Power Aktie

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Power Corporation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded on Friday, July 31, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steven Hung, Head of Investor Relations for Power Corporation. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for Power Corporation's Second Quarter 2026 Results Call. Before we begin, a link to the audio webcast and materials for this call have been posted to our website at powercorporation.com under the Investors tab.

Please turn to Slide 2. I would like to draw your attention to the cautionary note regarding the use of forward-looking statements, which form part of today's remarks. Please also refer to Slide 3 for a note on the use of non-IFRS measures and clarifications on adjusted net asset value.

To discuss our results today are James O'Sullivan, who's appointed President and CEO of Power Corporation on July 1, 2026; and Jake Lawrence, our EVP and CFO. We will begin with opening remarks followed by a question-and-answer session. With that, I'll turn the call over to James.

All right. Well, thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Before turning to the results, I want to share some high-level thoughts.

First, Power has an exceptional culture and team working with its partners right across the group. Having formerly led one of the public operating companies, I understand how Power creates value through active ownership and enable strong collaboration across leadership, capital allocation, strategy and risk. The strong partnership across the Power group of companies will continue to drive strong shareholder returns.

Second, Power has made strong progress against its value creation strategy and investors have benefited from strong total shareholder returns. Power will maintain continuity and strategy and no major changes are anticipated. Transparency and communication remain a top priority and we look forward to engaging with you directly.

Thirdly, in terms of capital allocation, Power will remain focused on investing organically in existing businesses, while being strategic in M&A. Return of capital through dividends and share buybacks will remain a key priority. Power is a patient investor with a longer-term time horizon and decisions are made thoughtfully. Building on the strong execution of the value creation strategy under Jeff Orr's tenure, Power will maintain ongoing momentum. I look forward to your continued support, engagement and dialogue over time.

Now turning to the results. Power reported a strong quarter with record adjusted EPS of $1.55. The results reflected strong earnings growth from Great-West and IGM, continued value creation from our NAV-based businesses as well as a decreasing share count.

Power's net asset value grew 74% year-over-year, led by our publicly traded operating companies. Great-West and IGM continue to track well against their respective medium-term financial objectives. Great-West surpassed 19% base ROE for the second straight quarter and both companies demonstrated strong double-digit adjusted EPS growth. On the NAV-based investments in our portfolio, Wealthsimple posted strong AUA and client growth and the business momentum supported a 15% fair value increase in Wealthsimple.

At Sagard, Power also recognized an 11% increase in fair value. Great-West announced the acquisition of Milliman through its Empower subsidiary, this will enhance its capabilities and contribute to it winning more business. Power also took another step in simplifying our operations by agreeing to sell our interest in LMPG.

Power returned $1.5 billion to shareholders in the first half of the year and buybacks remain an attractive use of capital with Power trading at a 20% discount. Finally, Power has delivered strong historical returns for shareholders over the short and long terms. As a former CEO of an operating subsidiary, I can attest to the Power of active ownership. With that overview, I'll pass it over to Jake to walk through the financial update and business review.

Great. Thanks, James, and good day to everyone joining us today on the line and webcast. I'm going to begin on Slide 7. As you can see, Great-West, IGM and GBL have all reported their respective results over the course of the week, which I think helps us obviously present today.

Turning to Slide 8. Power's adjusted net earnings were $974 million. That is up 10% year-over-year. Our adjusted EPS of $1.55, which, as James noted, is the highest quarterly EPS Power has reported and is up 12% compared to Q2 last year. On a reported basis, Power's net earnings were $690 million and EPS was $1.10.

The Great-West contribution to Power's adjusted net earnings was $871 million, up 10% versus last year. The results were led by double-digit base earnings growth at Empower as well as very strong double-digit growth in the Capital and Risk Solutions business. IGM's contribution in the quarter was $211 million, and that is up 34% year-over-year, very strong and that was led by double-digit growth from both the wealth and the asset management business segments.

Turning to Power's NAV-focused businesses. GBL and Power Sustainable reported a modest loss of $5 million and $4 million, respectively. Meanwhile, Sagard contributed positive adjusted net earnings of $33 million with positive net carry in asset management and the fair value increases in private equity from our investing activities. Corporate operations and other activities contributed a loss of $112 million in the quarter.

Turning to the next slide, Slide 9. NAV per share was $1.12 and $0.94 (sic) [ was $112.94 ] at the end of Q2. As James mentioned, NAV per share is up 74% year-over-year, and it's up 34% quarter-over-quarter. The composition of our gross asset value of $77.4 billion continues to be anchored by our earnings-based businesses. Importantly, I'd note 91% of our gross asset value is related to our public companies, Great-West, IGM and GBL. And when we include cash, this rises to 94%. As of last night's close, the adjusted NAV per share stood at $116.01 reflecting further appreciation in our listed holdings since quarter end.

Turning to our other investments. The fair value of Power's Wealthsimple position was $1.7 billion, net of carried interest. That's up 15% from last quarter, and that's in addition to an increase at the end of 2025. The increase in fair value was supported by stronger business performance and improved revenue expectations at Wealthsimple. The fair value of our ownership in Sagard also increased in the quarter, up 11% and that reflects the platform's continued expansion of capabilities and increasing scale.

In Q2, Power also agreed to sell our interest in LMPG as James noted, and that resulted in a small NAV reduction of $41 million. And then lastly, Power's cash and cash equivalents were $2.2 billion at the end of the quarter, up from $1.7 billion in the same period last year.

Next, I'll walk through the businesses, starting on Slide 10. Starting with Great-West, who reported a strong quarter. Base EPS of $1.42 was up 15% from $1.24 in Q2 of '25, reflecting sustained top line momentum, operating leverage, as well as the impact of share buybacks. Base ROE at Great-West Lifeco West was 19.3% for the quarter, that achieves the company 19% plus midterm objective for the second straight quarter.

As I mentioned, Empower and Capital Risk Solutions both delivered double-digit growth. Cash at Great-West Holding Company was $2.5 billion at the end of the quarter, supporting continued capital flexibility. Great-West repurchased $925 million of its shares on a year-to-date basis. Total capital deployment between share buybacks and the M&A transaction of acquiring Milliman defined benefit business is expected to be at least the same level as 2025 at $1.6 billion.

Looking closer at Empower on Slide 11. Year-over-year base earnings growth was strong, up 34% on a constant currency basis, and the retirement business client assets crossed $2 trillion for the first time. This quarter, Empower also announced the acquisition of Milliman's defined benefit business, strengthening the company's offering to plan sponsors. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of '26, it's going to add 1.5 million participants and an additional $130 billion of client assets in the retirement business.

Next, turning to Slide 12. IGM reported a record quarter of adjusted EPS at $1.41, up 32% year-over-year and ahead of its 9% medium-term earnings target. The results were supported by double-digit earnings growth across each business segment. On a year-to-date basis, IGM returned $386 million to shareholders through a combination of share repurchases and dividends paid.

Net flows across IG Wealth and Mackenzie were strong at $2.2 billion and record ending AUM&A, including strategic investments of $622 billion was up 19% year-over-year and an increase of 9% from last quarter. IGM also announced a multiyear initiative to simplify the organization and accelerate investment in key technology capabilities such as AI, to strengthen the business.

Turning to Slide 13, which takes a deeper look at IGM's results. On a year-over-year basis and by business segment, Wealth Management grew 33%, Asset Management grew 31%, while Corporate and Other, which primarily reflects IGM's proportionate share of Great-West based earnings grew 17%. The wealth business reported record high AUM&A of $176.6 billion, up 20% versus Q2 of 2025. It was also a record second quarter of gross inflows and sales and the 19th consecutive quarter of positive net flows.

In Asset Management, retail net sales of $217 million improved by $360 million from Q2 of $25 million reflecting the business' fourth consecutive quarter of positive retail investment fund net sales.

Turning to the next slide, which shows our strategic investments at IGM. They continue to see impressive client asset growth. On a year-over-year basis, Rockefeller's client assets grew 37% to $318.5 billion, China AMC AUM was up 12% to $608 billion (sic) [ $607.8 billion ] and Northleaf increased client assets 13% to $37.1 billion. These investments significantly broaden IGM's long-term growth profile.

Now moving to Slide 15. As you heard earlier, Wealthsimple's strong business momentum continues as it further increases its scale. Wealthsimple's AUA increase of $30.8 billion from Q1 reflects the company's largest quarter-over-quarter growth in its history. The growth was driven by strong net flows of approximately $17 billion. Power's collective group interest in Wealthsimple, net of carried interest now stands at $4.4 billion, up 15% year-over-year. This includes $2.6 billion at IGM, $1.7 billion at Power Corp and the balance at Great-West and other.

Now turning to GBL on Slide 16. The business has made strong progress on its medium-term plan for portfolio simplification with disposals of more than EUR 5 billion across listed companies and noncore asset sales. Meanwhile, GBL will continue to deploy EUR 2.3 billion into direct private assets through controlled or co-controlled positions. On a year-to-date basis, GBL continued to return capital to shareholders with EUR 773 million of buybacks and dividends. All of these actions are consistent with GBL's strategy of increasing direct private assets while returning capital to shareholders.

Moving to our alternative asset management platforms on Slide 17, which reported total AUM of $69.4 billion at quarter end. These businesses remain focused on increasing scale and growing AUM. On April 2, Sagard closed the previously announced acquisition of Unigestion, which added $15.1 billion of AUM. And despite the challenging fundraising market, Sagard delivered tangible results with approximately $2.6 billion raised in the first half of 2026.

This fundraising was led by strategies in real estate, private equity, venture capital as well as credit. Meanwhile, Power Sustainable's focus remains on converting its momentum into durable third-party AUM, maintaining disciplined investment in risk management in building a larger, scalable and increasingly profitable alternatives platform.

During the quarter, we saw further developments, including Sagard Credit Fund III announced a USD 1 billion of initial commitments towards its $2 billion targets. And this is investments focused on senior unsecured financing to mid-market companies across Canada and the U.S. Also during the quarter, Sagard launched the USD 150 million AI Fund that will be focused on AI infrastructure, cyber security, governance, customer experience, customer engagement and agentic workflows.

And with that, I'm going to turn the call back over to James for some thoughts on value creation and then concluding with closing remarks.

All right. Thanks, Jake. Power Corporation remains focused on building the momentum and its value creation strategy. Slide 19 shows the aggregate capital returned to participating shareholders since 2020, over $12 billion in dividends and share repurchases since we began that program. Returning capital to our shareholders will remain a priority.

Moving to Slide 20. You can see the strong NAV growth Power Corp has delivered since 2020 and with a 20% compound annual growth rate. While the NAV discount is topical, I believe that as Power continues to demonstrate and communicate the value addition from its active ownership, the trading discount can and will meaningfully narrow.

Next, Slide 21 tracks the discount to NAV since 2015. Power Corp is a very different company today versus pre reorganization. At a 20% discount currently, there is much more room to narrow in my view, and Power can focus on adding value by growing the company's net asset value, delivering recurring and predictable returns, continuing to simplify the company over time, and I think communicating the strong value proposition as the one power share essentially gets an investor, 0.98 of a Great-West Life share and everything else for free, including an interest in IGM, GBL, Sagard, Power Sustainable, Wealthsimple and a cash position of $2.2 billion.

Moving to Slide 22. Power's total shareholder returns have materially outperformed both the S&P TSX Financials Index and the broader S&P TSX composite over the measured periods, including the 1-, 3-, 5-, 10- and 30-year periods. We believe these results reflect the successful execution of our value creation strategy, and Power will build on that strong foundation.

Turning to the next slide. Looking ahead, Power is well positioned to generate further attractive returns for shareholders. The 3 pillars remain firmly in place. First, our earnings-focused businesses are showing strong momentum against medium-term objectives. Great-West and IGM should provide low to mid-teens returns as they continue to track well against their respective adjusted EPS growth plus dividend yields.

Second, our NAV-based businesses also offer long-term value creation. GBL Is targeting medium-term double-digit TSR and Wealthsimple continues to grow at a remarkable rate. Power's alternative investment platforms continue to scale their respective platforms. Third, our balance sheet is strong with $1.8 billion of available cash, supporting continued and growing return of capital through dividends and share buybacks, which in turn drives per share growth in NAV, earnings and dividends.

I am confident with the foundation and momentum that Power and its group of companies have been able to deliver against these objectives. This quarter was another example of the strong execution of the value creation strategy that I look forward to continuing to build upon. Thank you, everyone. And operator, I believe we're ready to take questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question comes from Doug Young with Desjardin Capital Markets.

James, you mentioned at the end in your prepared remarks, like simplifying the story further over time. And A lot of work has been done over the last 6, 7 years. And now finally, I guess, the LPMG stake has been small, but it was kind of -- it was renewed now. So maybe you can you walk through a little bit about what else can be done to simplify the story. I've some thoughts, but I'd love to hear what you have to say. And then just thinking about timing of these items as well.

Sure. When I think about simplification, I think about specific investments or properties that are perhaps held in more than one place. Is there an opportunity to consolidate those in a single place? I think we made great progress there between Power and IGM with China AMC a few years ago. I think that was a very good example of a simplification initiative.

I also think about types of businesses that are perhaps similar where they're owned in multiple places. Is there an opportunity to rethink, to consolidate to make them stronger, perhaps by bringing them together. So I think this is a multiyear journey. I think we're well into it. There is more to do. I'm not going to attach kind of specific initiatives or specific time lines to it though. I am kind of 30 days into the job.

But I think this initiative of simplification has been, frankly, one of the more important contributors to the market kind of really kind of recognizing the value creation within the group over the past several years. So we'll carry on with it, but it's just very difficult at this point for me to point to what's next or when it's next. But simplification is very much something that's front of mind for me.

Okay. Appreciate it. And then just on Wealthsimple, another revaluation this quarter. Any thoughts -- like how often -- I know there's growth and there's an explanation about why it happened this quarter. But how often should we -- outside of just funding around, should we expect revaluation of Wealthsimple? And what else can we expect maybe disclosure-wise, because to get a sense of how to think about the valuation of Wealthsimple?

Yes, good question. Well, a couple of thoughts on Wealthsimple. The first thing I would say is I've served on the Board there now for a couple of years. We just had a Board meeting on Monday of this week. Momentum has never been stronger. Their performance against their KPIs is very, very strong. I think the company continues to move, Doug, from strength to strength. And so to your specific question, what I would say is the value is revisited every quarter.

We have a rigorous process internally led by the team at IGM, it includes people at Power, it includes external people as well. We're obliged to look at it every quarter, and we do look at it every quarter. And it was really the remarkable progress relative to plan, frankly, and the forward outlook for the business that resulted in the 15% increase. So plan, performance against plan and outlook are the biggest, biggest drivers, and those are what support the increase.

We did disclose -- I think Jake just spoke briefly to the flows in Wealthsimple for the quarter. So that is additive in terms of disclosure. I think to this point, we've disclosed the assets, we've disclosed clients. Now we've got flows. I think your point is a very reasonable one. I think as this becomes a bigger and bigger share of IGM as it becomes a bigger share of Power Corp. indeed on a consolidated basis. The market will be looking for and deserves incremental disclosure, we'll do what we can in pursuit of that. I think it's a reasonable request.

The next question comes from Matthew Fortini with CIBC.

Matthew on for Scott here. I just wanted to ask about the Wealthsimple revaluation since we didn't get the chance to ask on the IGM call yesterday. Clearly, the impressive $17 billion of net flows in the quarter was a significant factor. I'm wondering if you can give some color into what drove those flows in the quarter and where or what product lines that were concentrated in across the platform.

Yes. Thanks for the question. Very, very broad-based. The remarkable thing about Wealthsimple is that it's not just a trading platform. Although it is that, it's a very good one at that. But it's trading, it's investing, it's saving, it's banking, it's crypto, it's tax, and soon, no doubt, it will be predictions. And I can assure you that the -- there's good growth kind of across the board.

Their trading business, in particular, is just moving from kind of strength to strength, and you see that in the flows. And there are also, as you know, driving very strong flows from kind of the domestic competition. Some of those are wealth managers, some of them are banks. But it's coming into the Wealthsimple ecosystem.

And I think the real strength of Wealthsimple is that when they get a customer, when they get flows, they get to know you real quickly and they get to know what the right next product is for you. So the flows are really just step one in terms of building a deep and sustainable relationship. And I think that's part of their secret sauce, frankly.

Okay. And maybe another quick one for me. On the LMPG sale, can you give us a sense of how much the business was carried out in the NAV? And should we expect the proceeds to further support the buyback? Or do you have another use of the proceeds in mind?

Yes. So it was marked on the books just under $90 million. The proceeds will be about half of that. We expect those proceeds to come in during Q3. Later today, frankly, if all goes according to plan. And frankly, it's with our cash balance at $2.2 billion and are available at $1.8 billion, that amount coming in is it's quite fungible. It's just going to move in. And so it will be part of our overall capital allocation strategy. It doesn't really skew us to say this incremental amount will go to this activity. So it will just fall into our overall pool of capital that we have available to make choices with.

The next question comes from Michael Mccue from TD Securities.

On for Graham here. Just first question. Just obviously, the buyback is topical. Just noticed with IGM accelerating the pace of their buyback, the ownership stake started to creep up a little bit at the Power level. And just wondering if there's any sort of intention to maintain a certain ownership stake in the way that you have by participating in the Great-West buyback.

Yes. It's James. I'll start and then Jake will add to it. I mean where I'd start is we do own a higher -- we have a higher shareholding measured in percentage terms in Great-West Life than we do in IGM. And to be perfectly candid, I'm very happy to own more IGM. And so if that occurs as a result of not participating in their buyback. I think it's just fine.

I have exceptionally high regard for their core businesses and their strategic businesses. I think they've been re-architected for growth for diversification. And I think the market is increasingly recognizing that. Having said all of that, we'll revisit this. By this, I mean whether we should or should not participate in IGM's share buybacks. We'll revisit it as we move through the year and as they start to think about what they might do next year.

But certainly, for the time being, I'm very happy. We are very happy to own more of IGM. And one way that I look at this is that, that buyback, which is substantial at 5%. I think that provides very strong support for the minority shareholders of IGM. And I think they deserve it, and I'm very happy to see that. So I think everyone gets something here. The minority shareholders get a stronger market with strong support in the market, and we get to own a bit more of a great business.

James, I think it's a good to answer, nothing to add.

Okay. Great. And then just if I may, a second one, just the outlook on fundraising for the remainder of the year. just sort of at the Sagard level holistically. And then specifically as regards to the private credit fund, it looks like you're about halfway to the $2 billion target, just the outlook for the remainder of 2026.

Yes. I think '26 has been an interesting year, just given all the volatility and uncertainty and different events that have taken place and that obviously impacts allocators of capital, particularly in the investment space. So Sagard, as I noted, has had a good start to the year at about $2.6 billion I think on the IGM call, they noted a strong quarter from Northleaf as well.

So in terms of outlook, we're hoping it continues at or near the pace we're at now for the balance of the year. We've seen strength so far this year around real estate, private equity Portage closed Fund IV on the VC side that went well. And as you noted, credit has done fine. I know there's lots of newspaper articles. And I'd just remind people that the credit business at Sagard is mid-market.

It has de minimis exposure into the software space, and it's very much focused on, I'd say, that mid-market cash flow and EBITDA business. So their strategies under Adam Vigna have performed well and that's why they've been able to fundraise in the space and they're halfway to the $2 billion goal. So we're optimistic that the challenging fundraising space that existed probably for part of '24 through '25 and into '26 starts to subside, and we see some stronger ones, but we're encouraged.

And I think part of the strategy that I'd note also is away from the organic fundraising, we did close Unigestion in the quarter, and now we see Sagard at almost CAD 70 billion AUM, and that really creates a nice earnings management stream for them as we move forward.

The next question comes from Bart Dziarski with RBC.

Maybe just on the SHMI revaluation, could you unpack the drivers of that between, I guess, the Wealthsimple mark would have had to flow through and the BEX deal closing?

Bart, thanks for the question. So yes, the Sagard revaluation in the quarter is up 11%. And I was just commenting on the Unigestion transaction. Obviously, BEX also has closed recently. A revaluation on the business we've done in the second half of '25. And since then, lots of great milestones have taken place. So they're now through that easily CAD 50 billion in assets under management.

They continue to build out capabilities. The Unigestion and BEX transactions bring in much stronger capabilities in Europe and a much stronger private equities platform with secondaries, primary and co-ownership. I'd say, one of the interesting things is the forecast and the earnings of the business is as strong as it's been in the past several years and continues to grow well.

I think the trick is when we look at the valuations of alt managers, which I think I know you do full time in your day job, those valuations have compressed. So if we go back a year when things were trading at 30x FRE, this would have been a much higher revaluation, but we're still quite encouraged at the 11% mark, which does reflect the growing management fees, which does reflect the carry, as you noted in the business, which has been quite strong from Wealthsimple, but also from other investments within the venture cap and private equity portfolios, and it really represents a strong maturing business that deserves a higher valuation, and we expect that to continue over time. And we'll revisit when it deserves it.

Much like Wealthsimple. There's third-party investors here. So there's an independent party involved in this valuation exercise. And so we find ourselves very comfortable with the market and are quite happy to see Sagard valued north of $1 billion as we lead the quarter.

That's very helpful. And maybe just a follow-up for James. I know you're 30 days in the seat, James, but would love any early observations from your seat now at Power versus IGM as to -- early takes, early reads, what surprised you? What are you seeing there?

Sure. Well, okay, a few thoughts. I mean the first thing I would say is that I think the market is clearly recognizing the accomplishments right across this group that have been years in the making. And so I do want to emphasize what I said in my prepared remarks, which is that the principal theme, as we sit here today is kind of continuity and strategy, there's not going to be any sharp turns, no turns left, no turns right.

Our goal very much is to maintain the momentum that we have built over the past several years. And I think the way we're going to maintain momentum is through what we call active ownership. Power Corp has had a mission statement for some number of years on our website. And for me, the key words in it are active ownership. We add value kind of vertically through the group. We add value horizontally across the group, and we do that by being good active owners. So we lean in on strategy, capital allocation, people, risk. But all of that, I think, is very, very additive the value, both of the publicly traded operating companies as well as Power Corp overall.

Maybe just a thought on priorities. For me, always sustainably growing the dividend is job #1 over time. I mean that's the principal way of returning cash and certainly the most regular way of returning cash to shareholders. A critically important driver, I think, of total shareholder return. So we want to sustainably grow the dividend. This management team is very committed to growing the net asset value, and we're going to do what we can to narrow the trading discount.

And I think the way to narrow the trading discount is going to be to really focus on the quality of our active ownership. We need to do it and we need to communicate it. And there's lots of levers for us to pull along the way. I think we've been very clear over the years that if you look at our operating companies, they have remarkable growth opportunities, both organically and inorganically, and there's plenty for us to do up top at Power Corp.

We can grow the alternatives businesses. That's a priority. We can continue to simplify as we discussed earlier, and we can buy back shares. There's going to be lots to do, I think, to drive value. And so let me just summarize by saying I'm very excited to be here. I look forward to meeting each of you on the line and communicating a path forward that I'm confident will create more value for our shareholders.

There are no further questions. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Steven Hung for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. Following the call, a telephone replay will be available later this morning, and the webcast will be archived on our website at powercorporation.com for 1 year. We look forward to our next update on our Q3 results, and have a great summer. This concludes the call.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect your lines.

Ladies and gentlemen, the time set for the Annual Meeting of Shareholders has come, and I hereby call the meeting to order. As you can see, simultaneous interpretation is available. My name is Paul Desmarais and standing next to me are Mr. Jeffrey Orr, President and Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Stephane Lemay, Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary. As Chairman of the Board, I'm responsible for chairing this meeting. Mr. Lemay will serve as Secretary. We are delighted to welcome you today, and we also welcome those who are watching the meeting via the webcast. I must say that I don't remember having seen so many people at this meeting for a long time, and it must be because of Jeff.

At this meeting, we may make statements containing forward-looking information. I would like to draw your attention to the visuals, where if you can read it, you're lucky. So I invite you to read all of this as you wish. Throughout the meeting [ we will address ] specific questions on formal items of business, and we'll have the opportunity to ask those questions and before we proceed to vote on specific items as well. We will also have a question period, of course, as you all know, at the end of the meeting. I note the presence of Mr. Welchinski and Madam [indiscernible] Deloitte, the corporation's auditors.

I hereby appoint Mrs. Pina Pacifico and Mrs. Teresa de Luo of Computershare as scrutineers for this meeting and authorize them to submit the attendance list.

Mr. Chair, we would like to confirm that our shareholders are present here in person or by proxy, 85% of those who are admissible for the vote. There are shareholders or proxy holders present at this meeting, representing in person or by proxy, 80.5% of the total eligible votes at the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you very much. The Secretary has informed me that the notice of this meeting and the related documents have been mailed in accordance with applicable requirements. I therefore confirm that we have a quorum and that the notice of meeting was sent with respect in compliance with the requirements. I therefore state that this meeting is duly constituted and I also open up the vote for all of the items on the agenda. Some of the items will be voted on. Some of you have already voted by proxy on these items and, of course, do not need to vote again. Registered shareholders or their proxies who have not yet voted on the agenda items will have received 3 ballots for this purpose upon registration.

If, however, that is not the case or if you wish to change your vote, please raise your hand now or before the vote on each item of the agenda and the scrutineer will provide you with the ballots. Are there any raised hands? Seeing none, that is fine. We're an organized group, as I can see. This is the adoption of financial statements. As permitted by applicable law, we have used notice and access to deliver our 2026 management proxy circular and our annual financial statements and related management discussion and analysis. Shareholders have received by mail a notice of access notification providing information on how to access these documents. Copies of the annual financial statements are available on our website and on our profile on SEDAR+. At this point, we're moving on to the other items on the agenda. I'd like to ask Mr. Jeff Orr to make a few comments.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to all. We're very pleased to be able to welcome you here today to our annual meeting online and those of you joining us online, we also like to welcome you. Thank you for joining us online, thank you for being here. 2025 was a significant year for Power. We celebrated our 100th anniversary. It was an opportunity to reflect on the journey that has brought us thus far. And Power truly has a rich history. It is a history that has been built decade after decade, thanks to the talent of our employees and the trust of our business and community partners and as well -- so thanks to our community partners. Throughout the year, we have held several events to honor those who have contributed to the company's success, both past and present.

Among other things, a cocktail reception was held here in Montreal, which brought together more than 400 of our community partners with whom we work. It was very important for us to thank them. Their work reflects a long-standing conviction at Power, the importance of acting as a socially responsible company. We are proud to support numerous community organizations whose remarkable work improves the lives of thousands of people every single day. This pride is shared by all of the companies in our group.

In this regard, the Power Group contributed $49 million to more than 4,000 community organizations. This approach is also deeply rooted in our core values, trust, respect, integrity and social responsibility. 2025 was a very strong year for Power, and we continued that momentum into 2026. But we are in an environment of heightened risk, geopolitical risk, economic risk, technological risk. We also have high inflation that is lingering, which not only affects financial markets, but is obviously putting stress on many people in our society. But at the same time, there's lots of opportunity in front of us. The macro factors have, in fact, been very positive. Stock markets have kept going up. Interest rates are quite supportive of our business. Investors have done very well. They're confident. So all of these factors, combined with the momentum that we have across the Power Group has contributed to record financial results and outstanding shareholder returns.

Let us begin with our financial results. Power delivered a solid performance in 2025. Power's adjusted net earnings reached $3.5 billion, a 14% increase compared to 2024. Net earnings came in at $2.6 billion. And the adjusted net earnings per share increased by 16% to $5.31. Net earnings per share was at $4.01. We have continued this momentum in 2026. Yesterday, Power released its financial results for the first quarter of 2026 and adjusted net earnings per share reached $1.43, up 17% from the first quarter of 2025. And the net earnings was -- per share was at $1.29 per share. So as you know, that Power has a long history of increasing its dividend. In the first quarter of 2026, Power announced a 9% increase in its dividend just as we did in the first quarter of 2025, and this was for Q1. So following our recent announcement, the quarterly dividend has increased to $0.6675 per share.

If we look over the last 5 years to 2020, there was an increase of more than 50% over that same period. In 2025 as well, we repurchased shares for the amount of $700 million. So combined with dividends paid as well as shares buybacks, returned back more than $2.3 billion to our shareholders last year. As well, share buybacks are continuing in 2026. So once again, if you look back in 2020, we returned more than $11 billion to our shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks.

Results, the return of capital as well as the momentum being enjoyed across Power's businesses have produced extraordinary returns for our shareholders. When you compare Power's returns to the TSX or TSX Financial, we have produced really strong returns, whether you look over shorter periods, 1, 3, 5 years or if you stretch it out over longer periods going all the way out to 30 years, Power Corp shareholders have enjoyed superior returns to our relevant benchmarks. So 100 years ago, Power actually was a power company. That's what we did. It's not a name that we picked up to assume that we have strength or anything like that, we were producing hydroelectric facilities to provide energy to a growing country. Now today, we're a financial services company. We own and oversee leading financial services company in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia. Great-West, IGM and GBL are 3 public companies that we own. And together, they have a market capitalization in excess of $100 billion. We're also building alternative asset management businesses being Sagard and Power Sustainable.

Our companies help people build financial security. That's what we do. We provide financial advice. We provide insurance products, investment products, income security products to provide financial securities. And we do so through 3 channels: financial advisers who deal with their clients, and most of our businesses deal through financial advisers, be Canada Life, IG Wealth, Mackenzie, Rockefeller in the States, Empower, Irish Life, we also work through employers. So we go through people and get to people at their place of work and help them and Empower, Canada Life and Irish Life are very big in these channels.

And increasingly, with technology, we're dealing directly with clients. And the best example of that would be what we're doing at Wealthsimple. In total, we serve over 45 million people in North America and Europe. And we have over $4 trillion of our clients' assets on our various platforms through these companies I just described. Now over time, our strategies change with opportunities and changing risk. But fundamentally, the way we approach our businesses, our investing principles, they have remained the same for decades. We take a long-term perspective. We either have leading franchises or we have a view to being able to build a leading franchise. We have a very active governance model, and we take a prudent approach to risk with a very strong financial position. That was true for 40 years ago and it's true today.

So Great-West has leading positions in each of its geographic markets and across its lines of business. Its lines of business are retirement, wealth management, insurance and group benefits. Now including in the U.S. now, where Empower alone now serves 20 million people in the U.S. and it's become Great-West Life's largest segment. Empower is actively building its brand in the U.S. through advertising, sponsorship and thought leadership. For example, Empower Field, where the Denver Broncos play used to be called Mile High Stadium for those of you who grew up with that, it's now Empower Field. And we've also got numerous golf sponsorships as an example, including Cameron Young, the Players Champion and hottest golfer in golf right now.

Over the last 5 years, Great-West has produced excellent financial results. It publicly stated financial objectives 5 years ago, and it has exceeded or met every single objective that it published, enjoying great results. Now IGM has got leading positions in its 2 core sectors being wealth management and asset management. Its core companies, core businesses in Wealth Management is IG Wealth Management and in Asset Management is Mackenzie. Those are the more mature businesses producing the bulk of the income. And they have had excellent financial performance over the last few years and are enjoying very strong inflows from their clients.

But IGM also has a portfolio of emerging businesses, what they call the strategic investments, not producing a lot of income today, but are going to, if all things continue this way, be the companies producing the income 5 and 10 years from now. And the growth of these businesses is shown on this slide. Wealthsimple alone, 74% growth in assets over 12 months. Rockefeller, our New York-based wealth management company, 25% growth. You can see it across the board. These companies are really enjoying fantastic growth. And financially, IGM itself announced 2 years ago its own financial objectives publicly. And after 2 years, is well ahead of its 9% earnings per share growth target, having achieved 14% per year compounded over the last 2 years.

Let us turn to Groupe Bruxelles Lambert, GBL. It's one of Europe's leading holding companies. It is a leading active investor on the continent focused on long-term value creation. In 2025, GBL continued to implement its strategy of focusing more on private assets and returning capital to its shareholders. GBL has also generated attractive returns for Power and its shareholders. In 2025, it notably distributed EUR 1 billion to shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks, and it delivered a total return to shareholders of 23.2%.

Six years ago, at the time of its reorganization, Power announced a strategy to support the growth of its alternative asset management platform, Sagard and Power Sustainable. These platforms invest in private companies. They select and manage portfolios that are composed of equities and credit instruments. Since the announcement of the strategy, assets under management have increased more than tenfold. Almost all of this growth comes from capital raised from investors other than Power. This was, in fact, our intention from the outset.

Sagard is one of the fastest-growing alternative asset managers, and that is seeing the greatest growth. It focuses primarily on the mid-market, as we like to say. In 2025, Sagard launched Sagard Private Equity Solutions, and this was the result of 3 separate acquisitions, Unigestion, Performance Equity Management and BEX Capital, which enabled the creation of a global leader in private equity solutions for the mid-market. And so today, Sagard manages over $64 billion in assets and employs over 500 professionals. On its side, Power Sustainable was established in 2020. Today, it offers 4 highly attractive products and has over $4 billion in assets under management. Power Sustainable relies on excellent investment managers with impressive track records as well in 2026, Power sustainable priority remains raising additional capital to continue its growth in the 4 strategies that are in very relevant asset categories.

If you go back over the last decade, the advent of personal computers, the Internet, mobility, digitalization, we've gone through massive changes. And on the horizon is AI. You cannot open any piece of paper, any website without talking about AI. It offers tremendous promise and it offers for society and for people. And for companies like us, it offers the possibility of serving our clients in a much better way and gaining greater productivity. But also many risks, including what bad actors can do with technology, impacts on employment. There's lots of things that are out there that are unknown. I will say that previous leaps in technology have resulted in massive improvements in standards of living and improve the lot of society overall. So we'll see how AI plays out. But we are all over it.

If we go back 10 years ago, Power faced similar uncertainty with what was happening in fintech. It was -- we were excited about what it could do, but we were worried about it disrupting us. So we adopted a multifaceted strategy, including becoming a leading investor in fintech companies. And that produced 3 meaningful benefits. First of all, we own many great companies, Wealthsimple being the leading example, but we also bought Personal Capital in the U.S., which is now part of Empower. We created partnerships between the fintech companies and our incumbent businesses. So Nesto Mortgages, Conquest Planning, they're embedded into the offerings of IG Wealth Management, for example.

Perhaps most importantly, we took a massive step forward in the knowledge and the attitudes of our management teams being exposed to new technologies, and we're in a much better place and a much more agile place than we were 10 years ago. So the Power Group is approaching AI with the experience and the playbook and the confidence gained from its fintech activities. I would say we're like a hockey team that has learned from the experience of its previous playoff series, and we're poised to achieve even greater success in the next round. How did that get there? Where is [ Ian ]? I don't know how that snuck into there. This is an annual meeting. We need a little to quorum around here.

I want to make a few comments on leadership transition. If you go back over the past 12 months or so, the leadership -- CEO leadership has been transitioned to GBL, IGM, Great-West Life and Power Corp. This is part of a well-planned succession process. It demonstrates the depth of talent we have across our group, and it provides continuity and builds on the momentum that we're enjoying. So if you go back to last year in May, we just announced that Johannes Huth was taking over as Managing Director, essentially CEO of GBL with Ian Gallienne moving to Chair and Mr. Paul Desmarais moving from Chair to Vice Chair. July 1 of last year, David Harney became CEO of Great-West Lifeco, replacing Paul Mahon, who had been in the role and very successfully built the business over 10 years.

And then in February this year, IGM announced its own transition as part of Power Corp's leadership transition, where we announced James O'Sullivan coming in to be President and CEO of Power on July 1 with me becoming Vice Chair. So as part of that, Damon Murchison was named CEO of IGM, and he will remain in his role as CEO of IG Wealth. And Damon is going to do a great job. He's a tremendous leader, great, great knowledge of the industry. He's been 11 years at Mackenzie and IG Wealth, really great stuff. Now James O'Sullivan had 30 years of experience prior to becoming CEO of IGM. He's got vast leadership experience across many parts of the financial services business. At IGM, let's just say the business is much stronger today than it was 6 years ago. He strengthened the core businesses of IG Wealth and Mackenzie. He strengthened the portfolio of strategic investments that I showed you earlier. The leadership bench has been strengthened. The financial results have been great and shareholders have done extremely well.

James is going to bring his experience, his leadership skills, his judgment, his intellect his values, his integrity to the role of CEO of Power, and he's going to do a fantastic job. Congratulations, James. Great. We look forward to welcoming you and Lucy to Montreal. So before I close and pass it back to the Chair, if you'll permit me, I make some personal reflections on a couple of years around the group. First thing, I am really, really confident about the future of Power Corporation. We have got leadership and people. That's the main thing. It is so strong. Our franchises are in great shape. They have strong momentum, and we have the proven power approach to investing and managing our businesses. Most importantly, we have the best ownership situation imaginable.

I'll tell you my story of coming to Power. 25 years ago, I decided to join the group after 20 years at BMO Nesbitt Burns. I had been working over those 20 years closely with Power, which was our largest client. I made the decision with Susie as I've done every other major decision in my life for the last 46 years. Just by way of example, of Susie and my relationship, I've been -- this is my 25th year as a CEO at a public company on stage for AGMs, and Susie has been there for 25 of those AGMs. But more importantly, she's there the other 364 days of the year as my partner in life. So I was happy at BMO Nesbitt Burns, but working on all these deals with Paul, with André, with Robert Gratton, who did so much to contribute to the growth of Power Corporation.

I come back and the quality of the discussions and the depth of what we went through, the long-term nature, the get the facts before you decide, just the decency of the people. I came home to Susie and I said, "You know what, I want to spend the rest of my career working with those people." I wasn't running from something. I was going to something. And I would say, Paul and André, I'll say this to the two of you, it starts with you, whether you say that or realize that, your long-term perspective, your engagement in the business, the values you bring, the fairness you continually demonstrate, that sets the foundation for the rest of the management teams and the Boards to do what they do. You set that foundation and then we can do what we do. And I believe that's our long-term competitive advantage. I think the only real long-term competitive advantage is people and culture.

And we're able to attract people and when they come, they don't leave. They don't want to leave because there's too much fun to work here, and we end up building this great culture and taking great long-term decisions. And as great as it is, I have no doubt it can get even better, and it will get better as we move forward. So I just want to say how fortunate and lucky I feel to have had this opportunity to be part of this for all these years. to Paul and André, to you, to my fellow directors, previous directors, Power Financial Directors and previous Power Financial Directors, the teams my previous colleagues, looking at you, [ Greg ], but there's many others as well. Thanks for being here and at the subs as well. Thank you so much. It has really been an honor and a pleasure to serve all of you. Thank you.

Thank you, Jeff, for those very generous comments to say the least. I must say I'm quite touched by your comments myself. And -- but let me make a few reflections on what Jeff was talking about on -- and congratulations for an incredible year and incredible results, hard to not be excited. But I'm very pleased to join him in order to thank our employees and our management and teams for these sound results. It's always gratifying to share positive news with our shareholders. So today, I would like to speak to you about an important element of the Power group that Jeff mentioned, that is leadership transitions in our teams.

Over the past year, Power Corporation and each of its 3 publicly traded operating companies have all announced, as you saw, new Chief Executive appointments. At Power, we have always believed that leadership transitions should be approached and addressed with care, discipline and a view to ensuring continuity in our individuals. A core part of our stewardship is the way in which we approach these decisions through close alignment, I would say, as Jeff mentioned, between ownership, management that works closely with them and the Board with whom we work. We have a clear sense of direction as well. There will not be confusion after the 40 years that we've been here. And it's very much the case with the changes that we announced in February. As you know, as of July 1, Mr. Orr will become Vice Chair of the Corporation, and Mr. James O'Sullivan will become President and Chief Executive Officer.

I'd like to recognize to start with Jeff's outstanding contribution. He has had a remarkable career in Canadian business and finance, spanning more than 4 decades. Before joining Power Group in 2001 as President and CEO of Investors Group and later of IGM Financial, he built an outstanding career at the Bank of Montreal. And thank God, we were able to lure him away, I have to say. As a young investment banker, Jeff was involved -- imagine this in Power Financial's first initial public offering, which, by the way, is quite funny because we toured the country. Remember what happened, nobody was interested to talk about that. I've just been named President, so you can imagine. I was a little depressed. It wasn't going very well. And then we made up for it after, I guess. But -- it is quite an incredible thing in history, both for the company and for him that this early connection from our organization was there.

And when you think of it, 2 decades later, that connection comes full swing and he becomes President and CEO of the company. I mean, who would have guessed that, right? And we were pretty young at the time, Jeff. Jeff has now been with the Power Group for over 25 years, as he mentioned. During that time, most recently over the past 6 years as President, CEO of Power Corporation. He was instrumental in strengthening and repositioning Power and deepening our leadership bench, big, big deal. It sounds easy, very difficult. We reached outside, and I'll talk about that in a minute and inside and maintaining focus, of course, on long-term value creation. That has got to be one of our differentiating factors here that Jeff, in fact, when I think of you, Jeff, I think of CEOs that behave like owners, like Jeff cares. It's his company. And you know what, that makes a big, big difference to everybody, including the owners.

It's very touching to see somebody sometimes geez, he seems to like this place better than I do. It just really is attached to it. So it's a big deal. Now during the financial crisis, I'd say with a lot of calm and discipline and clarity of purpose, Jeff played a central role in steering our group through this profound disruption. I can tell you there probably wasn't a day where Jeff would come in the office and say, "Paul and Andy, I think we have a problem." And I felt my face would go white like the sheet. And I knew how bad it was depending on his look on his face. But I remember a particular problem with Putnam, where I thought we're going to lose billions. And we -- he stayed calm. "Paul going to deal with this. We're going to do this, that, that," and we got through it despite the regulators wanting to go after us, as you recall.

But in the year since, Jeff has been the driving force in achieving meaningful progress, of course, with our group companies. In the end, that's pretty exciting. As Chair of the Board of Great-West and IG, which is really the big job of the CEO of Power Financial, that's what it is, is to work with our group companies. He championed those strategic initiatives that are -- got us really going in a great direction. He got -- we deployed Empower, looks easy now because it's going well. But you can imagine how we debated that and weren't sure what we were going to do.

And finally, we said we're going for it. And Jeff was right there to make his recommendations. Now the second largest retirement service company, as he pointed out in the U.S. He also supported the acceleration of the alternative asset management business and the continued development of our fintech strategy, which, again, we used to read this in the newspapers. And every time you read about it in the papers, you always think "Oh my God, we're going to go broke, we're in trouble. These people are going to disrupt us. We're in trouble." And finally, at one point, we sat down and we said, "We're going to stop reading about this. Why don't we just do it"?

And I remember when we had our meetings with Andy, Jeff and I, and we all said we're going to give $200 million into that thing. And we said -- at the time, we said to the team, kill us, if you can disrupt the hell out of us. And they did, and they're disrupting a lot of people, but we learned a lot. And through that, Jeff was able to build incredible excitement in the group companies as well. And James made this point recently at a Board meeting. The excitement that's been generated by our fintech group and our group companies with the young people and the energy that's been going on there is very exciting. And Jeff, you're at the helm of all that decision-making.

Power today, as Jeff put, I think the numbers speak for themselves, is well positioned with strong operating businesses. Big thing in our group, strong balance sheet. We're obsessed with it and clear strategic direction. And we're -- as my father would say, Paul, hang on to that cash. And we got a lot of it, I have to say. So that's also you leave at a moment where I don't think we've ever held as much cash in the group in -- ever in our history. But beyond strategy and results, Jeff's leadership has been marked by a strong sense of stewardship. I was kind of alluding to it earlier. He has consistently attracted, mentored, empowered talented leaders and has reinforced a culture that combines solid performance with always responsibility.

And I think people are confident, Jeff, when we have leaders, as you said, that culturally, we've got their back. We know you're going to take some risks. We know it's dangerous, but we're going to take those risks. We're going to take those chances, and we're taking them together, which is a big deal. we took our decisions together and with the people implementing those things. And I think those people always felt we had their back. And I think that's a big deal because I think that's what permits us to do the kind of wild things that we're doing like Wealthsimple, who would ever do that and all kinds of other things. I mean I could go through each company and talk about all the innovations that we've taken on. But to sum it up, on behalf of my brother, the Board and all shareholders, I want to thank Jeff for his extraordinary contribution. We are privileged that we will continue as Vice-Chair. I'm thrilled by that, Jeff. That doesn't happen often either.

And usually often the CEO that's coming in doesn't want that. But shows you the generosity of James who says the company matters. And Jeff could be good advice. Of course, we're going to keep Jeff. And that's the kind of leadership that we look for. So your experience, Jeff, sound judgment, deep knowledge of our group is of huge value. And thank you for staying with us. So as we look ahead, André and I, who have been very aligned on these things, I also want to welcome James O'Sullivan to his new role. James is an accomplished executive with deep experience across multiple segments. As Jeff has said, I won't repeat them. But at the helm of IG, you've done, let's call it, a hell of a job. And there, again, you've been gutsy. You've done new areas, new things. And you've shown great leadership, too. The people in that firm, you can see it. They just love you. They love working for you. That's a big deal. And to be able to do that and bring that kind of loyalty in any operation, I think it is a fabulous quality that we think the world of.

So during your tenure, you've worked closely also with senior leadership. So that's another fabulous thing. It's not like James just running one company. He's on the Board of Great-West and some of our group companies, Wealthsimple, as I recall, and others. And therefore, he knows our businesses. He's worked with us. He's seen our culture. He knows how we think. And he brings in all this vision and experience, of course, that this role requires. He brings a deep set of profoundly grounded values. I underline that because that's very important to André and I, and an integrity to closely align with the culture and our values. that really have defined our group. And Jeff, you couldn't have expressed this better. It was very touching that you would do that. So James is here with us today. And James, would you plan -- please stand and be recognized actually. Now we can see you.

James, we've got a bet in the office now. James, you're clearly jumping ahead on the French lessons. I'm taking a bet with some of my colleagues that decided to learn Italian, and I don't want to see if I'm going to beat them to the race or they're going to beat me. So we're going to see here who wins this race. I'm getting nervous. James clearly is jumping ahead here. So James, thank you for being here. This transition gives me the opportunity to speak more broadly about succession, people and governance. As I mentioned, effectively managing leadership succession is among the most important tasks of any board. Eventually, succession must happen. And ideally, it happens at a time and in a way that provides continuity and builds on momentum that is already in place at Power and across our group.

Succession planning is not something that begins when changes near, it is rather a constant focus that benefits from years of attention, honest evaluation and a willingness to think well beyond the immediate horizon. It follows a playbook that has been used by Power for close to 6 decades. It began with my father. It is leadership transitions that are planned well in advance and with discipline. And the Boards of Directors are actively involved in the process that is owners and management.

We focus not only on the next appointment, but on the broader continuity of the business, the development leaders over time and the preservation of sustained progress of our operations. Most of the CEOs appointed at our group companies have come from within the Power Group, though there have been notable and highly successful exceptions, including James, who was appointed CEO of IGM Financial. Succession planning is rooted in our management philosophy and its underlying principles have remained consistent despite changing environments that we have operated in.

Within the Power Group provide concrete successful examples of our special recipe, let's call it that, in this regard. You can now see a few of these examples on the screen. Over time, we have also built highly effective management teams, bringing together individuals of various experiences, backgrounds and complementary skill sets. We will continue to build on that strength and by attracting deeply -- highly talented people who share our common values. One thing that struck me when they sent you these pictures, it really strikes you more than the words. Not a lot of people there. And think of all the years, we're talking over 40 years.

Think of all the corporations you know everywhere changing CEO over 5 years. At the most, they say, "Oh my God, 10 years, he's enough. Take him out. It's too long," not here. No way. Here, when we've got good people and they're well and they're energetic, we ride with them until the end. And then when it's the end, we invite them to stay. So that is the circle of how we've done this, and I think it's really important. So it now brings me to the governance. Our governance model has been refined over decades in a way that Power conducts itself as an active shareholder involved through its group companies, Board of Directors and with management in all matters of -- and we keep it simple, strategic direction, leadership, capital allocation and dividend policy. We rely on management -- I'd like to sum it up this way. We rely on management to propose strategic plans and the Boards of Directors and of course, the owners to approve these plans after appropriate discussion.

We then entrust the management team's responsibility to execute those plans, we don't get in the middle of it. We let them do their job, but we monitor their execution. And so we're always yin and yang between management, owners and boards, and you're always working together, and I think that's a big part of our recipe. Andy and I, in particular, are highly conscious of our dual role as both the controlling shareholders and as members of the Board of Directors of our group companies. Those are both separate responsibilities, and they're important ones. This model has been one of the group's great strengths. Our approach is rooted in disciplined thinking and a commitment to resilience over the long term rather than being driven, of course, by short-term market pressures. It is our firm and deeply held intention to continue to guide with this approach.

As I conclude my remarks, I'm proud to say that we approach the future from a position of strength. We have strong businesses. We have experienced boards and talented leadership teams as well. And throughout the entire group, we can count on extremely talented people across our companies whose commitment and professionalism deserve our profound gratitude. And James comes to Power Corporation, I feel confident because I know that you have people around you like Jake and Claude, who work with Jeff and who will be working with you. And that is a really major asset that you've been able to build, Jeff.

And it is also an asset that gives me a great deal of confidence vis-a-vis our future and everything that we can continue to accomplish. So Jeff, we wish you all the best in your new roles. And to our shareholders, I'd like to thank all of you for being with us as well as thank you to our employees for your constant support. This one I was thinking I could take a break. The next item in the agenda is the election of directors. To propose the nominees.

Mr. Chair, I nominate the 14 persons for election as directors of the corporation. Mr. Marcel Coutu, André Desmarais, Paul Desmarais, Gary Doer, Ségolène Gallienne-Frère, Anthony Graham, Sharon MacLeod, Paula Madoff, Isabelle Marcoux, Jeffrey Orr, James O'Sullivan, Timothy Ryan Jr., Siim Vanaselja and Elizabeth Wilson.

Thank you, Mr. Hung. Are there any further nominations or questions from shareholders specifically on this item? I now declare the nomination closed and would ask Mr. Hung to present the motion.

Mr. Chair, I move that those nominated be elected directors of the corporation to hold office until the next meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected, subject to the provisions of the corporation's bylaws.

Thank you, Mr. Hung. Let's now proceed to the vote. If you have a blue ballot, please fill it out now and hand it to the scrutineers. So we're good fabulous. Have we received, we have, in fact, received all of the ballots, all the better. The next item in the agenda is the appointment of auditors. I would like to ask Ms. Julie L'Heureux, an employee as well as shareholder of the company to present the proposal. You're responsible for all of the gifts for Power Corporation. She's the person to go to.

Mr. Chairman, it's teamwork. I propose that Deloitte be appointed as the company's auditors to serve until the closing of the next Annual Shareholders' Meeting.

Thank you, Ms. L'Heureux. Any specific questions regarding this proposal? Let us now move on to the vote by ballot. If you have a salmon colored ballot, please fill it out now for this item. The ballots will then be collected. We have collected them. This could be a record. The next item of business, the approval of nonbinding advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation. I would ask Mrs. Sarah Benaouda, an employee and shareholder of the corporation, to present the motion.

Mr. Chair, I move that the nonbinding advisory resolution on the corporation's approach to executive compensation as articulated in the management proxy circular be approved.

Thank you, Mrs. Benaouda. Are there questions from shareholders specifically on this item? We will now move to voting. You can complete again the salmon ballot, which we're not doing because we all have them. We have received all of the ballots. Let us now turn to the shareholders' proposals. The company has received 3 shareholder proposals from MEDAC, 2 of which will be put to a vote at this meeting. Each proposal has been set forth in the proxy statement. The Board's recommendations are also set forth, as we all know, as usually presented in the proxy circular. I see that Mr. Willie Gagnon is here. He's a representative of MEDAC, and I'll turn it over to Mr. Gagnon to do the presentation.

Chair, I hope that everything is going well. My name is Willie Gagnon. They couldn't go better. I'm acting on behalf of the MEDAC in education and defending shareholders as I do each year. The MEDAC has been in place for 30 years. I have been there for 20 years now, a little bit more. I'm very pleased to be here today. We have 3 shareholder proposals. One is not subject to the vote. We were able to agree on the issue of AI. You'll recognize the policies that are in place with Power satisfy the same objectives as those policies and objectives that are set by the voluntary code imposed by the federal government that we can buy into. And you'll say us that you don't want to buy in, but you'll also tell us that your policies comply with the same objectives.

So we're very satisfied with this. And I may come back to this during the question period. I might come back to the issue of AI. In my mind, that is a key and important issue. And it is likely to replace many jobs in the economy, including those jobs at power. So in brief, we submitted 2 further proposals. One proposal aimed at strengthening the participation of shareholders at the meetings. It's not here that there are a few shareholders. We're very pleased to see that is taking place in person. But this proposal, which we were not very successful this year.

In fact, we've come until the end of the major season of shareholders' meetings. We're there now. And in fact, regarding the results we heard, we feel that this is valid, especially for the fourth item that we were asking for under this proposal. Had we received approval of this only element, we would have been in agreement with proceeding to the vote. We actually presented a table where you're able to see what the shareholder participation rates, whether it is rising or lower than it was compare this to the shareholder participation institutions. And we actually produced a table by Broadridge where the data exists. But it's difficult for shareholders to compile this data and to insert it into a table that would not be very costly, but it is complicated for a single shareholder to do this because you have to consult many documents produced in the past to see whether or not this is possible.

We dare to hope that this specific measure will eventually be carried by somebody. We hope that it will be less difficult here given the shareholder structure and the multiple votes that you have in place. We believe that this idea might have been interesting to you. But we're not here to convince you. We don't expect extraordinary results on this proposal. Of course, we invite all of the shareholders to support it, but we will be continuing to put questions to you about this measure. And it is easy. The data is in existence, and I think it would be easy to produce a table regarding this, our second proposal is one that has previously been submitted, that is to put in place a consultative vote on essential points.

Again, this is an instrument allowing all the shareholders to speak to the issues of the environment. It is not possible for a corporation like yours or another publicly traded corporation with such a wide shareholdership to consult each and every shareholders to see what each shareholder thinks about environmental policies. And this kind of advisory vote, and we'll all recall that vote, this would make it possible for all to be consulted. We're satisfied to note that you published the poll results last year on the proxy circular. That's an excellent policy. We also noticed that there are about 14% of shareholders who do not have multiple voting shares and who supported this measure last year. That is not tremendous nevertheless, it cannot be overlooked. So we invite all the shareholders to support this proposal. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for your comments and your proposals, Mr. Gagnon. So the Board's recommendation is, as you know, in the proxy circular, and they're well detailed and explain the reasons why we do not agree with you. But frankly, I have nothing further to add to these comments that we published and that all of the shareholders have had an opportunity to see prior to the vote. We will now proceed with the vote. If you have a green ballot, please hand this into the scrutineers. Do we have any green ballots? Well, we don't have any. That's fine. So I declare voting closed on all items of the agenda, and I'd like to ask the scrutineers to present their preliminary report. There might be slight differences between the results announced this morning and those to be released after the meeting.

Mr. Chairman, with respect to election of directors, a majority of the votes cast at this meeting were voted in favor of the 14 nominees named in the proxy circular with each nominee receiving in excess of 84%. The result with respect to the appointment of auditors, the results -- resolutions passed with votes cast in excess of 96.46%. The result with respect to executive compensation, the resolutions passed with votes cast in excess of 97.86%. The results with respect to shareholder proposal #1, the resolution was defeated with more than 99.87% who voted against the proposal. The results with respect to the shareholder proposal #2. The resolution was defeated with more than 95.11% who voted against the proposal. Thank you.

Thank you to the scrutineers. I declare the resolution on the election of directors adopted and the 14 nominees elected as directors. Congratulations. From the Board, I declare the resolution on the appointment of auditors adopted as well. Congratulations to our auditors. I hereby declare that the nonbinding advisory resolution on the company's approach to executive compensation has also been adopted, and I declare that both shareholder proposals have been defeated. A report setting forth the results of the vote will be filed on SEDAR+ following the meeting and a report on the election of each director will be included in a press release issued following the meeting. This ends the formal portion of the meeting, and we will now be happy to take questions and I open therefore the meeting now to questions. But before proceeding to questions [Technical Difficulty].

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Power Corporation First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded on Wednesday, May 13, 2026.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steven Hung, Head of Investor Relations for Power Corporation.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our first quarter financial results call.

Before we start, please note that a link to our live webcast and materials for this call have been posted to our website at powercorporation.com, under the shareholder Reports tab. Please turn to Slide 2.

I'd like to draw your attention to the cautionary note regarding the use of forward-looking statements, which form part of today's remarks. Please also refer to Slide 3 for a note on the use of non-IFRS financial measures and clarifications on adjusted net asset value.

To discuss our results today, joining us are President and CEO, Jeffrey Orr; and our EVP and CFO, Jake Lawrence. We will begin with opening remarks followed by Q&A. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Thank you, Steve, and thank you to all of you for joining us here this morning as we go through our results for the first quarter.

Very pleased with the first quarter results and generally the momentum that we have across the businesses at Power Corp. I think the backdrop has been very positive macro factors, notwithstanding all the heightened risk that we see in the markets and going around the world right now. Obviously, the stock market levels continue to rise. Interest rates have been supportive. Investors have made a lot of money. There's high investor confidence, good flows going on. So notwithstanding that all that goes on around the world, the business conditions actually have been very supportive.

And that's combined with the strength of our group's earnings to basically provide very strong momentum from an earnings point of view and strong perspectives from a cash flow point of view, our -- that's evident across Great-West Life's businesses, IGM's businesses, strong cash flow, strong increases in dividends, buybacks and then the portions of the portfolio that are not earnings producing assets like Wealthsimple, Rockefeller, the NAV portfolios are doing extremely well. So all things well.

I was addressing Page 6, thank you for catching up to me. I should have said I was on Page 6. And -- so very happy with the quarter. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Jake to talk a little bit about the earnings and the asset values, and I'll pick it back up after that. Jake?

Great. Thanks, Jeff, and good morning to everyone. Thanks for joining us for our Q1 call. I'm going to begin on Slide 8. And as Jeff noted, we're very pleased to report strong results for the first quarter of 2026. Our adjusted net earnings were $905 million, and that's up 15% year-over-year.

For the quarter, our net EPS of $1.43 is the second highest quarterly EPS that Power has reported since our reorganization that was announced back in 2019. And now our share price -- our earnings per share is up 17% from last year.

When we look at our earnings-based businesses, specifically Great-West and IGM, they both delivered strong financial results and continue to have very good business momentum. Great-West's contribution to Power's adjusted net earnings was up 21% year-over-year. Those positive results were supported by Great-West's eighth consecutive quarter of base earnings in excess of $1 billion, including double-digit growth this quarter across all segments. In addition, great West reported base ROE above 19%, and this was the first time they had achieved that medium-term objective.

Moving to IGM. IGM's contribution to Power's adjusted earnings was also up 21% year-over-year as IGM saw strong IG Wealth and Mackenzie net flows. Record high ending AUM&A was up 14% year-over-year. The results also saw a stronger earnings contribution from China AMC. In terms of return to capital to shareholders, IGM reported its highest quarter ever of dividends and buybacks.

Moving to our NAV-based businesses. GBL reported a positive contribution in the quarter of net earnings of $20 million, which was up from $3 million a year ago. The improved performance this quarter was due to higher contributions from the operating companies within GBL as well as higher interest income generated from cash balances. GBL also announced continued progress on its simplification strategy, which Jeff will have more to say on later in the presentation.

Moving to our alternative investment platforms. Sagard's contribution to earnings was a loss of $5 million, and that's down from a positive contribution of $37 million in the same quarter last year. The decrease was driven primarily by lower private equity gains in Sagard as reported in investing activities.

Power Sustainable reported a loss of $13 million, reflecting a higher loss compared to a year ago due to lower asset management activities and operating losses on the energy infrastructure assets.

Corporate operations and other also reported a higher loss driven in part by higher dividends on nonparticipating preferred shares following our issuance of $400 million in 2025. Meanwhile, operating expenses were lower than last quarter and flat compared to a year ago. Overall, we're pleased with the group's strong start to '26 and expect continued momentum into Q2.

Turning to Slide 9. Looking at our net asset value, we reported net asset value per share of $84.54 at the end of the quarter or March 31, 2026. I want to remind listeners today that 83% of Power's gross asset value continues to be driven by our earnings-based businesses of Great-West and IGM.

Second, Power Corp experienced strong NAV growth when we look at it on a year-over-year basis. We were up 23% with strong growth across all of the operating companies. NAV related to IGM increased 51%, which is quite impressive. GBL was up 22% and Great-West increased 12%. While Simple's NAV rose approximately 90% year-over-year and Power's cash balance rose 50% to $2.1 billion compared to the prior year. Power Sustainable NAV reduced a little bit, and that was reflected in some sales that helped generate that higher cash balance up at Power Corp.

Speaking of our cash balance, we ended the quarter at $2.1 billion. And when we factor in dividends to be received and paid, we have about $1.7 billion available. We remained active with our normal course issuer bid and continue to participate in Great-West normal course issuer bid during the quarter. As a result, we returned capital in the form of buybacks and dividends worth $650 million, tracking ahead of the $500 million we returned during Q1 of 2025.

And with that, Jeff, I'll turn it over to you to talk a bit more about the business results.

Okay. Thank you, Jake. So we will move forward to Slide 11, I think it is. Yes, there we go. So we have the earnings on Great-West Life. Obviously, a very strong quarter of earnings growth across the company. What was impressive, it was really across all the geographies and the segments. So we had broad-based strength in the earnings. As you know, those earnings are very cash -- they transform into cash. I think the company estimates about 80% of its earnings are available as cash. And so -- and they've been not only increasing their dividends but picked up their buyback activity, of course, which is also helping their ROE. So the company actually hit their 19% return on equity target, as Jake mentioned, which they had updated from the previous 16% to 17% when they announced their medium-term goals back in the spring of 2021, I think it was. So very, very strong performance across the board by Great-West.

If we flip forward one page, Empower continues to have very strong performance, delivered on a U.S. dollar basis, constant currency, 23% earnings growth over the first quarter of '25. It's 18%, of course, in the financial statements of Great-West Life because of currency. But in the local market in terms of measuring how the company is doing on its own growth is 23% growth in earnings.

The -- it was about 18% up in retirement, so strong performance in retirement. Market certainly helped but they're a growing franchise and the leverage in the business certainly coming through. It was helped a little bit. There was some credit losses in the first quarter of 2025. So that favored the earnings growth a little bit ahead of what one would expect in the retirement sector over time, but nonetheless, a very strong performance and good flows in the first quarter and good participant growth year-over-year.

The Wealth business had a very strong quarter from an earnings point of view, 65% had strong positive flows. They were impacted by some seasonality and some transformation initiatives that the company had during the first quarter but continue to look at Wealth as the highest growth opportunity within Empower and I think really within the Great-West Life Group.

If I turn the Page one forward to Page 13. I mean I tend to focus on the performance over the last -- since 2021, over the last 5 years, which has been ahead or met all of the objectives that the company set for itself, but this is just a point to say there's a pickup from the slide that Great-West had a week ago to say that the first quarter was off to a great start.

Let me move forward therefore to IGM. Really, great momentum at IGM, great quarter. earnings-wise, flow-wise, IG Wealth, Mackenzie, the strategic initiatives, really firing on all cylinders. From a -- I'll talk about flows for a second. The Canadian individual market, retail market, if you want to call it that, in investments and savings -- this is -- it's really come back after having been shocked by the inflation and interest rate rises that came out of the post-COVID period. It had been rolling along with good inflows. And of course, we went through that period. I don't know whether it's exactly 3 or 4 years ago, where all of a sudden interest rates were really biting. You had people paying down debt. If they were savings, a lot of the money was going into deposits and the whole kind of investment equities, mutual fund, investment funds flows went negative, certainly, in the sectors where IGM plays, maybe not in the ultra-high net worth, where people still had a lot of money and in the upper reaches of high net worth, but the sector went into outflows.

And it's back -- and so the -- it's come back right now, the first quarter through the [ RSP ] season was back to levels it was at back in '22, '21. IG's, the 2 main core lines of business there, IG Wealth on the Wealth management side, Mackenzie and Asset Management, both are participating in that -- those strong inflows. IG Wealth is just a stronger and stronger franchise, and my view continues to improve its competitive position every year.

I'm quite pleased with what I see at Mackenzie. If you -- Mackenzie's had strong flows in the first quarter. Part of that is because of strong institutional flows that they've been getting, which have been a real breakout for them over the last 12 months or so. But if you just focus in on the Canadian retail investment funds flows, you're seeing some really positive developments. Gross flows were up a lot in the quarter. And net flows were positive, but there's still a couple of big strategies, one big strategy in particular, which is outflowing. So their net flows are still being affected by that. But the gross flows are up a lot. And those outflows. It's hard to predict the future, but the strategies where there are outflows, it can't go on forever because the strategy gets smaller and smaller. So eventually, I see the making here of a pretty strong turn for Mackenzie's flows in retail, and now they've got the institutional business.

So that's -- I'm going on a little bit about that, but I haven't spoken about that for a while. I like what I see there. Predicting the future is always a mug's game, but that's kind of my perspective here looking at what's happened over the last few months.

Okay. I'm going to flip forward to Page 15. You've got the earnings contributions. The wealth management earnings really IG Wealth is the driver there, the strongest part of it and asset management also showing good growth. And then you've got the rest of the segments on 15. I don't need to dwell on it.

I will stop here on 16 for a second and just talk about the strength of these franchises. The strategic investment portfolio of IGM, not producing a lot of earnings right now with the exception of China AMC has got earnings in there. It's small relative to the rest. But the underlying growth of these franchises is really tremendous. Wealthsimple, the beat goes on. They continue to drive very strong growth. Rockefeller continues to have very strong growth. And while Northleaf, by comparison at only 10% year-over-year AUM, that's actually terrific in the alternative space. That's all organic fundraising. They have got great track records. They are broadening out their distribution, really impressive story at Northleaf. So good stuff happening there.

Okay. A couple of comments on GBL. It was, I think, a year ago, I think it was May of 2025, Johannes Huth came in as CEO. And the strategy that GBL is pursuing is being pursued with vigor, I would say. Just to remind you, they are, in effect, reducing their exposure to publicly listed companies and switching to direct private assets. So they're at about 32% of the portfolio right now is in direct private assets. On the left of the slide, they set a target to sell EUR 5 billion of their public portfolio. They're basically done on that over the last 12 months.

On the direct side, they continue to make investments. You've got a couple of examples on the page. They also announced late last year the sale of Sienna, which was where they were investing in other people's funds. And so that is being divested of. So they're going to really -- they're just focusing down on their direct private assets. And while they're doing so, they're also returning capital to shareholders, which you see on the right side through dividend increases and buybacks. So lots of activities. Last year, GBL produced an overall TSR of 23%. So we like what we see at GBL, good performance by the management team there.

On the alts platforms, moving forward to Page 18. Sagard continues to grow both organically and also through acquisitions. Right after the end of Q1 here in April, Sagard closed the acquisition of Unigestion, which is a European-based private equity solutions provider, meaning fund to funds, secondaries, direct private placements where they put together portfolios of private equity companies broadly based and package that for institutional investors, high net worth investors. That complements the acquisitions that Sagard had already made, performance equity and BEX.

And we've combined all 3 of those into basically a private equity solution -- Sagard private equity solution provider with USD 22 billion of assets with a strong presence in Europe and North America. And that closing brings the total AUM of Sagard up to USD 46 billion. It's very -- that's quite meaningful as a mid-market player. The Sagard plays in the mid-market and not focused on large cap. So very strong continued growth at Sagard, very impressive with what they're doing.

And over on the Power Sustainable side, they closed their U.S. infra credit fund, USD 800 million, super strong team there based in the U.S. That's an asset class, notwithstanding what you might hear about private credit, infrastructure credit is very much in demand. We have a very good team there and I'm quite optimistic for what we can do in that strategy.

And the fourth of their 4 strategy is the private equity fund based out of New York, the decarb fund closed on their first transaction over the last few months. So good momentum and building the power sustainable.

Page 19, just to show the return of capital, we're about $11 billion since we announced the reorg back in December 2019, returned to shareholders through the form of dividend increase -- dividends, which are increasing and buybacks. And we're sitting on a lot of cash, as you will have noted. So buybacks will continue to be a very high priority use of our capital.

Page 20 just follows the discount, which at 18% at last night's close, I continue to view as a future source of value creation. And I won't say much more about it now. We probably talked a lot about that topic over many, many calls.

You've got on 21, our shareholder returns over various periods since we've announced the reorganization. We continue to be pleased with the absolute returns we're producing and the relative returns that we're producing.

And I'll finish up on Page 22. I mean, to my mind, the value creation strategy is completely intact. I've spoken in the past about how we create returns. And that story hasn't changed over the last few years. And notwithstanding that the shares have moved up well, the story is very much intact in my view. We have 83% of the NAV or the gross asset value, I should say, at Power Corp is in Great-West Life and IGM. Great-West is earnings driven. IGM is principally earnings driven. They both have 9% kind of earnings guidance that they've given on the medium term since they've given those guidance, they both exceeded it.

But if you just take their earnings guidance and say for a second, they're going to be able to achieve that, they're both generating a lot of cash, so they pay out a good dividend yield on top of that. And you can just figure if all they do is hit that and there's no multiple revisions, the math works out to about 12.5%, 13% as to what kind of TSR you would expect. Hopefully, they can do better than that, but we'll see going forward. Then we've got the NAV portfolio where our expectations are for even higher returns, and we have been performing very well there.

So all of that remains intact. What has changed in the last few months is that the valuations of IGM from a PE multiple -- excuse me, Great-West Life and IGM have moved up a little bit. We haven't seen that really over the last 5, 6 years. They've moved up a few turns. But 2 things about that. On a relative basis, they haven't. Financials have moved up, banks have moved up, insurance companies have moved up. IGM's multiple, when you look at it, it might -- the PE multiple on a forward basis might look like it's moved up. But if you just -- I think the company itself has disclosed about $15 in value just on the marks on Wealthsimple and Rockefeller based on the transactions that they announced last September. So if you just take those values and make some sort of reasonable adjustment for those 2 assets, which don't produce any earnings, IGM's multiple is reasonable.

So I look at the PE multiples on Great-West and IGM, they moved up a little bit, but they haven't moved up on a relative basis to their peers. And on an absolute value basis, those are not high multiples given the kind of companies and the earnings trajectory, certainly relative to the rest of the market. So I think the valuation story is intact. And I think from a strength point of view, if I go back over the last 6 years, the companies are in a better position today, Great-West Life, all of their businesses, IGM, the businesses that power the -- alt program, the alt platforms, everything is in a stronger position than it was 6 years ago when we announced the strategy.

So I feel very good that the story -- the value creation potential and the strategies that we're executing are going to continue to be strong as we move forward.

And I'll turn just before I close to say, this is my last call at Power here as CEO. James O'Sullivan will be on the next call. And we started these calls back in December of 2019 when we announced the reorganization. That was the first time we had done a call like that. We laid out then what we were going to do. One of the things we said we're going to do is we were going to be a lot more transparent, a lot more in dialogue and actively engaged with the analyst community and the investor community. And we've tried to do that. I think we've done that at Power and within Great-West and IGM.

But it takes two to talk, and I just want to thank all of you on the line, both analysts and investors listening in and your predecessors who have actively engaged, done your diligence, asked your questions, probed and participated in generally helping get the understanding of what Power Corp is doing and what our companies are doing out to the marketplace. So for that, I want to thank all of you. I do say as we move into new leadership, in addition to the strength of our franchises, the last thing I'd like to point out is we've got James O'Sullivan coming in as CEO of Power. He can do a great job.

But we've really -- we've had leadership transition across the group in the last 12 months I mentioned at GBL, but of course, also July 1 of last year, David Harney taking over as CEO of Great-West Life. Damon Murchison is so well equipped and will do a great job as CEO of IGM. So really across our 3 public companies and across Power Corp, we've had leadership transition within the last 12 months. And I think we're well set up to move forward with the strength of our team. So with that, I will close my comments, and I will, operator, pass it open -- you can open up the lines, and we can do a Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from John Aiken with Jefferies.

Jake, I just wanted to take a bit of a different tax. Looking at the expenses for the holdco, the corporates, the operating expenses, bumping along mid- to low $50 million on a quarterly basis. I know Q4 had a bit of the compensation bump. But is this a level we should expect going forward? Or is there going to be any inflation in terms of expected expenses at the holdco level?

John, thanks for your question. I'd say you should expect kind of the normal inflation around salary. That should be traditional in any sort of business. So over time, that will creep in. The other point I'd highlight is the greatest volatility we see, and you alluded to it a little bit in your question, is going to be around the LTI. And so as we have stronger performance around the stock, we have had some higher costs associated with that, whether it's around taxes or some of the hedging costs depending on where performance factors come out. So those would be the greatest variability. The core operating expenses around the team and the investments and the technology up at Power, expect those to grow around the rate of inflation in the economy.

Jeff, I just want to pass on my congratulations on you stepping back, although I'm not sure exactly how far you're stepping back. But thank you for all your help.

Thank you, John. I'm not sure either, but we'll see. We call it Hotel California here. So I'll be around to help Jake and help James and the team here move forward in whatever way I can help. So -- but thank you for that.

Our next question comes from Scott Fletcher with CIBC.

I'll also just extend my congratulations, Jeff. We didn't overlap for long, but congratulations nonetheless. I wanted to ask a question on you just John. Now that that's closed and you're launching the Sagard Private Equity Solutions, is there any updated information you can share just on plans for the acquired platforms to complement each other and work together?

Yes. I mean they are -- they will be working together. They are being combined. They're quite complementary. Unigestion has just a terrific reputation in Europe. They're focused -- they're investment focused, although they've got global capabilities, their real strength is into the European mid-market, and they have a very strong investor base in Europe. When you look at Performance Equity Management and BEX, they're more North American focused mid-market, strong focus on the U.S., strong U.S. and North American investor base, although both of them have investors from other parts, they're not uniquely, but those are where their strengths are.

So those 2 platforms coming together under common leadership and then going out and being able to both bring their strategies to the investor bases that the other had and then also bring in the products and being able to do portfolios that are more broadly based. It's a real win-win.

And then trying to -- in asset management businesses, whether it's public company -- public asset management platforms or private, the cultural issues are always the one that you go, how is that going to work? There was so much -- I would say that here, the Sagard team is very good. Paul III, his whole team has put so much emphasis on bringing teams together and the value added of being part of the Sagard network and lots of work before the deal was even announced to make sure that, that was on site and people were on site, including the way the equity lines up and the compensation lines up.

So absolutely, this is not pulling together a string of pearls and hoping that somehow you can call it a business. They are very much making it a business. And there's going to be -- I think there's going to be really good synergies over time.

Just a quick one then on the GBL, nice pickup in earnings in the quarter. And as they shift more to the direct private investments, just wondering if you could share anything on what we should expect for the rest of the year in terms of earnings contribution?

I don't really have visibility into that. And I think it's hard when you get into their particular accounting. And when you get into a business that's -- a lot of the earnings are based on asset values, really hard to predict that number. Jake, anything you want to add? But I don't have great visibility. I wish I did, but it's hard to do.

I think Jeff's answer is really good guidance. I think the best way we try to think about those businesses is how we present them with Great-West and IGM being the earnings-based ones and GBL being a net asset value business. So we look for it to accrete net asset value, and it's a trickier model on the P&L lines just given the consolidation accounting that Jeff alluded to.

My experience is that the NAV businesses tend to create more noise than anything else. And you know some of the [ oddities ], I shouldn't take my last call to bash the accountants, but my [indiscernible]. In some of the accounting, I've got accountants around the table here, so just to understand, I'll be gentle. But as some of those -- sometimes you get the underlying asset value going up like in Wealthsimple, we get the underlying asset value goes up when we've got an upwards mark, but we consolidate or -- and we don't enjoy the growth in that upwards value, but we have a minority interest and noncontrolling interest that we mark-to-market. So the more the value goes up, the more we have losses, go figure. Anyway.

So I -- just Scott, a broader answer to your question. I think that part of the portfolio, we really focus on NAV growth and earnings at best, if they're not noisy, I'm usually happy.

Our next question comes from Tom MacKinnon with BMO Capital Markets.

I guess before I start my question, I want to congratulate Jeff on your great career with Power Corp and your -- I guess it was Power Fin prior to that and your -- also your great career with BMO Capital Markets prior to that.

So then the question is on your -- you participate in the Great-West buyback, but you don't participate in the IGM buyback. And why is that? And what should -- what are you signaling to the market there in terms of the fact that your ownership is modestly increasing in IGM as a result of not participating in that buyback?

Yes. Thank you, Tom. Good question. I think all we're signaling is that we are sensitive to the requests of our leadership teams within our major operating companies. So to go back a few quarters ago, when we started participating in the Great-West Life buyback, I gave some background on that. We are not sellers of either IGM or Great-West Life.

In the case of Great-West Life, they are very much and very active on bringing in new shareholders into their investor base, and they are doing so on a global basis with some very, very large global asset managers who were very interested and have been very interested in participating. And one of the issues while they're focusing on that marketplace was the relative float of Great-West Lifeco. And even though it's just a snick under a $70 billion market cap company, we own 68% directly and IGM has got another couple of points there. So there's only 30% available on the float. And the float became an issue saying we'd love to buy, but your float is not really as big as we'd like to have when we participate.

So then Great-West Life found itself kind of swimming in cash, if I can put it that way. And rather than sitting on it, just earning money market rates that we've got to -- we're not going to have a lazy balance sheet like that. We've got lots of firepower. We're going to start doing buybacks. But then we're going, well, we didn't want to -- we don't want to sell any Great-West, so go buy it in the float. And they were finding that they were shrinking the float.

And after about a quarter, they came to us and said, "Look, why don't you at least participate pro rata? You're not reducing your position in Great-West Life, you're maintaining it. And then we can -- we're only buying back basically 32% of the float when we buy -- or not 32% only 32% of the dollars we're spending are going to reduce the float. And we talked about that, we said, all right, we'll do that. It wasn't the plan, but we will respond to that. So that was the background. And they've kind of put the monkey on our back. It's a nice problem to have, but all of a sudden, we're getting -- we've built up this cash position kind of before we were really totally focused on what our -- what kind of buyback levels we would have.

So that's exactly the background. That has not been the story at IGM. IGM is not doing the same level of buybacks. They haven't -- they've been increasing them recently. They haven't been out there talking to those major institutions in the same way. It doesn't have the same market cap for them to be having those discussions. So that pressure hasn't been there at IGM, and therefore, it just hasn't happened. So we just haven't been participating in it and allowing them to go to the market to do so. So Tom, that's the background. And I'm not sure if I can add anything to that. Jake, did you want to add anything?

I think that's the fact. Hopefully, he understands that.

Yes. Wouldn't IGM want to be more broad-based with their shareholders and skinnies down. Why wouldn't some of those same things that the arguments that raised to apply to IGM?

Yes, they could over time. But a $17 billion market cap company with what, $7 billion, $8 billion in the marketplace is not talking in the same way to the very largest U.S. and global institutions and pension funds, right? Because they're not going to -- they might in some of their funds, but it's not -- they don't -- they haven't had the same pressure, even though their float is smaller. It hasn't been an issue with the public shareholders that have been buying them relative to some of the places that Great-West Life has been talking. So -- but Tom, you're quite right, it could come up. I mean it's possible that at some point of IGM's continuing to do buybacks and has a lot of excess cash. They might come to us and say, "Hey, we got -- our float's becoming an issue. But you're quite right, that could come in the future. I don't know.

But we've been responsive to them as my point. Like this wasn't us going -- we've been responsive to how the management companies have asked us -- what they've asked of us.

Our next question comes from Doug Young with Desjardins Capital Markets.

Wealthsimple has become a bigger part of the conversation. Power, I think, owns 54%, 55%, but through various entities kind of like a spiderweb. And maybe, Jeff, just thinking as you think longer term, is there a reason -- like you've done a lot of simplifying over the last 6 years across the Power organization, Wealthsimple is becoming bigger and bigger. Is there reasons to simplify just the ownership structure? Is there benefit, again, longer term to have Wealthsimple or Power own the entire Wealthsimple stake? Because you've done this before with the China AMC being moved around. So I'm just trying to think through longer term here as Wealthsimple comes bigger? Like how do you think about that?

It's a really good question, Doug. And let me give you one more time the background as to how we got there, just so you don't think that we spend our time trying to make our life complicated. It's important to understand the background. And then I'll talk about some of the thinking about why we might or might not do that in the future.

So the background is simply that at the time that we were launching our fintech strategy back in 2014, '15, and we were looking at kind of the threat and the opportunity posed by fintech, we were all over that at Power Financial. We set up our Portage strategy, we set up, which was a VC and fintech. We set up our diagram incubator strategy with [ Francois Lafortune ], which has given rise to companies like Dialogue and Nesto and others.

And then we also said we would have our eyes open for some larger opportunities. And that turned out that Wealthsimple was the opportunity with Michael Katchen. And in the States, it was Personal Capital. And that was different with both of those we decided to commit quite a bit more capital as opposed to taking a portfolio with small positions. So we ended up funding the first 5 rounds, I believe, of all of the -- not the very first seed round that Wealthsimple did, but the next 5 rounds, our group was 100% of the funding. And we had said to Michael, you go out and build the business and don't worry about fundraising.

Power Financial -- IGM management wasn't engaged in that in an active way. They weren't kind of -- didn't have capital to do that. They weren't focused on it. It was a Power Financial initiative. And the first couple of rounds went entirely to Power Financial and then there was another vehicle where Portage had some in Great-West and IGM were investors in it. So we ended up with all these okay? But it was mostly Power Financial.

I was up the view and then speaking to Jeff Carney at the time said, Wealthsimple this company could be in 10 years from now or 15 years from now, could be like one of the main franchises we have. And it really probably belongs at IGM more than it belongs at Power Financial. So they started doing the next rounds. I can't remember if it was around 3, 4 or 5, but they started to come in, and we ended up with it in two places, okay? So that's the history. As I said, we don't go out of our way to kind of complicate the way we're structured. But to do it over again, you might have put it all in one place.

Okay, we are where we are right now and look at the value that we have. But Wealthsimple is not producing any earnings or cash right now. They're investing money to continue to grow their franchises. So imagine if all of a sudden, you've got a great big asset with a lot of value not producing any earnings or cash flow. And now IGM has to buy great -- Power's position or Power buys whatever way you go, all of a sudden, you're looking at either issuing equity or using cash to buy an asset that's not producing any cash. So right there, you end up with a bit of an issue in terms of cash flow dilution, mix.

If it comes to us, it's more NAV in our portfolio if it goes to IGM. All of a sudden, it's a big check to right? It wasn't -- it's not like when we did the China Asset Management deal. China Asset Management was creating earnings. They had a dividend payment and they were on a very high growth rate, and it's turned out to be true. They paid cash, and we swap we took some of the Great-West Life stock and the whole thing work for them because [ CHMC ] not -- didn't quite replace the earnings that they lost on the Great-West Life side. But it basically -- it had earnings and dividends to support it. That is not true Wealthsimple.

So I am just giving you the pieces to how we got there and some of the issues we talk about, but I agree that over time, it would be nice to see an opportunity. I don't know when that would be for the group to consolidate its position, whether we can do that or not. I mean the time will tell, but would have been better had we had it in one place. Hopefully, that gives you some background. Anything else you want to add to that, Jake?

No. I think, Doug, the only thing I'd add is, and you'll see it this quarter, we're starting to enhance a bit of the disclosure around the business, given its size to Jeff's point, and we're going to continue to try to do that in future quarters to make the visibility of the business given its relative proportion of our overall asset value.

That's good color. I mean, it sounds like you guys have thought about it. Obviously, Personal Capital ended up at Great-West. And obviously Great-West is a much bigger entity, but I don't think personal capital was earning much at the time either. So it's just -- it's interesting to hear how you think about it. So -- but I appreciate the color.

And then just second question, lots of discussion around private assets, private credit these days, and it's in the paper every day. So Jeff or Jake, when you guys take a step back, any concerns, anything that gives you pause, anything to change the long-term outlook or strategy for Sagard? I assume no. But I'd be curious, you've been in the industry a long time, like anything that you're concerned with that you see that's going on out there?

Not from our perspective, I'll start high level, and Jake might want to jump in a little bit. The -- we have exposure -- so the impact is on the fundraising, particularly in getting individual investors to participate in alternative assets. That's where the impact is because there's a lot of headlines, obviously, what's going on with Blue Owl and a few others.

There's concern out there -- and therefore, the market is concerned, so trying to go out and raise money in private credit with individual investors is difficult. And in fact, those that have put some of the money in or trying to take them out. And I think we've seen a little bit of that, but not a lot. So that's the impact.

The actual -- of what's going on in the markets, we have not either in Sagard or in Northleaf that has a private credit capability or on the balance sheet of Great-West Life, it's got some private credit or even in the seed capital that Power Corp has, which I think is about $100 million in private credit. We don't have credit concerns at this point.

We -- our Sagard and our Northleaf and therefore, our seed capital I mentioned earlier, we're all mid-market focused. Northleaf is a mid-market. They're mid-market. Sagard private credit is mid-market. And where the issues have been in private credit have been around some of the larger players, particularly in the SaaS and the software space. We just don't have a lot of exposure there.

We've got a lot more, I'm going to say, nuts and bolts companies, but they're more basic companies -- so we -- our portfolios, and I'm not speaking with 100% clarity, but we've gone through them at Great-West, spoken to the credit managers. We're not seeing a lot of credit problems across. We're not seeing credit problems, period across our private credit portfolio. So it's more of a market impact for us ourselves. And that's my overall comment. And we'll get through it, but it's not -- we're not seeing any credit problems. Anything you want to add to that, Jake?

Yes, Doug, I'll run a bit of a commercial for the Sagard private credit project. As Jeff noted, it's first lien senior secured loans, it's mid-market based, moderate leverage with durable cash flows. They're not seeing any loans in arrears currently. There's no loans ticking at this stage, payment in kind. .

And as Jeff alluded to, there's very minimal exposure to software. So they've actually seen good performance. The exposure that Sagard has or the assets they're managing is about $6 billion, largely institutional. So I think you get a different reaction in the institutional space than you may see in the retail space. And they are out fundraising the third vintage of the institutional private credit strategy, and it's going to -- it's targeting its largest ever size by final close of $2 billion.

So I think there's a lot of headlines and private credit can be a very broad term. It can refer to a pretty broad asset class across different sectors, different types of structures, private placements can get looped in there as well. Some project finance sometimes gets looped in. So we just want to be clear that, as Jeff and I are commenting, we're very comfortable with our exposures here and on the balance sheet of our businesses. And it is noise that it is impacting probably fundraising across the alternative space, but the Sagard product is holding up very well.

And Jake, just on that, have you disclosed or do you have what the net flows for Sagard would have been in the quarter relative to last year?

Yes, I got it in the quarter. I don't -- so I don't -- I can get you back to what the relative comp was last year. So they did about CAD 1 billion. The majority was concentrated in the real estate sector. There was some private assets as well as venture capital in there and broad-based retail, but the majority was in real estate in the quarter.

But as you know, Doug, most of the funds aren't open funds. They have closes on them. So you can't always measure the progress in a quarter because you're building books and then you close the strategy every -- Fund III comes along 2 years after Fund II kind of thing. And it's episodic as to when you get the fundraising other than the open strategies, which tend to be the much smaller retail strategies that are just getting going.

Doug, I'm providing the absolute fundraising in the quarter, not net flow numbers you see at. Sorry, to be clear.

And then Jeff.

Sorry go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, Jeff, all the best in the next chapter, and thanks for all your insights and help over the years. I really appreciate it. So thanks.

Thank you very much Doug Young. Thanks for the comments.

Our next question comes from Graham Ryding with TD Securities.

Most of my questions have been asked. It's been a pretty thorough call. So I will just ask one question on GBL. Just as this portfolio is transitioned, it sounds like you're sort of nearing the end or the management team there is nearing the end of their sort of transition efforts. Is it -- is the expectation for it to sort of be about 1/3 of the portfolio private assets going forward and 2/3 public? Is that how we should think of GBL going forward?

No, I think you're going to see more concentration on direct private. It's simply that they had an intermediate goal of EUR 5 billion over a time period, which they hit. And we haven't heard from them stating new intermediate goals. But directionally, I think you're going to continue to see the public portfolio shrink and more focus on direct. That's -- so I don't -- it's not complete. I think there's still lots to do is the answer.

Okay. And then how should we think about sort of the earnings impact going forward? Like is it still going to be -- it sounds like low visibility and there's going to be some volatility in non coming from GBL going forward, even despite sort of transition in the portfolio?

That would be my view. I think you're going to continue to see with that kind of a business more kind of -- it's not really earnings based. It's NAV based. You might have missed the question -- the answer to the previous question. But yes, I think we bucket it with the NAV portfolio. We don't look to earnings as being the source of value as NAV is the source of value, which can go up and down over time. But hopefully, over time, it's going up with good rates of return, but not earnings.

And I made a quip earlier basically saying when there's no noise out of the NAV portfolio and I'm happy. I don't look to it for earnings. I look to it for good growth in value, but not earnings. And I think GBL will continue to be in that bucket.

Okay. Understood. And then just on the alternatives platform, like as you think about this year, where are you sort of seeing decent appetite and opportunity for fundraising? And then what areas sort of continue to remain soft?

I'll take a crack at that and then you jump in, Jake. I think strength on private equity side because we are mid-market. We've got a lot of secondaries, not just in Sagard, but we've got secondary -- really good secondaries capability within Northleaf as well.

And as you know, secondaries and solutions are really well suited to a lot of investors because you end up with a much shorter duration. You're buying into portfolios that have already been invested as opposed to the start of a new fund that's going to take 4 or 5 years to put the money to work and you're buying a broader portfolio. So good continued demand on private equity side.

On the private credit side, we already talked about it, good demand on private credit within Power Sustainable. Good -- really good demand on infrastructure credit right now. They're also -- so I don't know if there are particular areas of weakness by strategy other than, as we said earlier, on the retail side, probably what's going on in private credit has set that back a little bit in terms of fundraising. But it's pretty good across the board. Am I missing something, Jake?

Well, real estate was the strongest asset class in the first quarter, Graham, as I noted. I would say your question is around where you're seeing strength in fundraising. I'd say it continues to be a challenging fundraising market. So I think that's an important backdrop. And with that as a backdrop, I think the strategy we're seeing around consolidation that Sagard, in particular, has been pursuing for a couple of years now is going to be a theme that continues to play out.

So Unigestion, as we alluded to, was closed at April 2. I think you can expect that the team at Sagard to continue to look for opportunities to scale the firm. I think with that scale matters, obviously, as you get a larger asset base, you're able to spread out the fixed cost across a wider fee-paying pool. So scale is really important here. And if it's not happening through organic fundraising exclusively, it's going to happen probably through inorganic strategies as well.

And scale gives breath.

Okay. That's great. Jeffrey, congrats on a great career at Power Corp, even though I know you're moving into a different role, but all the best.

Thank you, Graham. Appreciate it. Thank you for all of our engagements together. Thanks very much.

Our next question comes from Jaeme Gloyn with National Bank Capital Markets.

Just wanted to touch on the pace of share buybacks, obviously, ticking higher this quarter and to get your views on that pace of return of capital to shareholders through buybacks versus perhaps deploying some of that capital to more asset management acquisitions following Unigestion. Just maybe talk through some of that.

Thanks. So if you heard the answer to Tom's question earlier around how kind of the switch went on in terms of us participating in the Great-West Lifeco buyback at their request back in the fall, I think it was -- I think it was August of last year, we were dealing with it somewhere around there, we started to participate. We've ended up with a lot more cash than we had originally planned for the reasons that I stated. And we end up where we know we want to continue to participate in buybacks. But then you go and all of a sudden, you're coming -- all this cash is coming in, you go and do it all immediately or do you wait and pace it out. So we have those discussions.

And that's something that's clear. That's a priority for us. The use of capital is not -- whether we're doing something because Sagard is buying something and we're going to put some capital in to help it or there's fundraising. I'm giving examples, Wealthsimple does a financing back in the fall of September last year, we put some money in, IGM put some money in. So those uses of capital that are M&A related or funding, they're hard to predict. We're not sitting on them and you know that in 4 months, you're going to do. Sometimes you do have some visibility. But generally speaking, they're harder to predict.

So we've kind of sat on more cash than we might otherwise have guided the Street and that we've talked internally about it. And answering your question, therefore, is difficult. You're really asking what kind of deals are we going to do upcoming and what's the visibility on them. And even if we had them, it's hard to talk about.

But that's -- those are the 2 things. We basically sit there saying we've got buybacks and we have episodic uses of capital. So that maybe not crystal clear answer to your question, I'll come to a higher level, which is to say buybacks are a high priority use of capital. We're sitting on more cash than we would normally sit on. I think that means all things being equal, you would expect higher levels of buybacks going forward than maybe we've done in the past, absent some thing that comes up and we decide we want to deploy the capital. Jake?

Jeff, I said it during your remarks. At 18.2% discount to NAV, it still represents a great value creation opportunity for us. Each time we buyback a share, it does create value for our shareholders. So we don't want to rule out other options at this stage, but buybacks is a pretty simple one that's right in front of us and easy to execute.

Thank you and congrats again, Jeff.

Thank you, Jaeme.

Our next question comes from Bart Dziarski with RBC Capital Markets.

I wanted to start with the dividend and just ask around how you guys calibrate the growth rate. So Great-West IGM increased their dividend 10%, Power 9%. And simplistically, I think about it as kind of the Great-West dividend funds the power dividend. So maybe walk us through, are there other factors that you consider when thinking about how much to increase the dividend?

Thank you for your question, Bart. So the way we think about the dividend is that the sources of the dividend are the predictable cash flows and the predictable cash flows are the Great-West Life, IGM and GBL dividends. Everything else that we might get is episodic for lack of a better word. We're selling an asset. We're putting some money out to work, et cetera. So we then deduct the predictable expenses being the expenses of running Power Corp and our preferred dividends and the little bit of interest we have on the debt that we have at Power Corp. And you end up with basically internally net operating cash that is available for dividends.

The -- we have typically flowed through most of that number, but we've been building up a little bit more of a positive cash flow. So we have lagged a little bit the growth rate in the dividends of Great-West Lifeco and IGM. We make that -- we have that discussion every year. It's not to say that it's cast in stone. But if you look at the cash flow -- I just went through the equation, the dividends minus expenses, the pref and interest. We have moved over the last 6 years from a position of having slightly negative cash flow to having quite positive cash flow, and we like that.

As we have been disposing of the noncore assets or you haven't been around for the last 6 years, I don't think on the strategy, but we had a lot of noncore assets. Previous disclosures, we've talked about the fact that we raised about $3.6 billion over the last 6 years, about $1.8 billion of that was reinvested into supporting the platforms and other acquisitions of assets and about half of it went to buybacks.

We're now in a position because of having lagged the dividend rate and shrunk the shareholder -- basically the share base of power through the buybacks, we're in a positive cash flow position from that predictable equation I just went through. We're now in positive cash flow. And I would think we'd continue to want to increase that cash flow as we move forward, that will be -- a decision will be made kind of year-by-year as we go.

So there's a long story there, I can summarize it. But we flow through the dividend and have been keeping a little bit more to increase the cash flow is the short answer.

Got it. No, that's very helpful. And then just on Sagard. So I mean the FRE is negative, but we did see positive operating leverage this quarter. And then with the close of Unigestion now, could you let us know if that the profitable business and pro forma, the combined business, like could we be at a tipping point where we see profitability later this year or 2027?

Jake, who's on the board, I'll let Jake answer that question.

Good question, Bart. Yes, we will start incorporating Unigestion starting next quarter, and it is a profitable business as was BEX that has been acquired.

Tough to draw a straight line to say, we'll immediately have profitability in this quarter because there's lots happening elsewhere in the business. They're building out their private wealth capabilities. They're building out retail and distribution. They're strengthening a bunch of the investment capabilities across the platform. So the goal isn't a profitability goal at Sagard at this time. It's to continue to get that scale to continue to get that brand and reputation with capital allocators and get that capital formation strengthened.

So I don't want to give profitability guidance at this stage, and I don't think we will because we don't want to miss opportunities to make better business long term. What that means for Power shareholders is, obviously, we have the largest stake in and our stake in that GP over Sagard's history has gone four or fivefold in value for us. So we want that strategy to continue to play out at this stage where they're creating value at the GP, they're creating value through carried interest. We're getting returns on our seed capital, but we're not going to hold them to a have to make $5 million or you have to break even at this stage, we want to build a great durable business long term.

Got it. Thanks, Jake. And Jeff, look, great capital allocation, transparency increasing and ultimately value creation. So I wanted to echo the congrats.

Thank you, Bart. Much appreciated. Thank you very much.

There are no further questions. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Steven Hung for any closing remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Following the call, a telephone replay will be available later this morning, and the webcast will be archived on our website for 1 year. We look forward to our next update on the Q2 results. This concludes the call, and have a fabulous day.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Power Corporation Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded on Thursday, March 19th, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Steven Hung, Head of Investor Relations for Power Corporation. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the fourth quarter financial results call. Before we start, please note that a link to our live webcast and materials for this call have been posted to our website at powercorporation.com under the Shareholder Results Reports tab.

Please turn to Slide 2. I would like to draw your attention to the cautionary note regarding the use of forward-looking statements, which form part of today's remarks. Please also refer to Slide 3 for a note on the use of non-IFRS financial measures and clarifications on adjusted net asset value. To discuss our results today, joining us are President and CEO, Jeffrey Orr; and our EVP and CFO, Jake Lawrence.

We will begin with opening remarks followed by Q&A. With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Okay. Thank you, Steve. I'll pass it right along to Slide #5. And I guess my overall comment is that we have -- excuse me, we can go over to Slide 6, excuse me, that's my error. Thank you. I think a very, very strong quarter, strong earnings growth from those parts of our businesses that are earnings based, strong contributions from the businesses that we have that are more valued on an NAV basis, strong capital generation, strong return of capital to shareholders and then a number of moves that we made from a leadership point of view. I think it was -- the quarter was strong and the year was strong. I would characterize them in a very similar fashion, just strong value generation, all parts of the strategy kind of coming together and contributing to value creation. A little bit of noise in the earnings as we sometimes get coming from some consolidating adjustments and some other parts of the portfolio, GBL, et cetera.

We'll have -- Jake will walk you through some of that. But I'm really, really happy with what -- how we finished the year and with the year overall. And with that, Jake, I'll pass it to you, and you can go through the results.

Great. Thanks, Jeff, and good morning to everyone joining us today. I'm going to start on Slide 8. And as Jeff noted, we're very pleased to report strong adjusted results for the fourth quarter and as also noted for 2025. Looking at the quarter, adjusted net earnings were $867 million, which is up 5% year-over-year.

On a per share basis, the Q4 adjusted net earnings were $1.36, which is up 6% from Q4 last year. When we look at the contributors, Great-West contribution to Power's adjusted net earnings rose 13% year-over-year. The positive results in the quarter were supported by Great-West's seventh consecutive base earnings over $1 billion in a quarter. And this includes double-digit growth in the U.S. and a notably strong quarter in the Capital and Risk Solutions.

These strong results obviously supported some more return on capital from Great-West, which announced an increase in its quarterly dividend of 10% to $0.67 per share. IGM's contribution to adjusted earnings were also quite strong, up 22% year-over-year with strong IG Wealth and Mackenzie net flows.

AUM&A were up 15% year-over-year and 3% quarter-over-quarter. IGM announced an increase to its quarterly dividend of 10% to $0.62 a share. It's also worth noting the performance of some of the strategic investments at IGM. During the quarter, Rockefeller completed its previously announced transaction and IGM received total proceeds of $394 million (sic) [ $394.2 million ] primarily compromised as a return of capital as well as an equity sale. Partially offsetting the results this quarter was a net loss of $15 million from GBL's contribution to Power's adjusted net earnings.

The performance in the quarter was due to fair value losses on the GBL Capital portfolio, while previous periods included significant gains and higher contribution from GBL's operating companies. GBL recently announced that it has completed 95% of its $5 billion portfolio simplification target, which it communicated in its midterm strategic plan update back in November of 2024.

GBL also announced a 2.5% dividend increase to EUR 5.125 payable during 2026. Contribution to the corporation's net earnings from GBL was a loss of $195 million, which primarily includes the share of impairments and other charges related to GBL's investment in Imerys and additional losses on the partial divestment that I mentioned at the GBL Capital portfolio.

Moving to our alternative investment platforms. Sagard's contribution to adjusted earnings was $26 million. This is up from a loss of $11 million last quarter and down slightly from $33 million in the prior year. The increased contribution from Sagard in the quarter was mainly driven by fair value increases in private equity and venture capital.

Power Sustainable reported an adjusted loss of $21 million compared to a loss of $16 million in previous quarter and a loss of $43 million in the prior year. This is driven by operating losses related to energy infrastructure.

Moving to our corporate operations and other line. The loss increased this quarter, driven primarily by foreign currency translation on our euro and U.S. dollar cash balances, while the corresponding period included foreign exchange gains. Also in the quarter, we had some higher employee compensation costs.

Overall, we're pleased with our group's strong fourth quarter results, and it caps a strong 2025, and we're pleased with the momentum we're moving into 2026 with.

Turning to Slide 9 and our net asset value. We reported adjusted net asset value per share of $85.77 as of December 31st, 2025. First, I want to highlight that 84% of Power's gross asset value continues to be driven by our earnings-based businesses, Great-West and IGM, and that's up from 76% at the reorganization back in 2019, 2020.

Second, Power experienced strong adjusted net asset value growth during the year, up 42% and up 19% quarter-over-quarter. All of our publicly reported operating companies experienced strong NAV growth year-over-year. Great-West increased 39%, IGM increased 35% and GBL rose 24%.

Sagard's NAV increased 35% year-over-year, driven primarily by the fair value increase in Wealthsimple. Meanwhile, Power Sustainable saw a reduction in NAV over the course of the year, but that was related to asset sales that occurred in the first half that did increase our cash balance up at Power.

Speaking of cash balance, our Q4 ended very strong at $2.2 billion with approximately $1.9 billion available when we factor in dividends to be received and dividends to be paid. We remained active in returning capital to shareholders through our NCIB program. And during the fourth quarter, we repurchased 5 million shares worth $329 million and 12.4 million shares in full year 2025.

Power is well positioned and has delivered a strong return of capital with over $2.2 billion in share buybacks and dividends over the course of the full year 2025. And with that, I'll turn it back to Jeff.

Thank you, Jake, and I'll just roll forward here and make a comment on the leadership transition that we announced about a month ago. I am delighted with what we have announced and very confident that this is going to be extremely successful.

First of all, I'll comment on James. He's probably well known to many of you, but he clearly has the experience. He's got the leadership. He's got the judgment. He's going to do a great job. He knows the company well. He has the confidence of the management teams. He's got the confidence of the Board, and I think he will be extremely successful.

He has also got behind him to replace him in his role as CEO of IGM, Damon Murchison. Damon, maybe I think he's known to a number of you, a very, very dynamic leader, real change agent. He has incredible experience and knowledge of the Canadian Advisory and Asset Management space, spent a long time at Mackenzie, has been running IG Wealth and of course with a number of other players in different parts of the channel earlier in his career.

And we're very, very fortunate to have Damon amongst our group, and he will also -- is well equipped to lead IGM. This announcement that we made, if you go back over the year and just go back 12 months, we also successfully had a leadership transition at Great-West Lifeco, David Harney successfully moving into the role of CEO that has gone extremely well. And you will recall that we also announced a year ago or so ago, Johannes Huth was taking over as CEO of GBL. So in a 12-month period, we've effectively managed CEO transition across the main operating businesses and at Power Corp. itself.

And I'm going to be looking forward to helping James and the team in whatever way I can in terms of my knowledge and experience and ensuring that the transition is smooth and successful, and I'm very confident it will be. So that was -- we talk a lot about our results at these calls, but that was a very significant move.

I would call it a classic power move in terms of the way transition works. I won't worry with the 50-year history, but going back to all the way to when Power Financial was created and James Burns and then Robert Gratton and then myself, it's always kind of these long planned out successions where you've got someone coming in who have already led parts of the businesses and get to know the network well and get to know the Boards well.

And so this is what I would say, classic playbook for our group. So with that, let me then turn my comments to the results themselves. Great-West, just the beat goes on, I guess, is the theme that I would put, continued growth in earnings led by Empower, but contributions from across the different parts of the business. When you go through Great-West results, strong results from CRS as well.

Europe actually contributed well, but there's a lot of work on capital efficiency. So I think the Great-West Life team mentioned that their results -- there was a less capital deployed in there. And so that had an impact, but they actually had quite strong earnings growth. So good contribution from across the group and continued good momentum at Empower.

Very strong capital generation, obviously. The buybacks are going on. So very strong return of capital to shareholders. We're participating in that and then a dividend increase of 10% announced. So just kind of very continued success at Great-West Lifeco. If I turn you to Page 13, I know you've seen this slide, but this is almost 5 years. It was -- I think it was the spring of '21. So 5 years ago, they came up with their medium-term objectives, and they've met or exceeded all of those objectives. I think you know at their Investor Day last spring, they bumped the ROE target from what had previously been announced to -- from 16% to 17% up to 19%, and they introduced a base capital generation measure, and you're seeing that play through. It's strong.

The earnings translation into cash flow is very strong at Great-West Lifeco. I think one of the things I want to point out, though, is if you go and if you have the time, look at the annual growth in base earnings in the last 5, 6 years, it's really, really steady. This has not been kind of 3 years of flat and then a big jump.

It has just been steady growth, and it's obviously not perfect. I mean it's not like it's 12% every year, but it's very close. And so it's just kind of steady growth in earnings and performance, very, very impressive. So really pleased with that.

I'll turn to IGM. IGM, this was the year, I would say, where IG Wealth and Mackenzie, the earnings drivers at IGM versus the strategic portfolio broke out with strong earnings after quite a few years of going up and down, but mostly sideways as they've been investing in change in their businesses.

You know that the wealth and asset management businesses in the retail space in Canada in the last 5 years have been mostly in outflows as we -- if you go back over the last 5 years, we had that bump coming out of COVID where inflation jumped up, interest rates jumped up. And unless you're in the ultra-high net worth, high net worth space, basically Canadian households were not saving.

They were dissaving and the savings they were doing were going into deposits and moving out of risk products. That's finally come back in the past 12 months, we're starting to see the sector get into growth. And so you had flows kind of not being a friend of the business, but internal momentum at the business and changes that they've made together with flows getting back in and markets helping and you've had a breakout year for earnings, which resulted in the first dividend increase that IGM has announced in over a decade, which is really nice to see. So -- and then good market share gains and good underlying strength in both IG Wealth and Mackenzie. So the earnings part of the portfolio -- of their portfolio performing well.

And in addition to announcing a dividend increase, they also are returning capital to shareholders through buybacks. And so that was the first time we've seen an aggressive buyback like that. So lots happening on the earnings side. And if we flip the page to the strategic investments, in these businesses, if you go back, I think in terms of the reported value, there's something like $6 billion of reported value right now that IGM has, if you look at their material.

Go back 5, 6 years ago, that was $900 million. It was less than $1 billion. This has been a big change. While the earnings parts of the businesses, IG Wealth and Mackenzie have been invested in and transformed this part of the portfolio, which really sets up the growth in the next 5, 10 years has really been performing well. And we've got a portfolio of very exciting businesses here. Wealthsimple, which is the biggest part of our ownership is at IGM, just a very, very strong growth. You see the AUA growth there year-over-year.

Rockefeller continues to perform exceptionally well. And then China Asset Management has been -- has also been gaining market share in China and then Northleaf had a very strong year. So we've got -- IGM has 4 very, very strong businesses here, and they're not contributing a lot to earnings right now. But I can imagine going out many, many -- several years from now, during this call, we would expect that they're going to contribute.

And you see that on the next page because IGM did come out 2 years ago with medium-term objectives, and they have the higher growth even in the next 3, 4, 5 years coming from the strategic investments. And to date, 2 years after coming out with the guidance, they are ahead of the objectives that they announced publicly.

Quick comment on GBL. GBL actually delivered a strong TSR over the last -- in 2025. Jake commented on the fact that in the fall of '24, they came out with an objective of EUR 5 billion of assets they want to sell. They've effectively completed that. They also then announced that the private assets where they've been moving their portfolio that the indirect private assets that they have in GBL Capital and Sienna are also going to be -- that's no longer part of the strategy. They're basically going to be disposing of that.

Some of that is in the EUR 5 billion. But most of it is not. And so there's still lots of assets to sell there. So they are selling their indirect private assets. They're winding down over time their public portfolio and getting much more concentrated on direct private. And while they're doing so, they're aggressively doing share buybacks. And they also announced an increase to their dividend to EUR 5 and EUR 8, subject to shareholder approval for 2026. Remember, they had an 80% or 90% increase in the dividend last year.

Okay. My comment on each of the 2 alternative asset platforms. Big year for Sagard. Everything is in Canadian dollars here until we get to this slide, Sagard reports their AUM in U.S. dollars on the lower left -- right-hand corner, excuse me. You see year-over-year Sagard, they ended the year at USD 27 billion under management. Pro forma the Unigestion acquisition that they announced last year.

They will get to $47 billion on the closing, and we think they're very close to closing that transaction. And so strong growth through acquisitions. BECCS Capital was also announced acquisition and then in BECCS and performance management going to -- actually, I'll say in a minute what they're doing with those 3.

So strong growth by acquisitions, but also USD 3.5 billion in new commitments, so successful fundraising. And they're pulling on every string, I would say, to get growth in what is a challenging market for fundraising in the alternative space, acquisitions, partnerships and also fundraising.

So in the upper left-hand corner, the Sagard Private Equity Solutions, effectively, they're combining Performance Equity Management, BECCS Capital and Unigestion, which is a mid-market European-based private equity firm. And these are basically solutions providers. So they're not kind of single sleeve managers for the most part, where they're running out and raising a fund in over 5 years, buying 10 companies and then returning it.

These are -- they're basically buying positions in other funds, putting fund of funds together, taking direct participations in individual companies from time to time when they're investors in some of those funds. And so they're managing a multi-asset portfolio of mid-market companies and then packaging them together in either separately managed accounts for institutional investors or into funds for individual investors.

That will be, I think, a $22 billion or $23 billion secondaries solutions provider when that -- when those 3 companies come together following the acquisition of Unigestion.

Okay. Power Sustainable. Power Sustainable is not -- its assets are much, much smaller, obviously. But just a reminder, when we announced the reorganization at the end of 2019, start of 2020, there were no products in Power Sustainable. We had a portfolio of energy assets that were being developed and managed on behalf of Power Corp.

So all of these products that you see on the page there have been created. Teams have been hired and fundraising has been done. And we now have 4 very attractive products, very strong track records, very experienced teams. Fundraising has been difficult, but they made good progress in 2025, still looking to get more scale into these strategies, but we're at a point here where we've got 4 very attractive strategies.

And we're optimistic that we're going to deliver a good return for shareholders, certainly, and we're hopeful that we continue to make success on fundraising.

I turn to Page 20. We have got here the return of capital, Jake mentioned, the increased buybacks at the -- in particular, in the fourth quarter.

In 2025, we're participating in Great-West Lifeco's NCIB. We end the year with a very strong cash position, and we are going into 2026 with, I think, more cash than we've had since I can -- well, maybe ever actually, I'm not sure, but I can't remember us having this much cash balance.

So we are looking to that. And if you can flip forward on the page and my favorite slide to love or sometimes to not love is the power discount to NAV. And with a discount at 20%, we have successfully moved it down in the last 6, 7 years with our strategies, but it's certainly not a straight line.

And when you get people deciding they're going to take profits or whatever and we end up with some pressure or the stock doesn't do quite as well, it gaps out. And I initially react by going, why is it not at 3% that's where it should be based on my math. And then I turn around and go, no, that's just an opportunity for us because we're sitting on large cash balances and hopefully, others out there look at it as an opportunity as well to buy into a portfolio of companies that are doing extremely well and buying them at a discount. I sound like a retailer there at Walmart or something like that, but stocks on sale here is [ 20%]. I'll let you make your own judgments on that. So then turning the page to Page 22, we have basically since our TSRs for shareholders over various periods going back to the reorganization and the restructuring that we announced and the reorganization, I should say, and we have delivered strong and competitive shareholder returns.

The final page is Page 23, here looking ahead, I think we're in a very strong position to continue to drive value. We've got earnings growth from the -- the main part of the portfolio, which is earnings based, which is now bigger than it was 5 years ago. I think I mentioned explicitly, we had as a strategy to have less NAV-based.

Good NAV-based businesses that set the stage for the future, but we were trying to increase the portion that was earnings based. We've done that. So those -- the Great-West Life, Mackenzie, IGM, the earnings -- IG Wealth Management, excuse me, the earnings portions are in strong position to drive earnings growth.

That, together with the NAV part of the portfolio will continue to drive our NAV growth. We've got strong cash generation across the companies. I think Great-West Life and IGM are both reasonably valued. I think Great-West Life, given the growth it's delivered, the strength of the balance sheet, it's based on the forward multiples of the Street estimates, they're in the mid-11 multiple in '26 earnings and lower than that for '27.

IGM's multiple to put any reasonable value on the strategic portfolio and it's trading at a low P/E. And then we're trading at 20% discount at the Power level. So I think as you look at the value that we have created in the last 6 years, it has not been based upon a run-up in our valuation. We are still extremely well valued in terms of the parts, and we're trading at a discount in terms of our NAV.

So I think that we're well set up to continue to drive good shareholder returns. And I guess another way to look at it, and I maybe end on this point is that if you're buying power today, there's 0.98 of a Great-West Life share for every share of power that's outstanding. That's what we own, not [ with ] outstanding. Power owns 0.98 of a Great-West Life share. I think last night, Power closed at 66.59 and Great-West was 64.50, something like that. So they're almost trading at the same price. You're getting almost one Great-West Life share and everything else, you're getting to Power Corp basically for nothing, which is all of IGM and all the other assets, net of the pref shares.

And so it's -- that's just another way of saying we don't have -- we've got a reasonable valuation here and a good opportunity to continue to drive shareholder value. And with that, operator, that would conclude my remarks and be happy now if you turn the lines open and we can entertain questions from -- that may be there. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] The first question today comes from Graham Ryding with TD Securities.

Maybe I'll just start with more of an earnings-related question just in the quarter for Jake, just the consolidation offsets, that was a bit of a drag on the EPS this quarter, and I think it was also a theme last quarter. What drove the consolidation offset this quarter? And is this a -- should we view this as more of one-off noise? Or is this something that should be recurring?

Yes. Graham, thanks for your question. So yes, I view these items in particular, as largely one-off. So the consolidation impact was about $0.07 this quarter on the number. It is almost entirely related to fair value changes, and that's based on timing recognition of some of the investments that are within the group that were made down at Great-West and IGM.

And so we're going to do some work to try to smooth out those timing differences. But yes, I view that as largely onetime in nature.

Okay. Sounds good. You can't do a conference call without discussing AI. So maybe, Jeff, I can sort of just ask you, how much time at the Board level of Great-West and IGM are you spending on looking at how those businesses are positioned to both leverage AI on your front foot and also defend the businesses against any AI-related competitive forces? Just maybe some high-level thoughts on how you're feeling about those businesses.

Graham, thanks for your question. It's a great question. And the answer is a lot at the Board level, a lot at the management levels all the way through the organization. We are absolutely focused on it. The management teams are focused on it. So what I would say is, first of all, from an organizational point of view, each of our management teams own the issue. So you go into Great-West Life and the champion of AI is David Harney. It's from the CEOs you get nothing done unless the CEOs prioritize the issue. We have that within our group companies. As well at Power Corp, we are attempting to coordinate and have the groups benefit from common learning because we have about a 5-point strategy across the group as to how we're going to tackle AI and what we are tackling.

I shouldn't use the future tense at this point, what we're doing. And 2 of those are kind of common as to -- we've got a theme on the senior leadership and executives getting proficient at AI. We've got a whole effort on doing that so that we're kind of not -- that people know what they're talking about when they're engaged in it.

And we also have a learning part of the strategy, which is going around and visiting competitors around the world, suppliers. And that earning process is also one that we're trying to coordinate and not have every company duplicate on its own.

Once you go from there, there's an exercise of mapping across all of the business units, what the opportunities can be and sizing them up so that we're into an exercise of prioritizing. And then we have exercises going on across the group that I would call them more pilots, but they're actually putting things into play in different parts of Great-West Life and IGM, and we're using different suppliers, outside suppliers, testing who's good, who's not, how is it working, people -- the various names that you would hear as opposed to using one supplier, we're trying different ones and then seeing how we work organizationally to put those into place and put the changes in process into place.

So that's what we're doing about it and prioritizing. And then you ask me for a comment and a perspective. I think this is -- in the first instance is going to be -- in some ways, you could say it's similar to fintech and then I'm going to say how it's not. But 10, 11 years ago, we saw fintech as, oh my goodness, what's going to happen? Is this going to hurt our incumbent businesses? And you know how we responded.

We responded by doing some things external -- by setting up some things like we set up a venture capital fund to invest in fintech, all our companies in place and put the management team in place. We started a basically an incubator fund out of Montreal, where we founded a number of companies, some of which have gone public. And then we made a couple of bigger bets in fintech through Wealthsimple and in the States through Personal Capital, which is now part of Empower bought that. And of course, we still control Wealthsimple.

We responded and many of the products that came out of that are now in our company. So Nesto is going to end up being one of the biggest mortgage administrators and managers in Canada. And guess what, IG Wealth was the first company to put it in place. But it's a company called TD.

I don't know if you know them, Graham, but they're, as I say, with a smile on my face. But Nesto is basically going into the banking channel now and also going to be supplying that. Same thing with Conquest Planning. So we had all this fintech strategy.

We're looking at AI as a comparable. It's an opportunity. And at the same time, you ask yourself the question, is it a threat? Is it going to displace some of our businesses, and we're thinking about it that way. We're taking it as seriously as that. And the last thing I'm going to say is I do think it's going to be a while. We, like many others that I talk to are looking at the opportunity, but not too many people have translated those opportunities into savings yet.

And I think it will be a while before you see actually P&L benefits. And then my own view is even when you get cost efficiencies and better client experiences, which is the 2 things you're going to get out of it, I think a lot of the savings will end up becoming -- it's going to be coming table stakes.

So I don't know that at the end of the day, you're going to see increased margins. I think you're going to have -- my own view is ultimately, it's going to -- everyone is either going to get good at this or they're going to be in a lacking a competitive position. And I think, therefore, the margins will be what the margins will be. But I don't view it as a massive profit opportunity. And if people are selling it that way to their shareholders, and I don't share that view. I think it's just something you've got to do to remain competitive.

And then we're in a competitive world, the margins will be what the margins are. So that was about as complete an answer as I can give you. I just went right through the whole thing. That answers your question.

The next question comes from Tom MacKinnon, BMO.

On Slide 27 of your investor presentation, some questions about the Power Corp earnings from investing activities of Sagard and Power Sustainable. You talked about a 10% plus return on the $3.2 billion in proprietary capital.

We kind of look at what that $3.2 billion was is $2.7 billion at the beginning of the year. And so that would be at least $270 million in terms of investing activity earnings. But if I go into the SIP, we're not getting kind of near that. The investing activity earnings on Power -- on both -- on Sagard and Sustainable are certainly less than that and in fact, were negative in 2024 and 2023.

Is there anything that we're missing here? Is this predicated on monetization? Or does that have an impact on this 10% kind of return? like why wouldn't.

Tom, I'll start off, Jeff, feel free to add in, if you like. Thanks for your question, Tom. So on Slide 27, you'll note the $3.2 billion, and it has grown. It is AUM, and it is the fair value of the investments. And as you'll note, there's a variety of strategies. And so those strategies have different return profiles and different return expectations, and we've tried to under the target net IRR, lay out the return expectations. But in terms of the return profile, you can expect something like a private credit to have more of a stream of income that comes in over time, well as other investments like venture capital and private equity, which you can see are a large portion on the page, they're going to have more episodic as it relates to monetizations and other activities.

You will see the value, and we tried to spell that out in the wheel on the left-hand side of the page where you've got capital appreciation versus pure income strategies. You will see as we fair value these, the increase will go up, but it doesn't always show up in the P&L or in earnings in the quarter. But it is creating value, and that will be realized and monetized over time.

So let me add to that, and I agree with what Jake said. This is not intended to say those are the earnings that we're going to drive. That's the returns we're going to drive.

But even on the income side of the picture, let's look at Energy Infrastructure, which is our energy fund, for example, energy equity fund, we're getting a cash return, and we've had an NAV bump on the portfolio. But the assets in that, that were brought under production in the last 3, 4 years, from a net income point of view.

And this one, we happen to own a big chunk of because we moved our energy -- back for a second. We moved our energy portfolio and we created a fund, and we own about 40% of the fund, I think, in this case. So we're consolidating this one. And so we put all these energy assets into production and there's big depreciation going on. So we actually have net income losses.

So that fund is producing losses in the seed capital portfolio, but creating positive cash flow every year, and we've had NAV bumps that have been going through the NAV. So there's a perfect example. We have losses going through the P&L, and it's going to make its 8% to 9% IRR.

I think it's been doing better than that since we've been in it. So it's a classic case, Tom, where we've got a portfolio of assets here that are not driving earnings, but they are, we think, driving value creation.

Yes. Understood. So sort of a geography answer to some extent there. The second question, just if I may, is really just on Page 13 of the SIP. You've got -- despite the fact that Sagard has got some bigger assets, the fees went up, but certainly didn't go up as much as the investment platform expenses.

So still negative fee-related earnings. What's contributing to this negative operating leverage? And when we might be able to see some fee-related earnings at Sagard and Sustainable going forward?

So there's been strong growth in -- it's a very good question. And at the high-level question is that Sagard is looking to grow. And it is adding strategies, adding in all the ways I've told you, adding strategies, making acquisitions, adding and trying -- it's getting itself up. It's 44 -- I think the Canadian equivalent of what we talked on the slide is USD 44 billion pro forma Unigestion, and they have publicly stated a goal of getting to $100 billion. And so they are making and Paul III is making an aggressive move to get Sagard to be a scale player, although focused in the mid-market.

You may say scale, $100 billion. I thought Apollo had USD 800 billion versus [indiscernible] $100 billion, how could that be scale? This Sagard is much more focused on mid-market and $100 billion in mid-market would put you as a very strong player globally. So he's prioritizing growth to get to being a viable long-term mid-market player, strong mid-market player.

And every time that you do that, you end up with you're adding teams, you're adding costs. I think the last number and look around the table to correct me, I think the run rate fees at this point are USD 190 million. So you go back, it was USD 18 million when we launched the Strategy 6 years ago when we said we're creating an alternative asset manager here.

It's up from $18 million to $190 million just on the fees over a 6-year period. So you can't argue with success. I think they're doing an amazing job. But here, I'm going to play back the discussion, Tom, to you, and hopefully, it resonates when you say, okay, so Power is earning $3-plus billion, we're creating a company where the GP stake of Power in Sagard has grown in value from virtually nothing to over $300 million.

Big, big growth in the value of GP. We've made money on the seed capital. We've got Carry. And I'm trying to build a $100 billion manager and you're asking me to produce $5 million of FRE for the shareholders of Power Corp. versus a $5 million loss. Well, I'm trying to build -- are you looking at this for the wrong end of the telescope and you go, no, you should continue to build, but don't create big losses.

How it comes out in any given year, I think they're trying to target to breakeven, but you get some fundings that are a little late or something, you don't quite hit the mark, but he's not far off.

So anyway, that's maybe a longer answer than you wanted. They're doing a great job. I agree with the objectives. I agree with the strategy. And that's another way of saying I wouldn't expect even if FRE gets a little positive in a given year, I wouldn't expect it to be a big contributor to Power's earnings in the next few years. We're not looking for it to do that.

Okay. And same for Sagard or same for Sustainable?

Yes. Power Sustainable is in a different situation. I think they've got -- they're lacking scale at this point because they're earlier -- I try to convey that. They did -- we had great products and they built great products, but they've run into -- it's not been the easiest time to fund.

And so they've got larger losses from an operating point of view. So that's a bigger challenge, and I think we have a bigger need there to get scale into those strategies. But they do have very attractive strategies. They're very, very focused on getting more funding into it. We have made good returns on the seed capital. So not -- and that was the one I explained even though we appear to be losing money on the seed capital, we're actually making money. So -- and we've got some Carry on it as well.

So it's not like the overall picture of our seed capital, the losses we're making at the GP, but the Carry we're getting economically, that looks a lot better than just if you look focus on the run rate of the FRE. But having said all that also, I think we have a bigger scale issue. It's not exactly the same answer.

We have a greater need to get more assets to get Power Sustainable to a point where it's up and it's got a decent P&L. It's not there yet. Still a work in progress on that one.

The next question comes from Doug Young with Desjardins Capital Markets.

Jeff, I just want to go back to Slide 2021, and you continue to tender into the Great-West buyback, but not all the cash that's coming in is being used to buyback Power shares and that's kind of funneling into the build-out of your cash balance. So what's the strategy on holding more cash? And to your point, the discount to NAV has come out quite a bit. Why not be more aggressive on buybacks? Or is there kind of an effort to hold more cash at the holdco? And if that's the case, why?

It's a great question, and we talk -- we're having the same discussions internally. I think the cash came at us more quickly probably than we should have expected it, but we've let the cash balance grow. And I think that coupled with where Page 21, I think we will be looking to be -- our top capital priority here is going to be to buyback shares. I think that's the answer. And we do think the cash balance is quite large. So I agree with your observation, and I agree with the opportunity, and we intend to be aggressive on the buybacks. It's a good question.

Okay. So there's no binding constraint that I'm missing and why?

No. Yes. It's just timing and timing of when we receive the money. We're continuing to receive the money. Also, can I -- I will remind you that it wasn't clear Great-West Life Board and hadn't decided what they announced in terms of the buybacks for 2026. And we got -- so we were building up the capital late in 2025, wondering how long that was going to go for? And do we kind of spend it all at once?

Or do we kind of feather it out over the next -- like some of those -- and we got behind the curve and then they announced they're continuing to do it for another year and all of a sudden, the cash is going to continue to come in and now the cash balance is growing. And so we're getting with the program here, and we've got a lot of cash on the balance sheet, and that's not an intentional -- it wasn't an intentional outcome. It just happens to be where we are. And looking at Page 21, I think we will get more aggressive on the buyback side.

Okay. And then are you proportionately tendering to the IGM buyback?

Yes. That was -- oh, to the IGM, I'm sorry, I thought you said Great-West. No, we are not. No, excuse me, pardon me, the answer is no. I had a look from Jake here when I said yes. He almost pulled me off the stage.

No, I thought you said Great-West. No, we are not in IGM. To remind you, Great-West Life asked us. We didn't initially do so. They came to us and said we would like you to do that, and we looked at that and considered it and said, fine, we will do that. And so now we got the cash coming in, but we've not had that discussion with IGM.

Doug, I think it's something we can look at over time. I think -- sorry, it's Jake. I think it's something we can look at over time. But as you've observed, we've got a strong cash balance now. And I think as Jeff noted, job one is to take advantage of the opportunity that the market presents us, and then we can revisit if we need other sources of cash.

Okay. And then just one last one, like operating expenses, I think you referred to it in your remarks, but $60 million was up last quarter versus last quarter last year. Any unusual items that's going through this quarter that we should think about? Or is this kind of a new run rate? Is it hiring? Is it technology?

Yes. Thanks, Doug. It's Jake again. So I think good observation. Both Q4 and '25 had some higher costs related to employee compensation. That would have been the bigger driver. And I think specifically, those costs are related to performance-related compensation or long-term incentive. And so we don't expect them to occur to the same magnitude in 2026. And so as we move into the year, we've taken some steps to tighten that up a little bit and make sure we don't see that same bump up. So I don't view it as a new run rate and our expectation in '26 is to see that come down a little bit.

We don't have a lot -- we haven't actually driven the costs of the head office is up in terms of -- it's gone up a little bit. We've got some -- we've had some inflation. We certainly hired a lot of great people. The talent has never been better here. So there's been some and very happy, terrific investment, but not to the magnitude the costs have gone up.

It's really been performance-based equity-based compensation, some of which was issued in previous years. And then we've had great performance, all the metrics we have internally, the stock price has done well. And so it's really from the TSRs that you've been seeing and some of that has been shared with the management and the people here. And not all of that was properly perfectly hedged, exactly. It wasn't perfectly hedged. That's the best way to say it. But it's not because the underlying cost has gone up in a material way.

It's gone up a little bit, but not -- it's gone up like the actual infrastructure hasn't grown. At all relative to the value. It has grown in low single digits in terms of number of people, et cetera.

Okay. So hopefully, that helps.

That's perfect. Appreciate the time.

The next question comes from [ Ramil Saba ] with Jefferies.

So my question is on capital allocation as well. So when we're looking at your power discount to NAV, it's been coming down from 35% to close to 10% at some point. At what point would you say that the discount is too narrow to continue allocating excess capital to buybacks and probably better to reallocate that excess capital to reinvesting into OpCos or publicly listed subs?

Ramil, thank you for the question. And you are correct. It's been a -- I think the discount started narrowing at the start of 2019 when Great-West Life announced it was selling its U.S. insurance business and in the press release said and would consider returning capital to shareholders, and we follow that up with a 3-way buyback that you may not have been around to follow us and then we announced the reorganization.

And it's been a long road of our strategies, communication, changing the mix, and when it doesn't go on a straight line. But then where does it get to? My own math is the following. We have, call it, $200 million or so of expenses here at Power Corp after tax. That's a smaller number to a net present value on that, and that's the only real liability.

You could put some pension expenses, I guess, if I was being complete on the balance sheet. You can get to a discount of about 3% is the way I do it, is basically -- because the pref shares and the debt are already in the NAV calculation. So there's a value gap when the discount is above 3%. But that's -- so it's -- there's a big opportunity right there.

But the reason for the buyback is not simply to [ arb ] the discount. That's just a benefit that we happen to be getting right now. But even if the discount were to narrow down, it wouldn't mean we would stop buybacks. If we are getting capital coming in from participating in buybacks from Great-West Lifeco, for example, in the future, what they're doing is they're transferring their excess cash to us. And because on their excess cash, they're earning 2%, 3% and then they're putting the monkey on our back, if you will, by building up our cash balance. And in that circumstances, we -- if we have good uses of capital, we'll do so. We'll invest it, but we would also continue to buy shares back potentially in those circumstances.

It's not just an NAV arb that we're doing. We're basically returning excess capital to our shareholders. So that begs the question, what are our capital priorities? Well, they've got to be on strategy. We've always participated and supported Great-West and IGM if they needed to do an equity issue for an acquisition or something. But that's happened, I think, about 3 times in the last 35 years.

So that doesn't happen very often. And then we've got to be convinced that when we're investing in other businesses that we have, say, the platforms that we're going to get an adequate return and it's going to be properly valued in our share price. And so one other thing that's been happening is -- and I'll finish my comment on that is as we've been buying shares back over the last 6 years, the source historically here has been selling a lot of NAV-based assets, the stand-alone businesses, et cetera. And we've actually been changing the mix of our business from I mentioned earlier in the call, I think we're about 74%, 75% of IGM and Great-West Life in the mix. That's up to 84%. We did that explicitly.

So I think we're also -- another thing when we're buying shares back, we're mindful of not kind of tilting the portfolio, if I can call it that, to being too much of NAV based because our shareholders, public shareholders tell us they're happy to have some of that, but not too much of it. So anyway, maybe I went into too many details for you, Ramil, but it's not just the NAV discount that we're [ arving ]. There's lots of other considerations when we do buybacks. That's my answer.

Yes, that's helpful. I'm just trying to understand how you think about capital allocation. That's helpful answer.

The next question comes from Scott Fletcher with CIBC.

I wanted to go back to the asset manager platform. So just asking about fundraising. It's been a while since the last earnings call. Just was hoping we get an update on the change in the fundraising markets, if they've strengthened or worsened for Sagard and by asset class, in particular, would be helpful.

I'm happy to kick off with some comments, Scott, and we can come back to you with by asset class. In the quarter, Sagard raised about $1.4 billion. And for the year, they raised $3.5 billion.

U.S. dollar in their case, yes.

Yes, U.S. dollar is a good point in their case. And so -- and I think we've seen that across several strategies. I wouldn't say quarter-to-quarter, we've seen any real change in the climate. And I don't think we've seen a change year-over-year, [ Frank]. There was a period where I think monetization did start to happen, particularly in large-scale public funds at some point of last year, but I think that started just with market volatility to dry up a little bit.

So as Jeff noted in his comments for both Sagard and Power Sustainable, the fundraising continues to be tough, but creatively pulling on different strings and taking advantage of those opportunities to build scale through other means, whether it's partnerships, Sagard obviously announced the Baird transaction last year as well as with Sagard, the acquisition of Unigestion, combining that with Performance Equity Management and another acquisition BECCS to build that private equity solutions business that has primary private equity funds, secondary and co-ownership opportunities. So still a tough fundraising environment, but a solid year for Sagard with USD 3.5 billion raised during the period.

Okay. That's helpful. And then just as a follow-up, if you think about getting to that $100 billion target of AUM, is there an ideal mix between M&A and capital raising? Like how much should we expect that to be acquired? Anything there would be helpful.

I mean, I don't know that there's an ideal mix. I think it will depend on the opportunities that are in front of Sagard and what the fundraising environment is like and what the in a way, there's almost an inverse correlation.

You can imagine when the fundraising isn't very good, lots of firms are growing and they're getting funding into their strategies and they're less inclined to look to do partnerships because they're having fun and they're getting there on their own. And so if we got back into a very healthy fundraising environment, you can imagine a lot of midsized players are saying, why would I sell out? I'm growing beautifully here and things are going well.

You get into a tough environment, and now they're looking at their dreams and they're going, boy, it isn't quite working out the way I thought it was. Maybe I need to partner with someone who's got more scale. We can get some cost synergies, we can get some more fundraising on a broader platform, et cetera, and you get more of an M&A market.

So I don't think you can overtrain on what -- how it's going to play out in the future because you don't have a crystal ball. And you just need to have all the tools and the tool set and be opportunistic as it comes. I think that's the real answer. I know Paul III and the team are going to use -- they're going to pull on every lever they have. That is the one thing I'm sure of.

The next question comes from Bart Dziarski with RBC Capital Markets.

I guess I'll stick with the asset management business. And just with Sagard private credit, there's lots of kind of noise out there today. I think lots of it is overblown, but there is about $8 billion of AUM in Sagard, and I think that has direct lending and CLOs. So can you guys just give us an update on what you're seeing on the ground in that portfolio or part of the business?

Jake, do you want to handle that one?

Yes. Maybe I'll just -- because we've covered seed capital as well in the conversation today, Bart, I'd just note that we're not concerned about our exposure that we have directly through seed capital. It's around $100 million in Sagard private credit funds, and we're very comfortable with it. As you know, they do have AUM exposed.

I'll scope your $8 billion down to about $6 billion which is specific to private credit, which is predominantly, and I'd say the majority is institutional. And when we look at the portfolios, I think we get to a spot where we're comfortable and why we're comfortable is Sagard's strategies around these funds.

They're conservatively positioned, and we're not seeing any concerns at this time. The default rates within those funds are not on the rise. And I think that's reflective of the credit team there Adam Vigna and other strong underwriting standards, their high-quality portfolio and low leverage.

They have nearly 0 software exposure, and they've seen, as I noted, limited credit stress at this time. And they -- the way they approach the strategy, Bart, is they're first lien senior secured loans in the mid-market space, generally in kind of family-owned or founder-led companies with moderate leverage and pretty predictable cash flow. So we're not seeing stress at this stage, and we're quite comfortable with how the product is performing and actually feel pretty well.

And there's obviously been a lot of coverage in newspapers, but that's not actually what we're seeing play out in the books that we've got exposure to here, both directly through seed capital and what Sagard is managing for their clients.

Great. Very helpful. And then one of the growth opportunities within the alt sectors just the insurance channel, and you've got a Canada Life within the ecosystem. Like could you give us a sense of where you are at with Sagard kind of leveraging that relationship to source capital from insurance? And I could broaden that out, I guess, to third-party insurance companies as well.

Yes. Thanks. Good question, Bart. Thank you. So the first thing to say is that what Canada Life and Great-West Lifeco does with its balance sheet is their own decision, of course. And so the primary decision making that goes on there is what's right for their portfolio. And when you look across the suite of assets that the alt managers have, there are some products that fit in.

But when you're running an insurance balance sheet, equity is not exactly a capital-friendly thing to do. You have some room for it, and there is some private equity on the Canada Life and the Great-West Lifeco balance sheets that comes from Sagard and Power Sustainable, but the bulk of what they're looking for is credit.

And then when you get into private credit, there's some allocation to that on the Canada Life, Great-West Lifeco balance sheets, but it's not -- it's a pretty small asset class. So you can address that more directly in questions to them.

So I guess the answer is there's an opportunity, but it's not -- you're not going to drive the growth of Sagard or Power Sustainable based on that. Power Sustainable itself has an infrastructure credit fund in the United States with Tom Murray running it, which is a really high-quality product. That is something I know that the Canada Life folks are very excited about and interested in.

So there's some spots here and there. So I think that Canada Life and Great-West Life have moved some of their portfolio into alts, but in typical Canada Life, Great-West Life fashion, they've not been as aggressive in that space as some of their competitors and certainly not the insurance companies that actually -- are actually owned by the alt managers where they've gone in a much more aggressive fashion.

So the high-level answer is it's Great-West Life's decision, it's Canada Life's decision. There's some opportunity, but -- and Sagard and Power Sustainable are all over it. There's what we're talking to them all the time. But I don't think you grow the businesses on the back of that.

So I think, operator, that's it for the questions? It looks like it is.

There are no further questions at this time.

Okay. Great. Thank you. So with that, I'd like to thank everyone for joining us this morning, and I hope you have a great day, and we'll talk to you at our upcoming quarterly Q1 report. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you all.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect your lines.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Power Corporation Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to remind that this call is being recorded on Thursday, November 13, 2025.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Steven Hung, Head of Investor Relations for Power Corporation. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our third quarter financial results call. Before we start, please note that a link to our live webcast and materials for this call have been posted to our website at powercorporation.com under the shareholder report tab.

Also, Power Corporation released a new financial supplementary package that can be found on our website as well. Please turn to Slide 2. I would like to draw your attention to the cautionary note regarding the use of forward-looking statements, which form part of today's remarks. Please also refer to Slide 3 for a note on the use of non-IFRS financial measures and clarifications on adjusted net asset value.

To discuss our results today, joining us are President and CEO, Jeffrey Orr; and our EVP and CFO, Jake Lawrence. We will begin with opening remarks followed by Q&A.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Jeff.

Okay. Thank you, Steve, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us this morning to discuss the results from the latest quarter. Very strong quarter for Power and the whole group with 3 components really on display here, strong earnings growth from the company's value creation on evidence from our strategic investments both at Power and at IGM and then very strong cash flow and buildup of our cash positions.

So all elements of what we're doing, I think, on clear display this quarter. From an earnings point of view, it was a very clean quarter. Obviously, it was good conditions, markets were strong, very, very positive environment in which we operate. But notwithstanding that, I think it demonstrated the earnings power of both the Great-West Life and IGM's earnings-driven businesses. And fundamentally, those businesses are growing. They're in good shape. They continue to build their businesses, but they also earn in a clean quarter, it was really demonstrating what kind of earnings power has been created there.

On the value creation from the strategic investment side, as I said, both Power and IGM have portfolios of companies that are much higher growth and that are basically valued more on NAV than earnings. And in this quarter, 2 of those companies announced transactions, the Wealthsimple and Rockefeller transactions that demonstrated not just the quality, but the magnitude of the value creation that can be created in that part of the portfolio.

And finally, from a cash flow point of view, a strong -- we've returned a lot of capital. That's an element of our strategy as well, and we stepped up our share repurchases on the back of a strong cash flow coming into the company, including from the Great-West Life buyback, which we started to participate in and notwithstanding the pickup in the buyback activity, the cash position of Power Corp had quite a material jump over the quarter. So then I'll just flip forward to Page 7 and just talk a little bit about the 2 transactions that were announced this fall.

So Rockefeller, as I think you're well aware, it was an investment that was made. I think it was in the spring of 2023, some 9 quarters or so ago. In U.S. dollars, IGM invested $620 million or $835 million, as you see at the bottom of the left-hand page there in Canadian dollars. So Rockefeller welcomed a group of new shareholders into the capital stack, and those are all kind of prominent family investors, Mousse is in effect of the Chanel family, it is their -- the Chanel company, basically, the Wertheimer family and the Heilbronn run Mousse that's their family office. Progeny is the Hemingway family for the West Coast of the U.S. at Abrams Capital, sort of Boston.

So they joined Viking and the Rockefeller family and in effective with IGM, the Desmarais family, if you want to put it from an ultimate control here. So you've got a group of prominent wealthy families that are in behind what's going on at Rockefeller, but a very significant jump in value is the main point here I want to make, as you can see on the bottom of the page for IGM.

And then Wealthsimple continues to experience tremendous growth that crossed recently $100 billion in assets and continue to really grow their franchise, grow the number of clients. You're just succeeding on all fronts at this point. They had announced a very successful financing round that was led by GIC and Dragoneer. Two, obviously, very credible investors, but also included some very other prominent investors that you can see at the bottom of the right-hand side there. And our group participated for $200 million, $100 million each for Power and IGM of the $550 treasury.

And then once again, at the bottom right, you see the value creation. Power has got its own investment and across the group, including IGM, principally, you can see the value pickup from just the last quarter. We had marked it up last quarter, but then the financing was done at an even higher mark. So nice to see those 2 transactions validating the value creation that we see in our portfolio of strategic investments. Page 8, I won't really go through with just kind of a summary of financially how we've done.

And with that, I'm going to pass the microphone over to Jake. Jake?

Great. Thanks, Jeff, and good morning to everyone joining us. I'm going to begin my remarks on Slide 10. And -- as Jeff just commented, we're pleased to report strong results for the third quarter of 2025. Our adjusted net earnings from continuing operations were $863 million, and that's an increase of 25% year-over-year.

When we look at the results on a per share basis, Q3 adjusted net earnings were $1.35, up 26% from last year and the slight uptick versus the overall earnings reflects our buyback activity. Before turning to the operating company results, I just want to remind everyone that our ownership in Wealthsimple across the Power, Complex is consolidated at Power's Corporation level. And therefore, the fair value increase in Wealthsimple will not appear in our P&L results.

Now moving to our operating company results and beginning with Great-West, whose contribution to Power's adjusted net earnings was up 16% year-over-year. The positive results were supported by Great-West sixth consecutive quarter of base earnings in excess of $1 billion, and including double-digit growth in our U.S. business, Europe and really notably a strong quarter in the Capital and Risk Solutions business.

IGM's contribution to Power's adjusted earnings were up 23% year-over-year, as we saw strong growth in IG Wealth and Mackenzie net flows. The quarter ended with record high AUM and AUA, which were up 14% year-over-year and increased 7% quarter-over-quarter. The results also saw a strong earnings contribution from China AMC, while Rockefeller, which Jeff just spoke to, their earnings in the quarter were positive. Slightly offsetting these results this quarter was GBL's contribution of Power's adjusted net earnings, which was a loss of $11 million. The lower contribution in the quarter was due to a fair value loss of GBL Capital as well as higher operating expenses and lower gains on disposals of investments.

Last week, GBL also announced a significant divestment of the GBL cattle portfolio, and the net earnings of the quarter reflect the estimated transaction value on their assets. Moving to our alternative investment platform. Sagard's’ contribution this quarter with a loss of $11 million. It was down from positive earnings of $106 million last quarter. The decrease was primarily driven by higher carried interest expense associated with the fair value increase at Wealthsimple as well as the impact of acquiring the remaining economic interest in Performance Equity Management, which they increased up to 100%.

Power Sustainable reported an improved contribution driven by lower net carried interest expense as well as lower acquisition costs. Looking at our corporate operations and other segments, we reported an improved contribution, and that was driven primarily by the positive impact of FX gains relating to foreign currency translation on cash balances. Meanwhile, operating expenses were higher due to an increase in long-term compensation expenses and some increased advisory fees. Overall, we are pleased with our group's strong third quarter results and expect continued momentum to end the fiscal year in Q4.

Turning to the next page, Slide 11, looking at our net asset value. we reported net asset value per share of $72.24 as of September 30, 2025. I want to remind the group that 83% of our Power's gross asset value continues to be driven by our earnings-based businesses, specifically Great-West and IGM. Second, during the quarter, we experienced strong adjusted NAV growth, which was up 25% compared to the same period last year and up 12% to the prior quarter.

Driving that change were increases at all of our publicly reported operating companies with IGM up 25%, followed by Great-West 22%, while GBL rose 18%. The net asset value of Sagard increased 40% year-over-year, and that was driven by the fair value increase in Wealthsimple I've mentioned.

Meanwhile, Power Sustainable saw a slight reduction in NAV, and that's related to some asset sales that we announced earlier this year that generated cash for the corporation. On our cash balance, we ended the quarter at $1.9 billion. We see about $1.5 billion available when we factor in dividends to be paid and dividends we've yet to receive. And as many will have seen, we remained active in our NCIB program.

During the quarter, we repurchased 3 million shares worth about $170 million. And to date, we purchased 7.4 million shares. We continue to be well positioned to deliver a strong return of capital, as Jeff noted upfront, and year-to-date to October 31, we've returned over $2 billion to shareholders through a combination of share buybacks and dividends.

And with that, Jeff, I'll turn it back to you.

Okay, Jake. Thank you. So I will move us forward to Page 13. Just a couple of comments about Great-West Life. They continue to meet or exceed the medium-term objectives that they announced -- objectives that they announced several years ago and continue to have strong earnings growth. I thought it was really pleased to see, and Jake mentioned, it was across virtually all the geographies.

And as well, if you look at it from a business segment point of view, retirement wealth asset management, insurance, et cetera, as you look through the different components of it, it was strong across the board. And it was also coupled with very high cash generation. I mentioned before that Great-West Lifeco is doing -- being very clear as to how the earnings in each of those areas turn into cash generation. And then you're seeing that at the top of the house as the cash continues to build up the Great-West Lifeco level. The company announced, again, a buyback earlier this year and then came up with recent announcement that they're increasing and extending the buyback programs. And as you know, Power Corp has decided to participate pro rata in those buybacks now. So just all good news across the Great-West, really great momentum in the businesses.

IGM as well, then turning to Page 14. Jake mentioned strong AUA and AUM growth, its markets, but it's also flows. It was really nice to see that both IG Wealth and Mackenzie had very strong flows. And those earnings are also turning into strong cash positions, financial position of IGM, cash position continues to grow and they have increased their buyback activity as well as a consequence. So the earnings businesses here really, really doing well.

I'll just turn you to Page 15 and just use this slide to focus on the strategic investment portfolio of IG, it is -- there are 4 businesses there. They're very high quality businesses, and they're growing very strongly. I talked about Wealthsimple and Rockefeller earlier, you see just there the year-over-year growth in AUA and in client assets at the 2 franchises.

But on the asset management side as well, China AMC is growing its assets strongly. They're growing their market share. The company is doing extremely well. That's been against the backdrop of mandated fee decreases. So the earnings haven't kept pace, but the earnings have been growing in spite of those fee drops. And so, but the health of the business, the growth of the business and the position of the business continues to be extremely strong. And then Northleaf, in a very difficult fund raising environment for alt managers, doing a really nice job in building up their AUM with some very strong fundraising and performance year-over-year. So very high-quality portfolio, not currently contributing a lot to IGM's, net earnings.

But over time, as these businesses continue to grow and mature, we have 4 very strong quality businesses that we hope and expect will start to contribute earnings in the years ahead as they get to being in a more mature state. A couple of comments on GBL then on Page 16. We did have mentioned that a new CEO was announced in the spring Johannes Huth and he has come in and got a very strong track record in his time with KKR, where he was there for I think it was 25 years.

The basic strategy is the same, which is ultimately to rotate out of the public portfolio over time. And then with the proceeds that would come from that, combined with an increased focus on private investments and coupled with a return on capital, the return on capital being evidenced through the strong increase in the dividend that they announced earlier this year as well as strong buyback activities.

There has been a significant transaction that Jake mentioned. As Johannes and the team have focused on the private capital, there is in GBL Capital, a portfolio of investments in other people's funds that was part of the previous strategy and decision was made that was not strategic. So the transaction that Jake mentioned was a $1 trillion -- that would be nice, EUR 1.7 billion that was disposed of at about a 9% discount when you do secondaries in this -- in private alts, you're typically discounting them. That was actually a pretty good price, 9% discount was not a big discount. They went out and announced a series of transactions with different buyers and disposed of a big chunk of that GBL portfolio of other people's funds. So good move and more capital coming into GBL. So good lots of activity there. We continue to watch GBL with interest as under the new leadership.

And then a couple of words on the alternative platforms at Power, ongoing fundraising on Page 17 of $2 billion since we last spoke. So continued good progress there. And you've got on this page the overall AUM in Canadian dollars. We've got $49 billion committed capital, of which $39 billion is funded. And what I really want to do then is turn Page 18 and talk about Sagard continue to use in addition to fundraising strategic transactions, acquisitions, partnerships to build their franchise.

And they announced in September the Unigestion acquisition as well as what Jake mentioned buying in the minority interest of Performance Equity Management. So what they've done here is they've created under one umbrella, a solutions business, if I can put it that way. It's alternative private equities that are focused on primary equity positions, secondaries, co-investments effectively mix all that come up with asset solutions for different client bases, be they retail, family offices, institutional investors that are looking for portfolios.

So this part of the business is really thinking of it as putting together packages of alternative assets for different parts of the market. And I guess somewhat analogous, if you want, in the public space to multi-asset type products versus individual fund sleeves, think of it that way, and they've combined this under one business, which has got USD 23 billion of investments. It's focused primarily in the mid-market as opposed to in the larger market, and they now have capabilities, both investment and distribution across North America and Europe.

And so it's a whole new area for Sagard and quite an exciting development that they have done. In addition, they did announce as well a strategic partnership with Baird. May not be known to all of you, but Baird is a significant U.S. wealth manager over $500 billion in U.S. in client assets, and they're looking for more alts. And so they entered into a partnership, took a 5% interest in Sagard and they're going to work on products with Sagard to bring into their retail and wealth channels. So a lot's happening at our platform.

Page 19, continue to -- I mentioned earlier, you just see here our return of capital to shareholders over the last several years. And I think on the right-hand side, you see the increased buyback activity up to the end of October. Pleased to see the discount narrowing. We can always get into a good discussion. I suspect we will continue to have a discussion about the discount. We're just very pleased to see that there's, I think, increased recognition on behalf of investors as to what we have across the portfolio and how we can drive value from all the different components of our portfolio as well. I suspect some of that.

But who knows, you'll maybe tell me some of that is also a reflection of strong cash flow we have in some of the buyback activity that we are doing. You've got on Page 21, the returns that we've generated over various periods, going back to the last year, 3 years, 5 years and roughly since we announced the reorganization a couple of weeks after that at the end of 2009. So we're pleased to see strong performance. I would not expect to see 55% TSRs every year that's a reflection of a number of factors in the last year, but we do think we can create if we execute on our strategy, mid-teen type returns over time, that would be our objective.

And then finally, as a roll up on the last slide around 22. Just again, to summarize, a really strong quarter, everything working well, very clean. There wasn't a lot of noise in the quarter, but also good markets, interest rates cooperating. It was just a good quarter where everything worked well. Not every quarter is going to be as clean as that markets go up and go down, and that's fine. From our perspective, it's fun to enjoy a quarter where everything is working well, but it doesn't change anything that we're doing. We're just executing the same strategy we have been for the last several years.

I take quick -- frankly, more satisfaction and just seeing the continued progress of the businesses across Great-West Life at IGM, the progress they're making and that steady progress, not up 1 quarter, down 1 quarter. It's just pleased with the steady strengthening of our franchises. The management teams are in great shape. And then I look to the rest of the portfolio, the strategic portfolio, the NAV portfolio, we sometimes call it, and continued strong progress. So great quarter. We'll enjoy it when everything is working, but everybody just got their heads down here and continue to execute on what we've been telling you for the last several years. So with that, I will end my comments.

And operator, you can open up the mics or the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Graham Ryding with TD Securities.

Can you just confirm the Alt AUM growth $2 billion in the quarter, was that fundraising? Or is that market performance?

That is fundraising, and that is committed. Wealthsimple as well. Thank you. Okay. I was about to say it was all fundraising, Graham, and I've got a hook here from Jake. So that includes some of the market increase in the Wealthsimple position as well. It's a combination of both, Graham. The Wealthsimple increase we've obviously shown and then the net position would be from fundraising primarily.

Okay. So half and half roughly?

Probably a bit more towards Wealthsimple and then the rest towards fundraising.

The 5% stake from Baird into Sagard, I think you've done something similar in the past. Did they put in actual capital here? Or is this a commitment for a certain level of AUM? How does that sort of structure look?

They put capital in. And I won't go into all the details, but there are some adjustments to what the ultimate position can be based on distribution performance on themselves, but they put capital in at the full value -- the current value 4.5%.

And then maybe what's your ownership stake going forward in Sagard? And then can you give an update on the AUM growth and the flows that you've seen from other wealth channel partnerships that you've done in the past. I think you did something similar with BMO last year, just maybe an update on any traction from flows from those sort of wealth partnerships.

Our equity position in Sagard at about 45% right now following these transactions. And I don't have in front of me here a summary of the flows that have come through retail channels. We can try and pull that information together, but I'd be misleading you or I don't have numbers in front of me. I think what you we'll see though, because it's not just a Sagard. I'm going to broaden your question out, Graham. We've got activity going on, for example, at IGM, where IGM has got Northleaf and they're also working with other parts of the all platforms across Power and other suppliers. And the Mackenzie is doing retail funds. And IGM is putting alts into their different shelf programs. You've obviously got empower looking at it.

Like across the group, you've got the phenomenon that's happening in the industry where you're taking alts and putting them into retail products and high-net-worth products. And they tend to go through a long period where not a lot of flows happen. You're putting structures together, you're educating advisers, you're getting on shelves, you're going through the different control mechanisms on different wealth platforms to get on. So it's kind of a long lead time and then the sales start to pick up and then at a certain point, the hope is they take off. And we're starting to see that. So the meaning -- the numbers -- I think if you added it all up, I'm just foretelling because I've seen the numbers all in pieces, I haven't kind of seen them all together in one spot. I don't think they're hugely material at this point, but the growth of them is really starting to accelerate. So I'm foretelling what I think the story is, but we'll try and figure out whether we can pull together some numbers for you and for others, obviously, we'll disclose it to everyone.

[indiscernible] the only thing I'd add on is we expect that trend to continue. We're seeing good coordination across the group with Sagard credit product and Wealthsimple. We've also seen access to the Empower shelf or at least announcement that Sagard will ultimately be going on that. So we do think retail funds will be a big component of growth moving forward.

The next question is from Jaeme Gloyn with National Bank Capital Markets.

First question, just a refresh on the dividend strategy. Obviously, a great year this year from an earnings growth perspective and cash flows. How should we be thinking about that dividend, I guess, maybe in the next quarter and obviously, how does share repurchases factor into that capital allocation decision as well?

Thank you. Good question, Jaeme. So what we do typically the fall is where Great-West Life and IGM would go through their 2026 budgeting process, get a good handle on where they think they're going. They will then come and come to the Board in early February or mid-February, when we have the Q4 results and would recommend dividends levels for 2026. Power then takes that looks at those 2 dividends as the 2 kind of steady sources of cash flow, and we then look at our expenses, what our net cash flow will be from those dividends and set our dividend as a consequence of having that information.

Other sources of cash that we might get from either disposing of an alt position or getting returns or cash flow from our alts positions or participating in buybacks that Great-West Life may be having or other sources of cash Occasionally, we do some fundraising. We recently did some preferred shares that market opened. Those, what I would call more episodic sources of cash are what fund our buyback programs. And then we look at that cash in the context of investments we might have committed to or other opportunities, and we set our buybacks in the context of that cash position. I don't know if that explained it. We look to the dividends from IGM and Great-West Life as lesser expenses as the main driver of our dividends and other cash flows go into a bucket, which we then use to source the buybacks. Does that answer your question?

Yes. And then maybe quite a different question just in terms of the capital allocation outlook for the business, obviously, Empower and funding the organic and inorganic growth of the operating companies is something that's top priority, but seen some dislocations in other financial services. I'm just wondering if there's any updated or refreshed view on, let's say, the verticals that you have in place today versus maybe where you might want to take that in the future.

Well, let me go to what I think our capital allocation priorities are and then try and tease out what the last part of that question is because I'm not totally clear on what it was you were asking there, Graham. But from Great-West Life's perspective, I think the U.S. continues to be at the top of the list of capital priorities. Empower continues to grow its franchise. It continues to grow its market share in the DC business and then the rollover opportunity into the wealth management business is really even an even stronger growth, and I didn't mention, but Great-West did point out that their wealth management Empower personal wealth across the USD 100 billion mark in the last quarter.

If I bring you back to 4.5 years ago, it was $20 billion. it jumped to $40 billion when they bought Personal Capital, which was combined with Empower Personal Wealth, but that's grown from that level up to $100 billion here. So that's a tremendous. We're very pleased with the progress that, that business is making. And if there were further opportunities to make acquisitions, that would be capital priority, number one, we would look to grow across the Great-West Life portfolio.

If we had synergistic transactions in any of the markets, we like the balance currently. But if there were synergistic transactions, we would do so and there's some capital needed to grow the business, but most of their businesses are pretty capital light. So the position they find themselves in is those earnings are generating a lot of cash and a lot of capital, and that's growing at the top of the house and notwithstanding the desire for acquisitions, they're not going to sit on a big, big chunk of cash earning whatever it's earning in current rates. So that's why the buybacks are there.

So that's a little bit -- I just tried to share with you how Great-West life thinks about capital allocation, IGM. From MacKenzie and IG Wealth, not necessarily acquisition opportunities there, but they do have their strategic portfolio, and they've got some high-growth businesses. So one could see over time some of those businesses requiring more capital. So that will be something that they would monitor in the strategic portfolio, but they also are building up strong cash now and have stepped up their buyback activity.

So that's what -- those 2 companies, those are the capital priorities. And now if you could be a little more clarity on the last part of your question there, when you talked about other verticals, I wasn't sure what you meant.

Yes, from like an OpCo perspective with Great-West and IGM life, life insurance asset management, it's a financial services business. Is that still the focus? Or would you entertain other verticals perhaps outside of those 2?

We're in the financial services business here. And those -- I think I've explained what they would do. I think the priority would be in-market transactions, occasionally to get into new markets we have made investments. So Rockefeller was not a business that we were in. China Asset Management was not a business we were in. Those are brand-new areas in financial services that in the past years we've made. And we've done those on a, I would say, on a disciplined step-by-step basis as opposed to jumping in with a lot of capital. So it's -- would we ever entertain other areas? The answer would be sure, we would. But our priority is building around the franchises that we have, that would be the priority. But it would be financial services. Just very, very clear. Jake wants to add something here, Graham.

Sorry, Jaeme. My apologies. Jaeme. Just even -- I don't know if the question is triggered by where our cash balance sit at $1.9 billion and available at $1.5 billion. I'd say one of our unique characteristics or a competitive advantage of Power is just the willingness to take a long-term view and approach to building the company. And so we won't -- I don't think Jeff or myself feel cash burning in our pocket that has to be deployed. And it's not as obvious. But even during this year, we've had opportunities to deploy within the existing platform. So as part of the Unigestion transaction to maintain our ownership position, we'll be allocating some capital towards that, Jeff obviously mentioned earlier in his remarks, we're going to be participating in the Wealthsimple. We did participate in the Wealthsimple primary. So there are places where we can allocate our capital towards at the end of the day, within the existing footprint and not needing to go into necessarily new operating companies.

But we are -- the last point, we are in the business of looking at opportunities. So we have what our priorities are, but we get shown a lot of opportunities. So we'll continue to look at them, of course.

The next question is from Bart Dziarski with RBC Capital Markets.

Jeff, I wanted to follow up on the NCIB question in terms of how you guys are thinking about that from a pacing perspective going forward. So $2.1 billion year-to-date, that includes dividend, but very healthy capital return. And you obviously have some kind of intrinsic value model internally that you keep buying back stock because there's value embedded there. So should we expect that pacing to continue? Do you think it will ramp up or...

Yes. Just in terms of our buyback activity, we do look to -- the -- we are driving earnings and cash flow off the alternative asset management platforms over time. It's not kind of steady on some of those distributions, but we create earnings there. We have some positive net cash flow from our dividends received less our expenses. So there's different sources of cash. We like to sit on some liquidity, but we also don't want all that cash just to build up on an indefinite basis.

So we jump into the market, and we have been for the last 4 years in effect, turning what are non-earning assets from a steady earnings point of view into contributing to EPS growth and dividend growth by shrinking the capital base. So if you think about that as a tool, it's a tool to take some of the earnings -- from the non -- some from the distribution -- I should say from the non-earnings part of the portfolio. The NAV and by shrinking the capital base and buying it back. We are increasing our earnings per share and increasing our ability to pay dividends per share. I think I mentioned might have been before you picked up coverage somewhere in the last year, I mentioned that we had -- because of the buybacks up until about a year ago, I don't can't remember 3 quarters or 4 quarters ago, we had calculated we had about $72 million, $73 million of extra cash flow available to pay in dividends that we wouldn't have otherwise had, had we not done the buybacks.

So there's -- that's one way of thinking about our buybacks. Now the second part of your question, there's not a formula, maybe Jake, I'll ask you to comment on your own thoughts. But we don't have a formula. We like to be in the market on a steady basis. We might ramp it up, sometimes ramp it down, but our cash doesn't come in on a steady basis. It might come in. All of a sudden, we get a bunch of cash. And we're not going to go out and kind of blow it all just because we just had a quarter where we had a bunch of cash come in, we like to be in the market on a steady basis. Jake, anything you would add to my comments?

Yes. Bart, tactically, how -- one way to think about it, and we gave a bit of this guidance heading into 2025. There's probably right now about 3 layers to the buyback program. The first layer is, as Jeff alluded to, we've been active for about 4 years now and roughly the same balance in the past few years of around $400 million of buyback activity. We obviously want to offset option dilution as well. So that would be the second layer. And then with Great-West announcing additional NCIB volumes, both with their Q2 and Q3 results and our intention or communication around Q2 of participating in that, that produces extra cash. And so that last piece is the one that we'll want to be thoughtful about how much of the buying we are any given day in the market. But we obviously have that core $400 million plus offsetting dilution and then doing some additional activity on top of that with the proceeds from the NCIB for Great-West.

And -- then on Sagard. So we saw the nice tick up in the Wealthsimple valuation Q-on-Q, I think up 50% on your -- on your LP. Would that drive a fair value increase at Sagard? I think it was flat, if I'm not mistaken. And then Sagard also announced [indiscernible], so another positive transaction. Like would the -- should the mark have increased? And if not, what would drive maybe factors going the other way?

You take that, Jack?

Yes, we don't -- as I know upfront, Wealthsimple, you may have missed it, Bart. We don't take it through the P&L. It has increased our NAV in the quarter, and that's been reflected. In terms of Unigestion, that's scheduled to close in the first half of 2026. Obviously, we announced it during the quarter and wanted to raise it on the call. We expect once it closes, it will obviously -- we'll look at what that means for the valuation of Sagard in due course and where the business has traveled between now and closing and make an assessment of its value at that point.

And just to underline the Wealthsimple position, again, we consolidate it. We do own more than 50%. Across the group, we own more than 50% of the outstanding shares at Wealthsimple, principally at IGM and at Power Corp. We consolidated. So we don't mark it up when there's an increase in the value. What we do get, though, as a present is there's some carry that the Sagard team has on overseeing that position. So we flow through the negative impact of the compensation carry in our P&L, but not the markup.

So the more Wealthsimple goes up in value, the more losses we report. And you can -- I'm not going to make a comment about the accounting industry at all because that wouldn't be fair, but it is a bit ironic here. Is the more the thing goes up, the more we report losses, but that's just the way it is. Economically, obviously, we're very, very pleased with the NAV growth.

Okay, because that's what I was asking because there's an expense that goes through and you would think the GP, Sagard gets a benefit from the higher value, which ultimately drives higher future carry. So is it a wash on the valuation of the GPU? Or am I missing something?

We don't value the GP every quarter, Bart. But you're right, their accrued carried interest has increased, but it's not a -- it's not like Great-West or IGM, where we're marking it every quarter.

We don't mark it up, but there is a liability that goes through the compensation because there's a share of that carry that obviously goes to the Sagard management team. So that we show through a liability, but all the increase in the carry and the increase in the capital that we have in Wealthsimple does not get marked up. All that gets marked up is the employees' share -- managers at Sagard's share of the carry.

Yes. It's a positive from those [indiscernible]. All right. And then just on the GBL transaction, they -- looks like they did a secondary with Carlyle, and I think it's like a 9% discount to NAV. So GBL earlier this year announced they took a stake in Sagard plus they committed to future funds. And then I think as part of this transaction with Carlyle, they exited some of the Sagard positions. So is that a change in strategy by GBL with regards to its commitment to Sagard? Or obviously is something else driving that?

Two comments, they did not dispose of their position in Sagard, so -- and nor have they -- and they continue to be committed to the product. So that has not changed. I'm not sure. So just correct you on that one. And second, the transaction to dispose of the positions in the GBL Capital was through various transactions to different buyers. I'm not going to comment on who they are, but it was not you may have become aware of one piece of it, but there were multiple transactions to multiple buyers that they announced.

We have a follow-up from Graham Ryding with TD Securities.

The follow-up question just on the buybacks at Great-West. So is it reasonable to assume that if there's no sort of obvious inorganic opportunity for Great-West that they will continue to be active on buybacks? And should we also then assume that you're going to continue to look to participate in future NCIBs to sort of maintain your ownership position?

That would be my expectation. With the current business mix that they have as they grow, they're creating more cash than they're putting capital back in or put another way, the earnings are turning into a lot of cash generation. And I think just building up that cash is not a very attractive alternative. And so if there weren't inorganic opportunities, I think it's reasonable to assume that we continue to do buybacks.

I mean those are decisions we'll make in the future, but that would be a reasonable assumption. The background on our participating, I'll just restate it, you probably know it. Initially, we didn't -- we said we're not interested in selling Great-West Life shares. They came to us and said, look, we would be great rather than us going out and trying to buy all of this from the market and also shrinking our outstanding. We'd like to grow our float, not -- the market value of our float, not shrink it. And so would you participate pro rata? When you think about it, you're still -- basically, you're getting cash back and you're still taking in 68% or roughly 68% of the earnings in the dividend.

So it doesn't really change anything, and it will help grow our earnings per share. And given a constant payout ratio, that will translate into higher dividends, higher earnings. So it would be great if you could support us in this with our objectives. So we took that back. And after considering it, we decided all right, that makes sense. We'll participate pro rata. So I don't see that changing at this point, Graham. So I think your -- the answer to your question is, yes, that's a reasonable assumption, both on continued buybacks and our participation, but that's -- obviously, we'll make those decisions through time.

The next question is from Doug Young with Jarden Capital Markets.

Sorry, I got on the call late, so these are repeated. I apologize. But I want to kind of continue with the buyback question that Graham just asked, a bit differently. Like what are the limits on the amount that Great-West can buyback and Power can buyback, like what are the constraints given -- I mean, you own 70% of power -- sorry, 70% of Great-West, there's limited float and that becomes a challenge for some people when they look at the structure. So I'm just -- like how do you think about that?

So the last part of my question, if you picked it up in terms of our participation went to the issue of float. And it's a trade-off because if you sit on -- as Great-West Life, if you sit on too much cash earning 2% or whatever you're earning, you're not going to have your earnings grow as quickly. You're not going to have your ROE go up as quickly. You've got too much lazy capital.

So all things being equal, your share price is going to drop or not grow as fast. It's a better way to put it, all things being equal, if you're growing the business. So the number of shares is one part of the float, but times the share price is how you get to the size of the float. And so as they're shrinking their share base, they're increasing their earnings per share, which all things being equal, is increasing their share price might even get reflected in a higher multiple over time. When you do that math, I think you get to saying we keep doing buybacks, and that's the page you're on. But that's the equation. It doesn't mean that you're buying shares back, you're going to have a lower value of your float. In fact, probably is going to be the opposite.

So it doesn't sound like you see any limitations on either the power level because I mean Great-West is sitting on over $4 billion, $5 billion of excess cash that we can see plus what's in the U.S. and then debt capacity. So there's a lot of capacity there left to continue.

That was their assessment and our assessment as well when they decided to jump into the buybacks. But obviously, we'd love to do -- if we could get an opportunity to do an acquisition, we'd love to do that and slow the buybacks down. That would be a good thing to announce if we could -- if we got that opportunity.

And the second, just obviously, an impressive list of value creation changes last 6 years. There's a laundry list. Some of it maybe was lower-hanging fruit. Some of it was tougher to get at. And as you look out going forward, like there's obviously -- Wealthsimple is creating value. Sagard is becoming more topical. Like what are you and the management team focused on? Like what's that next 5 years look like in terms of like the buybacks are here, but what are some of the other items that you're kind of looking at?

I won't get into specifics on what else we might look at. I would tell you, I'll just restate what we -- how we think about it. We have -- the bulk of our assets are in businesses that are currently leading franchises that are at a more mature stage, but growing nicely and producing a lot of earnings and cash flow. That would be Great-West portfolio, IG Wealth, Mackenzie. But we also are very long-term focused. And so we have through our fintech strategy that we launched in 2015 that gave rise to the position in Wealthsimple through IGM, ultimately taking a position in Personal Capital, which ended up getting acquired by Great-West through acquisition of China Asset Management, the Wealthsimple itself through the opportunity to buy in Rockefeller and then turning and saying we want to be part of the alternative asset management space through Sagard, Power Sustainable, Northleaf came to IGM.

There's 7 or 8 examples in the last 10 years of the group putting in a limited amount of capital, but meaningfully, it's still like 15%, 20% of the portfolio into investments that are going to not create earnings in the short term, but looking 5, 7, 10 years out, could be really meaningful contributors to value creation and ultimately, to earnings. So we try and do a balance between supporting and investing and growing our current leading franchises, but also seeding a portfolio of investments that, as you look 5, 10 years down the road are going to be really meaningful contributors.

And they won't all turn out that way, and they won't all work, right? I mean when you're doing it, you're buying in the businesses at earlier stages, higher risk, there's higher potential. Some of them will decide to take control positions in. Others we may not. I'm not going to get into what we're going to do. I couldn't do that even if I wanted to, Doug. But I think that philosophy is important to understand. And what's great right now is that I think for a period of time, people were just kind of ignoring it and saying, well, come talk to me when you've got some evidence that, that's working. But as some of these things have been held for a number of years, they're coming to fruition, and I think it's creating evidence of how much value that they can create and will create.

And ultimately, these businesses, every business goes through a phase where if it grows quickly, it's investing, investing, investing. And at some point, they turn into cash flow and earnings. And so I would expect that some of the assets that we have in these businesses right now and turn into a reflection of what our earnings power will be 5 years down the road or 7 years down the road as they get to more mature phases. So I don't know if I answered your question. That's a bit to told you what the approach to investment is, and that won't change. I don't think.

There are no further questions. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Steven Hung for any closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. Following the call, a telephone replay will be available later this morning, and the webcast will be archived on our website for 1 year. We look forward to our next update on Q4 results. This concludes the call, and have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your lines.