You have joined the meeting as an attendee and will be muted throughout the meeting. With us at the end of the call. As a reminder, and for those who are new to the company, AGA provides access to a global portfolio of mostly private companies owned by the Apax Private Equity Fund. And I'm pleased to report that the performance of the portfolio has improved in the quarter ending 30 September 2024. At quarter end, AGA's NAV was about EUR 1.2 billion, which translates to EUR 2.45 or EUR 2.04 per share. While it's not a constant currency base, the total NAV return per share was up 1.7% in the quarter. The impact of foreign exchange headwinds meant the total NAV return per share was slightly negative at 0.2%. To put this performance into context, there are a few points that I want to highlight. I mean, first, I've mentioned that the half-year results, the private equity portfolio is well positioned with continued good earnings growth across the portfolio. Now, second, following the recent exits in the private equity portfolio, the overall exposure to residual listed holdings has reduced. [Excluding Idealista], which is yet to close, the listed exposure in the private equity portfolio was approximately 4% of AGA's net asset value at the end of September. We've also seen continued momentum in investment and exit activity. Now, in addition to Thoughtworks and Veriforce, both transactions signed in August, three new investments in Zellis, Altus Fire & Life Safety, and GreytHR closed in Q3. On a look-through basis, AGA expects to deploy EUR 107 million across these investments. Now, moving on to realizations, we had six full exits signing or closing in the period, and they returned on average 2.7 times cost. Finally, in terms of capital allocation, share buybacks, which commenced at the end of June, together with the two dividend payments paid out this year, have seen AGA return EUR 67 million to shareholders since the start of 2024. This is equivalent to just over 5% of opening NAV at the start of 2024. Now, let me stay on the topic of capital allocation and double-click on the cash returns to shareholders. A new capital allocation framework was announced at the capital markets day in June this year, and this policy incorporated both investor and analyst feedback. The new capital allocation framework comprises of a continued payment of regular dividends to shareholders semi-annually, and the dividend is set at an absolute level of GBP 11 pence per share per annum, which is equivalent to 5.4% of AGA's September NAV. Second, a distribution pool which earmarks funds in AGA's balance sheet for buybacks. The distribution pool was initially funded with EUR 30 million, and AGA started buying back shares at the end of June. In Q3, AGA bought back EUR 2.2 million worth of shares, which is equivalent to about 0.3% of the 2024 opening share capital. As you would expect, the board obviously keeps under review the allocation to buybacks to enhance value for shareholders. Now, let me turn to AGA's portfolio. Again, at 30 September, private equity investments represented 83% of AGA's investor portfolio, providing U.S. shareholders with exposure to about 80 portfolio companies. These investments were made in line with Apax's Hidden Gems investment approach, which is centered around the firm's each sector expertise and focus on operational value creation needed to improve businesses. Apax identifies these investments for the funds in its core sectors, tech, services, and internet consumer, areas in which most of recent capital has been deployed. Now, as an update of Apax, we have recently decided to no longer have a dedicated team focused on healthcare. This decision was driven by our view that fewer opportunities suited to the hidden gem strategy are available in the sector. Now, having said that, the Apax funds will continue to invest in what I would call healthcare-adjacent businesses. The services investment in Palex, the MedTech distributor, which I talked about at the interim results, is a good example here for investments the funds will continue to make via the other sectors. But turning back to the portfolio itself, if you look at this pie chart, the private equity investments have been made over a number of years and provide for attractive vintage diversification with exposure to companies both at the start and at the end of their value creation journeys. Also, as you can see from the chart, capital not invested in private equity was primarily invested in debt investments to provide balance sheet robustness and capital flexibility for AGA. Continuing with the Hidden Gems page, the page we're looking at now lists the most recent investments made by the Apax Global Alpha Fund. Now, the reason these are worth highlighting is not only because they are all exciting investments with significant value creation potential, but they will also very much be the driver of future performance for AGA, given the size of AGA's exposure to these investments. We've previously talked about the six investments that you can see on the left of the chart, so I want to focus on the three portfolio companies on the right-hand side of the page that were signed during the third quarter. And let me take them in turn. The first is Thoughtworks, which is a global technology consultancy. Now, for those of you who've been following AGA over the years, it's a familiar name, as the Apax IX fund has first invested in Thoughtworks back in 2017. Thoughtworks was then IPO'd in 2021 at a very attractive valuation. To illustrate this, based on total receipts received to date, including from the IPO, Apax IX has already realized approximately three times cost. Apax IX remained a significant holder and supporter, still following the IPO. In August this year, the Apax XI fund reached an agreement to purchase all the outstanding shares in the company and take it private. Apax IX, together with some related co-investors, will not sell its shares but will own its approximately 57% stake in the company. This transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter, and AGA's total indirect luxury exposure in Thoughtworks, both through the Apax IX and the Apax XI fund, is expected to be €54 million once the transaction closes. Now, the reason for the transaction is that Thoughtworks has been negatively impacted by post-COVID shifts in IT spend from big corporates, and we believe that there is now an opportunity to accelerate deep transformation and operational improvement, which can only be accomplished in a private setting. Turning to Veriforce, Veriforce is one of the world's largest providers of integrated supply chain risk management solutions, serving a multitude of end markets and with hubs in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. The Apax fund has significant experience partnering with successful supply chain management businesses. I have examples here of the investments in Alcumus and EcoOnline, which are current portfolio companies that operate in a similar space. What makes the Veriforce still attractive is that the supply chain risk management sector is still a relatively new and highly fragmented sector. This creates an opportunity to support Veriforce to expand and create a scale that can better serve large global customers. Finally, Altus Fire & Life Safety. Altus is a leading provider of regulation-mandated fire and life safety services in the United States. Again, the transaction draws on the Apax fund experience in one of our core subsectors, which is the density-based business model subsector. Other investments in the subsector include Safetykleen, which, as a reminder, is Europe's largest service provider for parts washers, and SavATree, a lawn and tree care company in the US. Now, for Altus, what's the investment thesis? It's to support the company through its growth journey by investing in sales and marketing, increasing the revenue mix, and capitalizing on the highly fragmented fire and life safety markets you remain. We've already touched on Zellis Group at the interim results, but I wanted to take the opportunity to provide a further update and more detail on the transaction on the next page of the presentation. Zellis Group is another good example of Apax's Hidden Gems approach, leading to a transformative add-on acquisition early on in the company's growth journey. Again, those of you who attended AGA's capital markets day in June may recall hearing from the CEO of Zellis Group just before the deal closed. For those who are less familiar with the company, the investment in Zellis was signed in April 2024, and Zellis Group is one of the leading providers of payroll and HR software solutions to customers in the U.K. and Ireland. It's also an emerging leader in the global benefits administration software market. Already during the due diligence phase preceding the investment in Zellis Group, our deal team recognized the potential opportunity for transformational acquisition of Benify. Benify is an employee benefits software provider in the Nordics and was identified as an opportunity to rapidly enhance Zellis Group's existing benefits business and to establish the company as a key player in the global fragmented and expanding market for benefits administration software. Now, the good news is that post-closing of the transaction, Zellis actually acquired Benify. And now, together, Zellis Group's existing benefits business and Benify will create a leading global benefits reward recognition and employee engagement software provider with an enhanced value proposition to customers globally. The two businesses are highly complementary, and this acquisition creates a truly global solution and will allow customers to benefit from a deeper seed of platform integrations across HR, payroll, and benefits carriers. This acquisition also comes at a time when global employers are accelerating investment technology, investment in technology, to create a single global experience across benefits and rewards, underpinned by a focus on eliminating administration and ensuring compliance. Let me now turn to the AGA NAV per share development during the quarter. So back to numbers. This page shows the NAV development on a per share basis. Consistently for five periods, earnings growth in the private equity portfolio was again the key value driver in Q3, as you can see from the first column in this waterfall chart. The negative movement in the debt you see on the chart is due to an increase in overall levels of net debt in the portfolio, which is mainly driven by portfolio company M&A. Movement in comparable companies' valuation multiple has increased in the quarter. This is largely attributable to the Fort Worth transaction alongside a handful of other portfolio companies. Foreign exchange was a headwind in the quarter, and as I mentioned in my introductory comments, this led to a flat NAV per share before dividends and buybacks. Now, NAV per share declined by 7 pence during the period following the payment of the interim dividend, and as dividend, sorry, as buybacks only started in June, they did not have a measurable impact on NAV per share yet. So I just highlighted the operating performance continued to be the main driver, the main value driver. So let's take a closer look at some of the key metrics across the portfolio on this page. I should flag that these numbers represent the last 12 months rather than the quarter. Overall, the portfolio is showing good operating performance. This last 12 months' EBITDA growth is 16%, while the valuation multiple increased slightly. Again, the latter is driven largely by Thoughtworks transactions. Overall, leverage levels across the portfolio remained modest and in line with strategy at 4.6 times. The slide also highlights again that the exposure to the post-IPO holdings in the private equity portfolio are now very small, and therefore you should expect less noise from this part of the portfolio going forward. As I've mentioned previously, transaction activity also picked up this year, and I will cover in more detail the transaction activity on the next page. We've seen good investment activity across the private equity portfolio, including the new investments in Veriforce and Fort Worth, which I've covered. AGA made five investments in the third quarter and expects to deploy a total of € 107 million across these deals. We've already discussed at the interim. We've also seen a pickup of exits since the beginning of the year, and with the exception of idealista, these deals have now all closed. Returns across these exits have been very strong. Other than the exit from Guotai Junan Securities, which was an investment made in a Chinese financial services business back in 2017, returns have ranged between 2.1 times and 4.3 times. As I've already mentioned, across all of these exits, the average was 2.7 times, so a very strong outcome. Genius Sports, Thoughtworks, and Baltic Classifieds Group were in the bucket of companies that were IPO'd successfully, and where now residual stakes in these companies have been fully exited, and the deals generated returns of 2.6 times and 4.2 times money of invested capital. Healthium was a healthcare business in the MedTech space, and the business was sold at 3.4 times to another financial sponsor. AffiniPay was a software carve-out, and the funds repaying the minority stake when the business was sold, again to another financial sponsor now, which took a bad stake. The minority stake has therefore been realized, leading to a very attractive overall return on the deal of 4.2 times. As I said, idealista hasn't closed yet, but we expect it to close soon, and the expected money of invested capital of 2.1 times you see here is for the second investment made in idealista via Apax X, and those of you who have followed the interim results will remember that the Apax fund had previously made a successful investment back in the company back in 2015, which already realized 5.2 times for the funds, so all in all, a good uptick in exit activity since the beginning of the year and some very strong returns from these exits, substantiating the quality of the portfolio. Before I conclude and open up for questions, I want to provide a quick update on the capital which is invested in debt on the balance sheet. As a reminder, the debt portfolio absorbs capital not invested in private equity to limit cash drag, generate additional returns and income, and provide another source of funding towards the dividend payment and the recently created distribution pool. The debt portfolio primarily comprises first- and second-lien loans and investments in companies and sectors which Apax can leverage insights from its private equity activities. And in Q3 2024, the debt portfolio achieved a return of - 2.2% or + 0.3% on a currency-adjusted basis. So again, performance of this portfolio was primarily impacted by foreign exchange headwinds, which had a - 2.5% drag on the portfolio in the quarter. Again, as a reminder, this portfolio reflects smaller prices for the various loan positions, and as a small number of these debt positions saw prices go down in the period, there was also a small reduction from this on returns in the quarter. For completeness, the debt portfolio also includes the remaining Vyaire position debt, which now represents less than 1% of NAV. The remaining assets of Vyaire were sold over the summer, and we expect this position to be closed out soon. But taking a step back from the quarterly returns, the portfolio maintains a strong income yield of approximately 9%, and the average yield to maturity was at 11% at the end of the quarter. It provides balance sheet robustness to the balance sheet. It's adding to the available resources outside of the private equity and provides a buffer to fund future calls into the private equity portfolio. This is my update for the third quarter. To summarize, we saw an improvement in performance in the quarter, and we believe the private equity portfolio's position for further value creation from here. The momentum of investment activity has continued with both existing exciting new deals as well as an increase in the pace of realization since the start of the year, and we feel good about the outlook. The most recent investments in the private equity portfolio are off to a promising start, a good example being the Zellis transaction which we've discussed. These new deals will be a key driver of value for AGA going forward, given the relative size of these transactions in the portfolio. Exposure to private equity investments has significantly reduced, and it's therefore expected to be less of a headwind or noise going forward. The new capital allocation framework allows AGA to play an active role in value creation through the introduction of the distribution pool and commencement of buybacks, while also providing certainty of income to shareholders. Finally, the AGA balance sheet remains robust as AGA takes a disciplined approach to balance sheet management in order to support unfunded commitments made to the private equity funds. With that, I'm now happy to take any questions you may have and hand it back to the operator. We will now start the Q&A. As a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please submit them via the Q&A box, which can be found at the bottom of the screen by clicking on the Q&A box. Alternatively, you can send any question via email to investor.relations@apaxglobalalpha.com. There will be a short pause while we wait for the first question to come through. Our first question comes from an anonymous attendee. How are you going to get the NAV and USD share price up? The only way to create value for shareholders. Yeah, thank you. So as I've mentioned, the operating performance across the portfolio is in a good place. We're seeing good momentum across the portfolio, which is the key driver of NAV accretion. Also, historically, what we've seen over the last two years, we've seen volatility from post-IPO holdings in the private equity portfolio. These have now reduced. As I said, they're at 4% now, so we should expect less volatility from this going forward. We have a number of new exciting investments in the portfolio. I covered Zellis. And again, if you look at transactions realized for signed and closed, the average money multiple on these transactions is at 2.7 times, which speaks to the quality of the portfolio. So in summary, not only have we seen improving performance during the quarter, but if you double-click and look at some of the underlyings, good operational momentum, less exposure to these post-IPO holdings in the private equity portfolio, and good investment activity, both in terms of new investments, exciting new investments, and attractive realizations that we've seen, we feel very good about the potential here for value creation and NAV accretion. Just as a reminder, if you wish to ask a question, please submit them via the Q&A box, which can be found at the bottom of the screen by clicking on the Q&A box. Alternatively, you can send any questions via email to investor.relations@apaxglobalalpha.com. We will give one more short pause to let questions come through. Our next question comes from Marco Claus at Bordier & Cie. Hi, Ralf. Thanks for the update. Buybacks are subject to two conditions. One, discounts to NAV exceeding a certain threshold. Two, offering better value than other investments. Can you please share the team's view on the second condition? Thanks, Marco. Hey, Marco. Thanks for the question. It's a good one, obviously. I think the answer on the second one, what is the trade-off between reinvestment in the portfolio and buying shares for reinvesting in a portfolio through a share buyback? I think there is a significant scientific answer. As I've pointed out, the realized returns you're seeing in the portfolio and the operating momentum is strong. So I think there is a case and a sort of benchmark set by these underlying returns. At the same time, the good view and also feedback that we've had from shareholders in the run-up to designing this capital allocation policy is that at the current levels of discounts, buybacks make sense, and that's also why you're seeing AGA being active in the market. There are no further questions on the webinar. I will now hand over to Ralf Gruss for closing remarks. Please go ahead. Well, thank you all for participating in today's call. Obviously, if there are any further questions now following the call, or if you would like to arrange a meeting, please contact our investor relations team. And with that, I'd like to thank you again for joining. I wish you all a good day, and goodbye. Thank you for joining today's call. We are no longer live. Have a nice day.
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