Hello and welcome to the Apax Global Alpha half year results call. My name is Lauren, and I will be coordinating your call today. There'll be an opportunity for questions at the end of the presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Alternatively, if you have joined on the webcast, please type your question into the Q&A chat box. I will now hand you over to your host, Ralf Gruss, COO of Apax Partners to begin. Ralf, please go ahead. Hello and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining AGA's interim results presentation. My name is Ralf Gruss. I'm the COO of Apax Partners and a member of the investment committee for Apax Global Alpha. I look forward to taking you through the presentation and will answer any questions you may have at the end of the call. Before we go into the details of this half, I'd like to start, though, with a quick overview on how AGA delivers value for its shareholders. AGA, as you know, provides investors with a unique way to access the private equity activities of Apax Partners with its proven strategy of mining the hidden gems across four attractive and dynamic global sectors. At its core, the Mining the Hidden Gem strategy identifies investment opportunities in companies in coveted categories within the Apax sectors, which have attractive business models but are not yet the finished product. Then during ownership, the operations of the companies are improved and the businesses are transformed, making them more valuable and often leading to a re-rating upon exit. This investment approach is an all-weather strategy as it does not rely on tailwinds of financial markets for value creation, but on a varied set of operational levers to drive value. As you can see on this page, the strategy has delivered over the years. Five-year cumulative NAV returns to the end of June are 83.5%, which translates to 14.3% on an annualized basis. These returns are at the upper end of returns that AGA has set out as targets when it went public seven- years ago. With this in mind, let me now update you on recent trading and performance of AGA in the first half of 2022. There is no doubt that the first half of 2022 has been a challenging period. Inflationary pressures have proven to be persistent. Central banks are fighting monetary policy and raising rates. Global supply chain issues continued, and there is an ongoing war in Ukraine. Both public equity and credit markets reacted with significant valuation declines. In fact, the decline of the S&P 500 over the first six months in 2022 was the largest in over 50 years. A pretty dire picture and challenging environment. Against this backdrop, though, AGA's portfolio has proved resilient with a total NAV return of -3.5%. This is a testament to the continued strong operating performance across the private equity portfolio, and I'll give more color on this performance shortly. Unsurprisingly, in the current environment, deal activity has been somewhat lower, but I'm pleased that the Apax teams have continued to identify attractive opportunities for the Apax funds, with five new private equity investments and two exits closing in the period. AGA also made a number of new commitments to invest in the private equity portfolio. This includes a commitment of $700 million to the Apax XI Fund, which is Apax's global buyout flagship fund, and which will continue the successful investment strategy of its predecessor funds. There was also a commitment of $60 million to the Apax Global Impact Fund, a new strategy that aims at delivering private equity style returns, while at the same time investing in companies that have a measurable impact on society or the environment. Last, there was a commitment of $40 million to the second generation of the Israel-focused Apax Mid-Market Israel Opportunities Fund. This fund will continue focusing on mid-market investments in Israel, leveraging the strong market presence of Apax Partners in that country. Now, it's good news that the board of AGA has approved these new commitments. It will allow AGA to continue to have significant exposure to private equity investments in the future, and new investments made by these funds will continue to diversify and build AGA's existing private equity portfolio. Important in this context is that AGA's capital and liquidity position remains very healthy. Summarize the key numbers, AGA's capital resources outside the private equity portfolio totaled EUR 765 million at period end. This is a combination of EUR 150 million of cash, an undrawn facility of EUR 250 million, and EUR 360 million invested in derived investments. It's that strength of the balance sheet that allowed AGA to make commitments to these new funds. Particularly important at this point in time, since private equity as an asset class typically outperforms after periods of market volatility. AGA is in a good position to reap the benefits. With that, let me now discuss the private equity investments of AGA in more detail. As I've outlined, the way AGA accesses its private equity investment is by making commitments to and being a limited partner in the Apax funds. This structure is, however, effectively only a conduit and shouldn't be tracked from the fact that you as a shareholder gain exposure to, at the moment, 78 private equity portfolio companies. The pie chart on the left-hand side of the slide shows these portfolio companies. All these 78 companies operate in the four sectors the Apax funds focus on. Tech and digital services, healthcare and internet and consumer. The color coding of the pie chart highlights these sectors. AGA's private equity portfolio delivered a robust performance in the challenging environment we just talked about during the first six months of 2022, with a total return of -5.7%. Let me summarize why we also remain confident in the outlook for AGA's private equity investments. There are a number of reasons for this. Let me just mention a few of them. Firstly, the portfolio, private equity portfolio is nicely diversified across sectors and investment vintages. Having a wider purse to invest globally across different sectors is also beneficial from an investment standpoint, as it allows to identify the most attractive opportunities across a broad spectrum. It eliminates the risk of being solely exposed to a single industry or geography. Secondly, the portfolio continues to perform well. The last 12 months revenue growth was 19.1%, and last 12 months EBITDA growth was 15.8%. Most of the Apax Funds portfolio company has strong market positions with real pricing power. Although for some, for example, in healthcare services, we are seeing time lags between cost and price increases. Thirdly, the Apax Funds investment strategy of focusing on opportunities that have scope for operational improvement and multiple micro levers that can be pulled is an all-weather strategy and well suited for the current environment. The Apax Partners deal teams work very closely in partnership with Apax Partners Operational Excellence Practice in this context. Those of you who have attended AGA's recent Capital Markets Day will have received more detailed insights into the approach and the work of the Operational Excellence Practice. If you didn't have a chance to attend, I would encourage you to watch a replay of the webcast, which is available on AGA's website. Now, as a prolonged recession could impact trading in several sectors, I think the biggest question for AGA at this stage remains our valuation multiples. The considerations here are nuanced. As mentioned before, we have seen some significant declines in public market valuations during the first six months, though as you know, markets recovered somewhat after period end. The worst declines in public markets have been in super high growth and unprofitable stocks, which the Apax Funds have chosen to have less exposure to. Still, stock prices of companies in AGA's portfolio that have been IPO'd previously have generally not escaped the public market re-rating, and the overall valuation of AGA's private equity portfolio was impacted by that. In private equity markets, while there's been some deterioration of valuation multiples, these markets remained more robust, you know, particularly for strongly performing companies. Because of these two factors, valuation multiples across AGA's portfolio have however reduced substantially since the end of December, though if you exclude the publicly listed companies, the effect is less pronounced. Multiples is a good segue to the next page, where you can see the total return achieved by the private equity portfolio for the last six months, broken down in its return component. If you look at this slide, the key takeaway here is that there is continued strong operational performance across the portfolio. However, this was offset by multiple compression. What the waterfall chart shows is that movement in the underlying earnings metric used to value portfolio companies continue to deliver strong positive contributions to returns. This again demonstrates the success of the Apax Funds investment strategy of transformational ownership rather than just riding the wave of strong markets. The biggest offset was from valuation multiples used across the portfolio, which have contracted since the end of December, as I've already explained. What you can see here is that it's really the investment strategy and philosophy that is key to delivering results through the cycle. Not only does the investment strategy focus on driving growth and underlying earnings, the way this is delivered is by pulling different operational levers of growth and generally improving the quality of an investment, which often also leads to a re-rating of portfolio companies upon exit. Which leads me on to the next slide, which focuses on the track record of uplifts achieved in private equity. The chart you can see here shows uplifts achieved in exits across the global buyout funds and the two strategy-specific Israeli mid-market and digital funds. As you can see, there is a pattern of consistent uplifts between roughly 25% and 40% across these funds. Uplifts as they were not really a function of cycle, as these funds cover a range of investment vintages. These uplifts speak much more to a conservative and transparent valuation approach used for the private equity holdings, but also importantly to the benefits of an investment strategy that focuses on improving the quality of a business. Turning to deal activity across the private equity portfolio this period. As you would expect in the current environment, deal activity has been somewhat lower than in recent years. However, I'm pleased to say that the Apax teams have continued to identify attractive investment opportunities, and the Apax Funds closed 5 new investments. In services, there was a new investment in a company called Alcumus, which is a global leader in technology and risk management and compliance solutions. The investment thesis is to partner with the existing management team to support the company in capitalizing on long-term secular growth and consolidation in the market. There were three deals that closed in the tech sector. The first is T-Mobile Netherlands, an acquisition from Deutsche Telekom that was already signed end of last year and now closed during the first half of the year. The other two investments in tech are smaller investments for AGA. The first is an investment in a Chinese company called YunZhangFang. YunZhangFang is a software business providing accounting and tax solutions, and the investment was made through the Apax Digital Fund. The second investment is in Infinity Labs. Infinity Labs is a company operating in Israel. It's an interesting business, a software developer training program where the student pay no tuition for training, and upon graduation, they are placed in a job with a predetermined salary. The investment in Infinity Labs was made by the Apax Mid-Market Israel Opportunities Fund. The final new investment closed in the period is in the internet consumer sector. A company called Old Elk Distillery. Old Elk, you know, it represents the second investment in premium wine and in spirits category, following a recent investment in Far Niente Wine Estates. On exits, there were two to report. Unilabs, the Pan-European provider of laboratory and imaging diagnostic services, was sold at a very attractive gross multiple of invested capital of 3.1x and 25.3x gross IRR for the Apax XI fund. MyCase, a provider of legal practice management software for small and medium-sized law firms in the U.S., was also exited at even more impressive returns of 3.9x gross money multiple and 125% gross IRR for Apax X. The Apax funds became a minority investor in the business that acquired MyCase, a company called AffiniPay, as part of this transaction. Before going to the four sectors in AGA's private equity portfolio in more detail, let me also spend a minute on AGA's derived investment portfolio. As a reminder, the derived investments portfolio is a capital buffer for AGA, where capital not deployed into private equity is invested. The reason these investments are called derived is because investments are sourced leveraging the knowledge that has been built within and has been derived from Apax Partners' private equity business over many years. You can see that on the bar chart at the bottom right of this page. The performance of the direct investments portfolio during the first half has again demonstrated its resilience and the high quality of the underlying investments. 92% of direct investments are invested in debt, mostly low risk first and second lien, unsecured instruments. Therefore, focusing on the returns in direct debt, you know, direct debt produced a positive return of 3.4% or -3.6% excluding foreign exchange movements, you know, despite some significant volatility in the markets. If you look at returns achieved over the last five years, the direct debt portfolio has delivered constant currency returns of 23.8%. These are very attractive return levels when compared to a broad loan market index such as the S&P/LSTA, which only delivered a return of 15.4% over that period. Not only do debt investments strengthen the balance sheet for AGA as a capital buffer, allowing for significant commitments into new private equity funds, they also reduce the cash drag for the fund at return levels that outperform loan market indices. Important here to highlight is that 97% of the debt portfolio is currently invested in floating rate instruments. This minimizes duration exposure, but also provides return upside as interest rates increase. Strong interest cover provides comfort in the current environment. Because of the floating rate nature of the portfolio, the yield of the derived investment has moved up in the first half of the year, and the average yield to maturity is now 8.9%, and the income yield is 7.3%. To summarize, the derived investment portfolio is in good shape. It provides resilience and a capital buffer to AGA, allowing for significant commitments in new private equity funds, whilst at the same time producing attractive returns and minimizing cash drag. As I've covered performance of AGA on a high level, I would like now to do a bit of a deep dive into the private equity investments and to provide more color on recent performance and developments in the private equity portfolio. Let me start with tech and digital, which remains the largest part of AGA's private equity portfolio. With tech being a very large sector, the focus of investment is on three subsectors, software, tech-enabled services, and telco. The investments in tech and digital continue to perform well. Looking at the three subsectors that I just mentioned separately, they have each demonstrated resilience. Software and telco both perform strongly, reflecting the robust and defensive nature of the business model. Tech-enabled services have also been resilient. The two largest investments in tech are Thoughtworks, which is a tech-enabled services business, and Paycor, a software as a service business focusing on HR and software. Both companies are publicly listed, and while their share prices have decreased in the first half of 2022, both companies are still very successful investments for AGA and have returned 2.4 times their initial investment already, with a further 3.1 times of value remaining based on the June 30 share prices. After Thoughtworks and Paycor, the third largest investment in tech is Bonterra. For those of you who've been following AGA, you will remember that the Apax funds acquired three software companies serving the nonprofit sector to create a large social good software platform of scale, which, you know, subsequently, you know, those three companies in the combined platform were branded Bonterra. Bonterra has continued to perform well over the period, you know, with strong momentum across business units. Let me now move on to services, which is the second-largest sector in the portfolio, you know, at 31% comprising 19 portfolio companies. You know, services is a broad sector, but as in tech and digital, the Apax team has built deep expertise within a few key subsectors of focus. These subsectors include, you know, route density-based businesses, residential services, and outsourced sales and marketing. At an overall level, these subsectors have all shown resilience and the strengths of the business models, notably in their ability to very largely pass on inflationary cost increases. The three largest investments in services each fall into one of the three subsectors I've just mentioned. AssuredPartners is an insurance broker operating in the North American market, and the attraction of AssuredPartners as a private equity investment results from its recurring revenue, non-discretionary product business model, which makes it very defensible. Also, the insurance broker industry remains fragmented, providing, you know, compelling opportunities for growth through M&A. AssuredPartners continued to experience strong growth during the period, you know, driven both by accretive M&A and continued organic growth. Authority Brands is an investment in the residential services subsector. Authority Brands is a franchise business, you know, franchising its brand and expertise to home service businesses such as pool maintenance or cleaning businesses. Again, a very attractive and stable business with pricing power and with ample scope for growth and value generation potential in the highly fragmented industry. Authority Brands also continued to perform well in the first half of 2022. TOI TOI & DIXI is the provider of portable toilets and investment in the route density-based businesses subsector. TOI TOI & DIXI, like other businesses in that subsector, operates a network and has trucks that drive routes servicing one customer after another. Route density-based businesses benefit from scale as serving routes becomes more efficient and thus creating further barriers to entry for others. TOI TOI & DIXI continues to perform well and is growing both organically and inorganically. Healthcare represents 15% of the invested portfolio and has seven portfolio companies. Here, the key focus subsectors are medical technology, healthcare services, and pharma. These subsectors have generally all seen strong demand, for example, from a pickup in surgical procedures as we move past the COVID impact. There's been some operating headwinds from supply chain pressures and generally a more complex operating environment resulting from that, but these have all been well managed. Again, let me touch on the three largest investments in this sector. Vyaire Medical is the producer of ventilators, respiratory diagnostics products, and related consumables. As we've noted at the Q1 presentation, Vyaire has seen significant demand during the early phases of COVID, and as this one-off demand has subsided, you know, the demand in the business is tracking more in line with expectations again now. Given the global nature of its supply, management highly focused on managing the company supply chain. Candela is the provider for aesthetic devices and solutions. Performance at Candela continues to be very strong across all three global regions where it operates, with growth somewhat limited by global supply chain shortages. The third-largest investment in the healthcare portfolio is Eating Recovery Center or ERC, a national leader in the U.S. for eating disorder treatment. ERC is seeing increased year-over-year demand across the U.S. as it opens new sites with three centers opening in the first half of this year. Last but not least, internet and consumer. The focus subsectors here are online marketplaces and consumer packaged goods. In online marketplaces, we've generally seen strong demand and operational performance through also some modest declines in valuation multiples from previous highs. In consumer packaged goods, portfolio companies perform very strongly. Again, there were some modest declines in valuation multiples from previous highs, though the market differentiates significantly between performing and non-performing companies in this subsector. The largest investment in internet and consumer remains Trade Me, the largest online auction and classified site in New Zealand, covering motors, property and jobs, and classified, while also being the number one online marketplace for used goods. Trade Me continues to deliver strong trading performance. Cole Haan, the designer and retailer of premium men's and women's footwear, apparel, and accessories, is the second-largest investment and has continued to meaningfully recover from the impact of COVID-19 and is well-positioned for continued recovery over the coming quarters, assuming market conditions remain constructive. Wehkamp is the third-largest investment in the internet and consumer sector. As a reminder, Wehkamp is an online retailer in the Netherlands. Wehkamp's performance continues to hold up well versus the exceptionally strong performance of the COVID year. I hope this summary by sector has given you good insight into both the overall performance of AGA and also a bit of a deep dive at the operating level. Before we go into the Q&A, let me summarize a couple of key takeaways. You know, AGA has a strong track record reflecting the high quality of the underlying portfolio companies. The investment strategy of AGA is well suited to continue to deliver in the current environment. With new private equity commitments made, AGA is poised to participate in the next phase of the Apax Private Equity journey, and all of this is underpinned by a robust balance sheet and healthy liquidity position. To conclude, overall, despite the challenging market environment we live in, we are confident that AGA will continue to deliver. With that, I'm now happy to answer any questions and hand it back to the operator for this. Thank you. If you would like to ask a question and have joined on the telephone, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. Alternatively, if you've joined on the webcast, please type your question to the Q&A chat box. Our first question comes from Charlie Murphy from Singer Capital Markets. Charlie, please go ahead. Ralf, good morning. Got a couple of questions. Talked about private markets proving to be more robust in terms of valuation metrics than the public market. How comfortably are you that this isn't just a lagging indicator and it'll eventually catch up? Yeah, look, you know, I mean, general observation is that, you know, that the public market, as I said, you know, has been more, you know, more volatile and, as I said, you know, more resilience in the private markets. Although, as I've also mentioned, you know, we have seen, you know, some moderate declines in valuation in some of the subsectors. Now, if you look at our portfolio, the first thing I would say that, you know, generally, you know, this, you know, this sort of speaks to the high, you know, the high quality of AGA's private equity portfolio. Now, you know, whether there's still gonna be some sort of adjustment in private equity valuations, I guess nobody has a crystal ball at the end of the day. Again, you know, what I would point out is that, you know, the investment strategy in private equity that the Apax funds have, you know, they don't rely on, you know, financial market tailwinds and multiples. You know, they much more rely on operational value creation, and you can also see this from the waterfall chart that I just presented. At the same time, you know, if there was, you know, some sort of quote-unquote normalization of valuation multiples, obviously also, you know, good news for, you know, for new investments in particular, you know, with the new commitments that, you know, AGA has made. That's great. Moving on to the debt markets. We've got significant sort of pricing correction. Is there debt available at a sensible price at the moment, and how is this impacting on transactions? In credit markets, look, you know, credit markets have become more difficult towards the end of the last quarter. Now, in terms of availability of debt, you know, to fund new transactions, you know, for the right transaction, you know, there is that capital available. I mean, keep in mind, you know, over the last years, there's always a big group of like private lenders that has developed, you know, who sit on capital to invest. Terms are reflective of general market pricing, of course. Now, if you think about new investment activity, you know, with debt pricing, you know, moving up, you know, you would hope again that this is at some point, you know, reflected in overall valuations, you know, to offset, you know, the impact of higher debt pricing. Cool. One final question, and thank you very much. Unsurprisingly, activity levels have been fairly soft in the first half, just 'cause of the uncertainty, macro and geopolitically. Is there any sign of a sort of pickup in activity levels into the second half, or is there a bit of a standoff between sort of old selling prices and what buyers would like to pay in the current market environment? Look, you know, we're six weeks now into the second half. It's probably a bit early to comment generally on, you know, what's gonna happen in the second half. You know, what I would say is that, you know, we've coming out of a period in 2021 with some very high deal activity. That activity has, you know, obviously reduced a bit. I think ultimately it will depend on the you know the quality of individual companies and on the sort of exit channels that you have you know for exits you know to continue to look at new investments. I think we'll just have to wait a little bit more you know to see how both the macro and the financial markets are gonna pan out over the next six months. Thank you very much. That's all my questions. Thank you. We now have a written question from Yusuf Samad from Belfield Capital who asks, "Did the floating rate portfolio in derived debt suffer a markdown spread widening in the loan market? Please comment on how these loans are valued. Yeah. Thank you. These were available. Those loans are largely valued with reference to broker quotes or other observable metrics in the pricing metrics in the capital structure. If there is no broker quote available for the instrument held by AGA, sometimes there are broker quote prices observable for other parts of the capital structure which you can use a pricing reference. Generally speaking, we've seen obviously an increase in base rates which is driving the yield to maturity. There's also been a bit of a, you know, a spread widening more generally and therefore, you know, slightly lower prices across the portfolio. Thank you. Sorry, I hope that answers the question. Thank you. That is now the end of the Q&A session. I'll now hand you back to Ralf for closing remarks. Well, thank you everyone for you know participating in the call this morning. If there are no further questions at this stage, obviously, if there are any questions after the call, you know, please feel free to reach out to arrange a meeting you know through IR. Unless there are any questions now, which I don't think there are, I wish everybody a good day and already a good weekend now. Thanks everyone for dialing in. This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining me and I'll disconnect your lines.