but it not getting reflected in your guidance for EBITDA margins. Well, we have indeed operated at higher levels of investment volume in the past. If we go back to peak investment levels, you know, we have run our engine deploying $30 billion in the past. We're not yet back to those levels, and so that's what I mean by excess capacity. In addition to that, from peak levels, we've added meaningful resources. If I look at the operating resources and the investment talent that we've added to the platform from where we were, you know, five, six, seven years ago, we do think that we have a meaningful opportunity. What I was talking about before was excess capacity for the industry, right? Our entire industry, not just Partners Group. If you think about all the platforms out there that we're investing aggressively into investment talent, all of which are running somewhere below peak levels, to varying degrees. We have an industry that has quite a bit of slack in it from a capacity perspective and ability to generate investment volume. On the topic of the performance fee, that's been in Joris's models now for you know however long him projecting that that transition was going to take place. For us, it's not a change, it's just you're moving it from this spot to that spot. as we think about the 20%-40% guidance over the long run, as we thought about, you know, the need to update that guidance, that was one of the factors that informed us in our ability in our changing- We wouldn't give that guidance if you would think of it as being 25% for three years. 25%-40% means 25%-40%. That range is given for a reason. Let me just make one comment here. This is actually a compliment to the DX team. The EX team is always completely underpromising on cost. You know, if you think about a foreign exchange, you know, development of Swiss franc in the last few years, you know, and we're today, what, 63% roughly today on the EBITDA margin with a constant FX over the last 10, 15 years, we'll probably be at like 70 or something. I do think our investment team is actually well staffed. Maybe in royalties, I guess there's a couple of people we're looking for, but I would say by and large, I mean, we can do much more. We will need to. Much more because of more fundraising. I think on the operations side, you guys are really effective and will save costs every year. I think you said today the goal run it at another 60%. Well, I think we haven't run it at 60%. We've probably run it at 65% or whatever against the effects that changed in the last time. I think the company is actually keeping the efficiencies quite well, also going forward. This is Matthew Mish from UBS. I have two questions, please. The first one would be on distributor fees. Anecdotally, distributors are clearly pushing for higher distributor fees, and I think it's fair to say that some sector peers are also willing to offer that. Could you talk a little bit about to what extent that can be a limiting factor for growth through those channels? And also to what extent that might pose a risk to recurring fee margins at some point? That's the first question, and the second question is a fairly short one, a little inquisitive, if you don't mind. And that's on real estate. I think it's fairly very clear the direction of travel is vertical real estate. You made that clear. Is there any regional focus in M&A efforts in real estate? Here is a good example for Germany. Which other geographies are of interest? Thank you. First of all, on distributor fees, I'll hand it over to you. I do think that given the fact that we have been in that space and had existing relationships with distributors for decades now and are not the new kid on the block, does mean that there's a slightly different dynamic with the Partners Group versus if you're coming anew into the, you know, the private wealth space. You know, they already have 200 products on the shelf, and you wanna be product number 201, there's a slightly different dynamic for the new kid on the block. Roberto, do you wanna speak to No, no. I agree. Obviously, we weren't the ones who needed to buy a seat at the table because we used to have it much longer. I do think, personally, we have experienced those new entrants. In my personal view, this is a couple of years back, but that probably peaked. I think since it has been subsiding. A bit along the lines of what I mentioned before, I also think what we've been seeing more recently is that, any incentives to start a new fund or the like shifting more to the benefit of underlying investors as opposed to the distributors. Especially in the U.S., there seems to be an increasing standardization. A bit like what you've seen on the long-only side, how the market works and the pricing of those funds and the respective incentives are. I think it's been probably subsiding over the last year or so. We acknowledge it's got recent coverage. It's some of those fees are kinda out in the media now and create a little bit of a buzz, but some of that is not a new dynamic, right? Some of that's a five-year-old, you know, topic that's just now getting some attention because of the, you know, private wealth space gaining more prominence. With regards to additional potential acquisition activity on the real estate side, as we look to build further integration, I mean, the U.S. is an obvious spot for us, and we do have a couple of interesting things that we're looking at. But probably more than geographical focus is the, you know, the focus on, you know, the vertical in which they operate. You're gonna see probably some additional focus for us on multifamily and on industrial. Those are two spaces that we're zooming in on right now. Hi, my name's Carmela from PEI. Just two things from me. One is on the Middle East. I know you've put out a press release on it recently. I appreciate, Dave, you've talked about how we live in a complex world where this is the new world right now of more geopolitical risk. We're hearing from advisors, at least for the near term, that Middle East investors are more or less taking a pause on commitments to some of their managers. Wondering to what extent you're hearing or seeing that as well. Maybe if you could talk about the implications of the conflict near term and long term across, you know, exposure to private markets for at least your Middle East clients. First of all, just to create a little bit of a context, that region represents only about 3% of our client mix today and has more upside than downside for us as we think about, you know, the activity there. We have invested significantly in the region. Steffen, how often are you going there? Every six weeks. Every six weeks. Much more active there than we have been in the past. We just had an email bouncing around. We had a new mandate got signed this morning, right, out of that region. It's not been our experience that people have paused or stopped activity. I can't speak more broadly what's happening. All I can say is our own experience is that the trains are still moving. I think what's happening, so people might mix up two things here. One is a broader topic amongst the largest investors in the region for maybe two, three years. They're really Try to redefine how to go about private market investing. Some of them actually, for instance, the Partners sent us, you know, this morning, actually signatures on a large mandate. They have, for instance, decided to cut back from about 45 counterparties to 15 counterparties. This is the view that they wanna have a fewer, a smaller group of players that will be much closer in the relationship. They wanna work together on transactions. It's much more like a partnership also. I think that's why also the mandates, I think, play a very fundamental role in that region going forward. I think sometimes you might hear people saying this is pausing. I'm not sure where it's pausing. I think it's a little bit of a reconfiguration of their investment approach, and there will be a number of managers that will maybe not get the same kind of capital from the region. The region itself is growing. For sure, the current dynamics now, I mean, this one party, I mean, clearly came to the office in a very normal way and signed documents, but I'm sure there's others that maybe paused a little bit for a week or two or three weeks. No one knows how exactly that situation will develop. My sense is that overall, the region, I mean, will be a very, very large investor. It will grow massively. The allocations will go faster, higher. They will have an interest in becoming more of a partner with GPs. They will also have an interest because often, you know, the sovereigns are quite closely related to the leadership in these regions, so they wanna have also a partnership where they feel that you bring something back to the region. We have, for instance, a number of portfolio companies that are very active there, like the International Schools Partnership. So I think it's just the relationships, I think, with many of these sovereign wealth funds, it's not only the Middle East. I think they will again become much more tailored, partnership-like. I think there will be a smaller number of GPs that I personally believe will benefit from that. I think we've thought of that. There will be maybe more traditional GPs that have in the past just, you know, gone there every three years for their fundraising that might find it a little bit tougher going forward. Thank you both for that. I've got one more if that's all right. For Steve on royalties, please. Appreciate you've talked about the guidance there in terms of how much you expect to raise, you know, in the next few years. If you could talk me through. Sorry, I'm here. Over here. It's very short. The pipeline of opportunities there in terms of, maybe sectors, 'cause I know you've done pharma, natural gas, and then entertainment. Maybe that's one part of the question. The second one would be, the types of LPs who are actually coming to you and are attracted to the strategy. That'd be very helpful. Thank you. I'm gonna start with the second question first. I mean, we've obviously been fundraising this for 2+ years now, and what becomes apparent is that 99% of global investors currently have a zero allocation to royalties, and that's across all types of investors. That's from the largest sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurance clients. That's all the way down to private wealth clients. By the end of this year, we'll have four, maybe five evergreens into the market. We are seeing demand across the board. It's actually quite consistent across the different types of investors. The question people really ask is. Where do they put it in their portfolio? Everybody sees the merits and the rationale of including royalties, particularly because the sectors we invest in are very countercyclical, resilient, yielding investments. Pretty long dated, but we front-end load the cash flow as well, so there's a yield element which is very attractive to people. We actually see the fundraising as being relatively consistent across the different types of investors. On the first question, we actually invest in close to 10 sectors in the underlying fund. We have life sciences, obviously, then we invest in entertainment. Everybody assumes that it's just music. It's much more than just music. It's film and TV. It's music on film and TV. It's book royalties, theater IP, YouTube royalties, sports royalties, brands royalties. We also invest in energy transition, so U.S. natural gas, green metals, carbon, water. I mean, we also own royalties on lobsters to give you a very different example, right? It's a very big space which people just aren't aware of how large it is. I mean, this isn't just about raise as much capital as you can. This is about maintaining the investment quality for our clients and our future clients. A lot of work is going on to ensure we understand the size of the market. We actually view this as an asset class, not today, not in two years' time, but maybe early 2030s, where we can be deploying $10 billion a year into royalties and still be taking less than 10%-15% of market share. That's if markets don't grow from where they are today. That's not just buying royalties. That's also doing what we did with The Weeknd, which is taking a product out to IP owners, actually lending against the IP and providing them a different alternative than simply selling their work. It's what Steffen was mentioning earlier around going to companies and creating royalties over their assets, which gets accounted for as non-debt and is non-dilutive, so very interesting to people. That area in healthcare alone is expected to grow 10X over the next five years. We see huge growth potential, and we actually think we're just scratching at how big an opportunity set royalties is for Partners Group. Thank you. Thank you very much for the presentation. It was quite comprehensive. Two questions on my end. One on the secondary. Unlike the other peers on your industry, you don't have an asset class per se in the secondaries. It's split in the different strategies. I wanted to know how much it accounts in terms of the different strategies and how do you see growth going forward on that one? That's the first question. The second one is in terms of trends. We see a lot of your peers going to defense, which is quite a very trendy topic these days. I wanted to have your views. Thanks. First, with regards to secondaries, the secondary market has emerged from, you know, a $100 billion opportunity years ago to over a $200 billion opportunity today. We deployed $5 billion into secondaries last year across topics, about $4 billion in private equity, and then the other $1 billion across infrastructure and some of the other strategies that we have. That was up close to 20% from where it was the year before. Indeed, we have been active, we've been growing within the secondary market, but we don't have it broken out into a separate area because we see the benefits of having a secondary team that can leverage the insights and know-how of our vertical research. When someone's pricing a secondary, it's not uncommon for them to walk over to get insight from the vertical team about how they see, you know, this particular space or this particular asset, or to talk about some of the risks associated with this business to compare and contrast that with what we're seeing in, you know, the direct side of the business. We really like to be able to leverage the insights from a sector perspective from across vertical teams and to have that bleed over into the secondary modeling and secondary pricing. That's the reason why we have kept our secondary strategies embedded within our overall asset classes. It's a different approach. It's probably an approach that's less focused on scale, and it's a little bit more focused on track record. We do have one of the strongest track records in the space. Second question. Maybe for defense. Actually defense in the last 18 months, due to the happenings, we got more and more interest from our clients, more mandate clients, in this sector, and specifically when it's defense and not offense. Now, you might say, the space is already a little bit crowded. I mean, you have seen public markets rising. What we actually are doing, it is one of our themes that we go very deep right now. What we look is at the second and third line of opportunities that kind of are serving that space. The first line, the defense industry, is probably overhyped. Who are the suppliers? Who are technologies in the background, services in the background? That's what we are looking at. with a good team. that, by the way, is not an uncommon way for us to invest. If you think about like the broader AI trend, we do have some very targeted data center investments that we've made. But we also have a number of areas where derivative strategies. We have four different platforms that we've invested in the heating, ventilation, air conditioning space that kind of tie into the broader, you know, topic of cooling and energy efficiency and things like that, not as a direct exposure to the space, but as a, that's called a derivative exposure. Yeah. Thank you for the presentation. Miguel Nabeiro from Lighthouse. Just one question on the infra space. The returns that you have achieved are very, very impressive. If you look at the makeup of the infra universe, there is quite a large chunk in which you are subject to regulation and regulated returns. Do you think it's sustainable to maintain that very impressive IRR? Esther, do you wanna speak to the, term profile? Thank you. Couple of comments there. I think infrastructure, as you look at the evolution of the asset class, it's moved from traditionally 20, 25 years ago being regulated assets and then a private financing model coming in to take over a public duty to build, enhance and operate the asset to today's world, which is much more complex and more diversified when you look at the income streams you generate off an infrastructure asset, and also has a number of, I guess, broader risks on the one hand and opportunities to earn a return on the other hand. If you really pare back to sort of infrastructure market from a risk profile, then traditionally the most risk-averse part of the market has sought to maximize its exposure to regulated cash flow stream. When you hear people talk about core infrastructure investments, you will typically see them backing directly regulated returns. The way we've looked at that space, also at the base of the research and the thinking we're doing, we actually saw comparatively more risk in that part of the overall investment universe than maybe the market consensus or it suggests, because ultimately regulation, you know, will need to always balance between a right of an asset owner to make a profit and the ability of a society to pay for it. That's why historically, our portfolio was relatively low on directly regulated exposures. Where we have taken them, one good example is a distributed heating platform we have in the Baltics and the Nordics that we've expanded into U.K., that has a regulated asset base as a primary sort of foundational aspect. We've used the cash flows from the regulated base to enhance and diversify that business into industrial offtake as well. Basically, long-term contracts with industrial counterparties to expand into new geographies and to tag on existing additional regulated assets in quite an efficient manner. That way, you can move from a regulated return that caps your overall return on the assets at, say, 7% or 8%, and then through an appropriate capital structure, you uplift that to maybe a low double-digit equity return. Through adding all these additional components onto the infrastructure asset, you can generate a, sort of a profitability return on the capital you're employing that's more commensurate in a sort of 14%-17% return range. Then you look at the types of buyers that would like to own these assets going forward, and they're willing to pay an additional premium for the right to continue to tapping into these interesting unit economics, the diversified asset base, and the diversified business model. That helps drive an extra premium on top of those returns. I do think that thinking going forward will remain essential for the infrastructure universe, not just Partners Group, but the overall industry as well, because the world where you can make money on the back of outperforming significantly to a regulated allowable return without delivering industrial bottom-up value to the assets themselves, I think, is well over. We saw that, for example, here in the U.K. with the water industry, right, where there's actually been a consecutive number of trades between different equity holders at increasing premia to the regulated asset base while the operations were somewhat challenged. I mean, there will be a point where the regulator steps in and needs to take, I think, corrective measures. Those are the types of exposures that I think going forward one ought to be well advised to avoid. In short, we're striving to continue to perform in that way while also maintaining an appropriate social license to operate. By the way, I must admit, you're very patient. You must be hungry meantime, no? This is amazing. Shall we have a last question or shall we adjourn? I want to stop it. What's the point? I'm done. Anyone not hungry enough and still wanting more information on PG? Then I think we can close it here and welcome everyone for lunch upstairs. Okay. We'd like to thank you for your attention and time. This is indeed a very interesting market opportunity, one that does have its volatility, right, but one that also presents significant opportunities. Hopefully we've been able to frame how we're looking at those opportunities for you today. We'll wrap up the Q&A portion, and then we'll move upstairs for lunch. Thank you very much. Thank you for the time. Thank you for the patience.