Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Princess Private Equity Holding Q3 2021 investor conference call and live webcast. I am Paul, the conference call operator. I would like to remind you that all participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A session. You can register for questions at any time by pressing star and one on your telephone. Webcast viewers may submit their questions or comments in writing via the related field. For operator assistance, please press star and zero. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to George Crowe. Please go ahead, sir. Mr. Crowe, your line is open. Thank you very much. Warm welcome from my side, too. My name is George Crowe. I'm a member of management and partner with Client Solutions team based in London, also responsible for investor relations for Princess. With me today is Felix Haldner, who is a partner at Partners Group and also represents Partners Group on the board of Princess. During the next 30 minutes or so, we'll talk you through the Q3 results. As mentioned, there'll be an opportunity for Q&A. I'd encourage you to enter questions in the webinar tool as we go. With that, I'll hand over to Felix, who will take you through today's presentation. Over to you, Felix. Thank you, George. A warm welcome from my side as well. My name is, as George mentioned, Felix Haldner. This quarter has been fairly eventful for Princess Private Equity Holding with we observed record realizations of close to EUR 300 million, mostly actually by two companies, by International Schools Partnership and GlobalLogic. We also observed that we made a number of new investments and a lot of them actually also in the pipeline for the next quarters. As always, before diving into the quarterly figures, some words to Princess and its investment strategy, just as a reminder. Princess provides shareholders with exposure to Partners Group's direct private equity investment strategy, and by that, they're participating in transactions alongside our institutional clients. Partners Group as a manager, we are a so-called thematic investor, so we focus on investments in companies where growth is underpinned by long-term transformative trends. We bring extensive resources with a global team of over 150 investor professionals that are supported by a global network of external industry advisors and by operating directors. I'll further elaborate on the investment strategy when we cover recent portfolio activities later in the presentation. Again, as a reminder, all of Princess investments are subject to Partners Group's responsible investment policy. ESG factors are therefore fully integrated at all stages of the investment life cycle alongside commercial and financial factors. Finally, the company's investment objective is to generate long-term capital growth and an attractive dividend of 5% of opening net assets. Over the last 10 years, the company has achieved double-digit NAV and share price total returns. This brings me to slide five. So performance continued to develop positively during the third quarter of this year with a quarter total return of 2.6%, which brings us year-to-date to almost 20%. Equally, the share price total return of 16.2% over the year-to-date, thereof 5.8% in the last quarter. In terms of portfolio activity, I alluded to the two realizations of GlobalLogic and ISP. I covered some of it in the previous call, but certainly later in the presentation, I'll use the ISP case as a showcase of how we add value to our portfolio companies. We made new investments in Apex Logistics and Reedy Industries. I will come back to them a bit later in the presentation. There's a, as I said, a high level of portfolio activity in the fourth quarter, we are in the midst of it, and a number of realizations and new investments are signed or are in closing. As a reminder, we declared the second interim dividend in October, which brings us then to a total dividend of EUR 0.67 per share, in line with the company's objective to distribute 5% of opening NAV. When we look at the historic NAV and share price performance, Princess NAV and share price continued to perform positively, maintaining their long-term outperformance of public markets. In terms of discounts, we observed as of last Friday a discount of 9.7% compared to the peer group, which was 12.9%, so largely in line or slightly better. Maybe for the long term, the discount continues to narrow. However, it remains slightly wider than pre-COVID. By that, a bit of scope for further concentration, contraction, please. On the key figures, well, following the realization of GlobalLogic and ISP, the investment level stood at 88%, as you can see on page eight. Princess has then a number of new investments which are signed and in closing, and there's a visible pipeline of investment opportunities. We expect to see the investment level increase over the coming quarters. We'll come to that a bit later in the presentation. Just as a reminder, among the unfunded commitments, we distinguish between so-called active ones and so-called stale ones. We consider about EUR 77 million as active. That is, we expect that they are going to be called over the next quarters and years, while the remainder is our commitments to mature funds that are no longer in investment period and where we do not anticipate that they are called in full. This brings me actually to the realizations for the ten largest portfolio companies in the last quarter. As you can observe, a very positive development. I'd like to highlight particularly two companies that is KinderCare and Form. Both of them we provided comments in the last couple of quarters, particularly on KinderCare, the nursery and early childhood centers company in North America, where we had a revaluation of startling 26.4% in the last quarter. This is basically a recovery or a consequence of the recovery of this business as life has come close to normal in the U.S. when it comes to early childhood education. As you know, KinderCare, as I commented in one of the last calls, KinderCare is in an IPO process. Unfortunately, I won't be in a position to answer many questions in the Q&A to this company. The other noteworthy development is Form. Form Technologies that again, as a consequence of the recovery of the economy in general, has experienced a steep growth in revenue and EBITDA. As fast as we were in writing down or reevaluating downwards when Form had issues, particularly as it serves clients including in the automotive and in the oil and gas sectors, and they now benefit from the recovery, the broad recovery in these industries. This brings me to the portfolio overview. We can take note that we are invested in a very broadly diversified manner, with a focus on resilient companies in sectors and subsectors that benefit from trends. We have a limited exposure to cyclical sectors. We are also invested globally via diversified globally with about half and half, Europe and North America. Now with the exit of ISP, which was counted towards Europe, North America has gained in importance. However, as this ISP example shows, I think these donuts diagrams only show of course part of the truth as many of our companies are fairly international, global themselves, and by that, have exposure, for example, to emerging markets or to other continents. We also diversified broadly by investment and vintage years and basically it shows that we have a fairly mature portfolio, which was demonstrated by the recent exits. Certainly by the vintage years, you can probably expect more exit activity over the next quarters and years. Finally, about the investment types, most of our investments are in direct investments. There's a small legacy portfolio and funds, which is in the run-off. There is a bit higher debt portion by now. Reason being that we put some of the proceeds we received from the large exits in senior loans. That's basically for portfolio management purposes. To earn a coupon of, say, 3% or so in the interim, basically waiting for being deployed into direct investments in the coming quarters. On the portfolio metrics, we observed that we continue to have very healthy revenue growth over the last 12 months. Very healthy EBITDA growth as well. Actually it increased significantly reflecting probably a combination of top line growth and some base effects of Q3 2020, when more severe COVID restrictions remained in place. By that, these lower figures dropped out of the last 12 months and by that, this significant increase. Whilst the valuations and net debt remained broadly in line with previous quarters. Before discussing Princess's specific recent portfolio activity, I'll spend a few minutes discussing Partners Group's transformational investment strategy, which combines a thematic approach to sourcing investment opportunities with a very hands-on entrepreneurial governance model to then transform businesses. Partners Group has identified three overarching, I call them, or we call them giga themes: digitization, new living, and sustainability and efficiency. These giga themes basically guide our investment activity. I alluded to this in previous quarters, that then within each of these giga themes, we then drill down into specific sub-themes, and by that, mapping the market to identify the most attractive target companies ahead of our competitors, so we can build our investment case ahead well in advance of the sales process. This proactive research-driven approach ensures we focus our sourcing efforts and that we ultimately buy what we should own, rather than reacting to what is for sale or what banks basically want to sell. We invest then in companies that are basically supported by resilient long-term global trends. On this page, you see basically a selection of these many sub-themes. At any time, we probably have about 40- 60 of them. Here a small selection. As an example, in technology, we like software businesses. For example, that deal with governance, risk compliance, that develop operations so are basically software for software developers and so on. By that, we then identify Idera, which is now in the portfolio. In services, that’s of course a very broad area. We drill down to sub-themes where we believe there is a lot of tailwind, and then we drill down to companies that basically can play within this theme. We basically identified Reedy Industries, and I’ll come to that in a minute. In goods and products, we like beauty, personal care. We like actually specialty chemicals. We like sustainable agriculture. As investors know, we made an investment in Rovensa, the biocontrol company headquartered in Lisbon with global activities. In health and life, we like IT-related health and life, so healthcare IT. We like pharmaceutical services providers that help the big pharma to speed up with products to go to market, which was particularly important or was particularly visible in the pandemic and the delivery of some of the new drugs and vaccines to the market. Or in contract development and manufacturing organizations like very recently Pharmathen, but also with PCI Pharma Services. So these are just a number of sub-themes. We would like and then we send our investment professionals to look for actionable companies in the market. Then having acquired a company we then implement our entrepreneurial ownership governance model. This is very different to the approach of, for example, a VC, a venture capitalist, that are typically very smart people who identify sectors and then companies, and then they buy a minority stake. They may buy maybe 20, 30, 40 minority stakes. Some of them are basically home runs and others are flops. They are not intervening too much in their businesses. Very much to the contrary, we buy, we build high conviction in certain companies and then build them together with the management teams. We are, of course, then shareholders with a controlling position and a board representation. By that, we are able to drive growth and to implement our value creation playbook that we developed jointly, typically with an ambitious management team. This very systematic approach yields consistent results and ensures that best practice is implemented across our portfolio. By that, I give you maybe one example on our investments you have observed for a while in our portfolio. Happily, despite of the exit, we are still exposed to because we reinvested some of the money. It's International Schools Partnership, which is by now a leading international group of schools of choice, providing English or bilingual, that's local language, plus English education to local children. By now, we've got 52 schools across 15 countries with almost 50,000 students. This was actually founded in 2013 by us and just a very entrepreneurial vision of an entrepreneurial team with a vision of creating a leading K-12 kindergarten to the twelfth school year schools group. We at that time realized that the K-12 schools market was very fragmented. Actually it is still, despite the fact that there are now about five, six, seven large school groups that have been basically formed and have reached a size where actually some are even listed. As you can see on the right-hand, on the top, there's still many potential targets for us, particularly probably the two on the upper right side. K-12 schools that are in small groups, group ownership, were still about 500 or independently owned K-12 schools owned by mom and pop. These are basically our targets. Have been our targets, and actually as we did the re-underwriting, are still our targets for the journey in the next couple of years. International Schools Partnership was really very much about platform building by a buy and build strategy. About 48 of the 52 schools were basically acquired. While we also had some greenfield operations, so where we opened new schools from building to acquisition of teachers, and then of course attracting pupils with four schools. We then also increased the capacity through the expanding existing schools, improving facilities to create incremental capacity for more than 5,000 students. We invested a lot in the learning team to deliver high-quality learning offer. This is probably also what is very attractive to teachers working in a group like ISP as opposed to working in a school in a single school. As this learning environment and this investment in teach the teacher is very attractive for teachers. We invested a lot in the digital infrastructure. Some of you remember we developed a proprietary online platform, which we call The Learning Hub. It was originally designed for teacher development and best practice sharing. By default, it basically also served us as the learning platform when governments basically ordered people to go home and where we had e-learning or distance learning. This brought us then basically from more or less zero in 2013 to financial year 2021 with 52 schools and a running EBITDA of EUR 115 million. As you know, we sold the company, the school platform for EUR 1.9 billion. We attracted a minority buyer, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, with a 25% stake and reacquired the remainder. By that, on the next page, you'll basically see our realization activity on one page. I covered ISP and GlobalLogic. There was some other and the legacy fund and debt investments also provided some realization proceeds. More importantly, we acquired, again, a stake in ISP, and we actually, apart from this EUR 13.3 million, we also reserved additional equity for its ongoing acquisition and expansion tour. We acquired an interest in Apex Logistics, Asia-based, China-based, integrated logistics solutions providers. I briefly alluded to that in the last call. Finally, we invested in Reedy, an industrial company, so it's a provider of commercial heating, ventilation, and air conditioning services. Following this strong period for realizations and also a portion of the proceeds was invested in senior loans on a temporary basis. This is just for liquidity management purposes. This loan position will be reduced over time to fund the closing of new private equity investments. Maybe on Reedy, there you will see that this is a North American, actually Chicago-headquartered company, a very established provider of aftermarket commercial HVAC maintenance, repair and replacement services. We believe as they are a market leader in a growing market that is underpinned by very stable demand, as they have a very proven M&A and integration capabilities, a very ambitious team that there are tangible benefits to scale, route optimization, technician productivity, response time improvement, technical expertise improvement and so on, and their favorable market tailwinds. What we believe we can do with this company in terms of value creation, as with most companies, there is an M&A plan. We'll also accelerate organic growth. We'll build best in class technical expertise. We'll optimize benefits of density by improving utilization. I'll be happy in the next quarters to report on the progress. Apart from these signed and closed investments in this quarter, we have also a number of activities, actually, post the quarter. As you can see, we had an investment level, as earlier alluded to, of about 88%, including the EUR 75 million of senior loans. We had realizations, partial realizations or full realizations like in Hortifruti, Straive, Foncia, which we'll receive cash for in the next, well, we'll have by now or receive in the running quarter. We also have a number of investments that are in closing, including Foncia, pardon again, that is the real estate property management company. We talked about a number of times, Pharmathen, this pharmaceutical company, a contract development and manufacturing company that's basically a specialist in the development of so-called sustained release technologies. What is that? That's technologies that improve patient compliance. For example, by long-acting injectables or slow-releasing oral medicines and other mouthpieces. Pharmathen is in the closing. ACT, a broadband provider, particularly in Southern India. I'm happy to report in more detail next time. BluSky, which is a commercial restoration services provider in the U.S. Basically, if a thunderstorm destroys roofs or other parts of a building, there's basically a rescue commercial provider that organize restoration and so on. Very recently, we had you may have observed a press release whereby Partners Group agreed to buy a portion of Breitling, the iconic Swiss watchmaker, and I'm also happy to report more about this investment in one of the next calls. This brings us actually on a pro forma basis as we speak, to about 95% of investment level which includes some additional EUR 60 million in senior loans we executed in October. Apart from this very specific and investment activity that does. That is, in closing, we have a near-term pipeline that is the next six months or so that is again focused on resilient sectors and growing businesses. You will see that there is in all of the geographies we cover. There are investment activities and in all the sectors we cover, particularly goods and products, technology services, health and life, as industrials that are below our giga themes. There are topics like consumable cutting tools, data intelligence platform, tertiary education provider, fund administration services, cancer care provider, healthcare IT, and so on. The sub-themes or some of the sub-themes we mentioned before or we alluded to in the last call, the last quarter. This brings me already to the summary. Princess follows this thematic investment approach whereby Partners Group has identified companies that benefit from trends, and then we invest into attractive companies with clear development potential. We are builders, so we build leading companies, and then we integrate ESG factors fully into the process, and these factors are actually not only to mitigate risk, but also to create and drive value. We've got deep resources with a large team. We've got apart from the direct equity professionals, we've got a network of industry experts and operating directors, and by that, we build a very diversified global private equity portfolio that provides exposure to thematic growth trends. It's very balanced across investments in various stages of the value creation mode. We've got mature investments where we will report about exits and crystallization of value, and we've got others that are basically just in the starting phase where we start the journey with the management team to an accelerated growth. There's a near-term investment pipeline, as I just alluded to, which across all regions actually, and I'm not worried at all about the redeployment of the pile of capital we have seen in this third quarter come back to the company. By that, I'm at the end of my presentation. Maybe just a final word. This was also the last investor relations call by George Crowe as he decided to move on. In the name of the many, many investors you met George, in the last years, thank you. Thank you very much, and all the best for your future. By that, I pass back to the operator, and thank you for your attention. We will now begin the question and answer session. Anyone wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. You will hear a tone to confirm that you have entered a queue. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Questioners on the phone are requested to use only handsets and eventually turn off the volume from the webcast. Webcast viewers may submit their questions or comments in writing via the relevant field. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. As a reminder, if you wish to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. There are no questions from the phone. Okay, it looks like we have a few coming in over the webinar tool, so I'll move to those now. Firstly, a couple on the senior loan allocation. The first is asking is that held in individual names or within a fund? The question's coming from a risk perspective. That's one I can take, Felix. The allocation is via a fund. We hold around 400 underlying loans, so very broadly diversified. Those are for the most part first liens, so the most secure part of the capital structure and floating rate. From a risk perspective, you know, it's broadly diversified exposure, and the purpose is really, as Felix mentioned, to mitigate the potential drag of holding cash. Now, we have another question on the senior loan allocation. Can we elaborate on how much of the NAV is now in senior loans? Could these be sold in order to deploy capital into transactions? Any color we can add on the timeline to invest the senior loan balance. On a pro forma basis, accounting for the additional deployment that Felix mentioned that took place in October, we are now around 13% of NAV in senior loans. You know, these are only to be held on a temporary basis, so we aim to redeploy into private equity investments as they close. This is certainly not a strategic allocation. In terms of the timeline, I think we won't be rushing to get this to redeploy and get this to 100% private equity. We have a very broad pipeline of deals that will extend not only for the rest of this year, but into next. We do need to preserve some capital. I would say, I mean if Felix has, you know, chip in if you sort of see this differently. I would say we're looking more towards the second half of next year to be close to fully invested. You should certainly expect to see us chip away at a bit of that loan allocation in the coming quarters. Question on the dividend. Felix, maybe one for you as in your capacity as a board member. Do we stick to the target of 5% dividend of opening net asset value? Yeah. The short answer is, yes, that's what we intend to do. Perfect. Thank you very much. A question on the market environment. You know, how competitive is it? What do we consider Partners Group's edges when competing for new transactions? Felix, maybe one for you. Yeah. No, thank you. Thank you. It appears that the very difficult ones come to me, end up with me. Now, the market environment is as difficult as it could be, I would say. We have observed during many quarters record high valuations of our assets. Our response actually hasn't been much different during all these quarters, other than adding resources at our end. Sticking to our beliefs, that is the thematic investment. To put as many thoughts as required in defining the themes and then the sub-themes and the sectors and the sub-sectors we want to be where we want to seek exposure. By that then acquire companies at historically very elevated valuations. By that, we need to build a very high level of conviction that we can develop these companies, that we have that there is sufficient visibility, clarity on the path to growth. Even factoring in that at an exit in four, five, six, seven years, the market environment or the valuations will be lower. That's how we go into transactions. Probably not much different from previous quarters. Maybe the macroeconomic outlook is even a bit more uncertain as people's views deviate a bit as to whether we go into inflationary periods or whether it's inflation paired with stagnation. Certainly not easy. Our ambition as a manager in any case is independently as to where the economy is going, the macro level, that we are outperforming certainly public markets in any cycle, but particularly also in a downward cycle, by investing in very resilient middle market companies that should experience growth despite of the economic environment. Hope this lengthy answer provides at least some insights in our thinking. Perfect. Thank you, Felix. Could you say a few words also about geographic allocations? Do we expect those to change? Maybe particularly looking at emerging markets, do we think we'd do more there? Look, we like emerging markets, particularly because of certain demographics, the rising middle class for consumers, for products. ACT is an example of that. We just acquired, or we are in the closing process of buying. Its services are one of the largest broadband providers in Southern India, where we basically benefit from a growing middle class. However, we also like actually very much buying companies in North America and Europe with an exposure to emerging markets, without being headquartered there. Many of our companies have a very significant portion of revenues or of facilities or in emerging markets. Generally, we like kind of a 40/40/20 split, I would say, among Europe, Americas, and emerging markets. The more detailed split you can see actually on the page in the appendix of our presentation. Well, I think that's about what I can say here. Okay. Thank you. One final question, again, on the senior loan allocation. What is the current yield? I can take that one, Felix. It's about 4.2%. Yeah, let's say straight over 4%. Okay, which I think brings us to the end of the questions from the tool as well. It just remains to thank shareholders again for their time for dialing in today. We do hope you'll dial in in three months' time when the company will provide an update on its 2021 results. You know, thank you once again. Wish you a good day.