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Q4 FY2025 · Earnings Call TranscriptFebruary 12, 2026

Operator

This call will contain forward-looking statements, including statements of current intention, opinion, and predictions regarding the company's present and future operations, possible future events, and future financial prospects. While these statements reflect expectations at the date of the call, they are, by their nature, not certain and are susceptible to change.

The company makes no representation, assurance, or guarantee as to the accuracy of the likelihood or fulfilling of any such forward-looking statements, whether express or implied, and, except as required by applicable law or the ASX Listing Rules, disclaims any obligation or undertaking to publicly update such forward-looking statements. Participants recording this call may use such recordings for their internal business purposes only and are prohibited from making any such part of the recordings available to the public without the prior written permission of the company.

I would now like to hand the conference over to Tim Carver, CEO. Please go ahead.

Tim Carver

Thank you, and thank you, everyone, for joining us for our 2025 full year results earnings call. We're thrilled to be here.

As always, I'm joined by my partner, our Chairman and CIO, Rajiv Jain; our Chief Financial Officer, Charles Falck; and our Global Head of Distribution, Steve Ford. If we go to the second slide for financial highlights, you will see that we had a solid year in 2025.

We ended the year with just about $164 billion in funds under management, an increase of just over 7% from the prior year. If you actually update that to to the end of business US markets yesterday, we ended internally unaudited we ended right around $172 billion, which is right on top of our record FUM for this business, which we achieved 6 months ago in June of 2025.

The business from a funds under management standpoint continues to be very robust and very resilient. For the for the year, for the 2025 calendar year, we had net outflows of $3.9 billion, offset by $14.8 billion of assets driven by investment performance.

The business continues to be very well diversified across four major strategies and with large books of business geographically dispersed and in across a number of different product types, both retail and institutional. For the year, we saw net revenues of $808 million, an increase of 6.3% from the prior year; net operating income of $622.5 million, an increase of 7.6%; and net income of $463.3 million, an increase of 7.3% from 2024.

The board has declared a fourth quarter dividend of 3.65 US cents per share, which represents a 90% payout ratio of our distributable earnings, consistent with the third quarter 90% payout ratio that we announced last quarter. We're going to start this presentation with Rajiv giving an update on our performance and on investment environment, and then I'll bring back I'll take back over to talk a little bit more about the business after that.

Rajiv?

Rajiv Jain

Thanks, Tim, and thanks everybody for joining. It's been quite a fascinating year.

That's the best way to put it in context of what's happening in the markets and, obviously, geopolitically. I think if you switch to slide number 4, I think what we're talking about is that there has been a clear shift towards cyclicals, particularly AI-driven theme as such over the last just over 2 years.

As we had significant exposure to those very names, but being disciplined to generate longer-term returns, we start cutting back in the second half of '24 and very aggressively in first quarter of 2025, which, obviously in hindsight, was a little premature. However, having lived through some of these cycles and I think it's fair to say that either you're early or you're late.

It's very hard to time these cycles. Problem is that if you look at the underpinnings of the whole AI theme as such, we feel the underpinnings have gone progressively worse, not better.

We continue to work on this theme not just with our traditional analysts, but also with our non-traditional team, and the data points are actually quite startling in a negative way. Now the other aspect is that despite the fact that global unemploy numbers are creeping up, looking at 3-to-5-year highs in vast majority of developed countries, significant part of emerging markets, too, including China, the defensives as such are actually fairly attractively valued.

As you can see on this page, the left-hand side chart, it is actually quite remarkable where the valuations are and the fact that some of the defensives have been underperforming for almost 4 to 5 years now, while you are seeing early signs of green shoots appear across the board. If you look at the last few quarters, things have gone progressively less bad or early signs of even improvement, but the valuations are not discounting that.

Number two is, if you look at the weights in the index, what we do feel that some of the weights in the index of the tech names and the tech-type names, which are basically driven by the whole theme, is actually close to 50% including emerging markets. More than half of the growth was really driven by what's happening on the memory side.

Even within tech, as software is finally getting hit. We wrote a piece of paper around 4 years ago, is software the new shale, which, again, we were a little bit early, but had you sold some of the software names then, you actually would be better served because of the dramatic sell-off that you're seeing.

The accounting was very aggressive, and we feel some of the similar traits are now appearing in the semiconductor side. The Mag 7, not only they're running out of cash, if you adjust for the stock-based compensation, etc., they are actually hitting the bond markets.

FT had a piece that they'll be looking to raise just under half a trillion dollars. Our view is good luck with that.

In the meantime, if you look at our positioning, if you go to next page number 5, what you're seeing is that the software is seeing still buying the dip. One of the questions we get all the time is that the retail desire to own anything that sells off, i.e., buying the dip, will continue.

Our view is that, having seen way too many cycles, that happens at the tail end of the cycle, and that's not exactly what will support. In fact, you're seeing that in broad-based software ETF, there's massive call buying as well as inflows.

That hasn't really supported this space because when these things fundamental change, it'll be very hard to maintain those. This an important chart, by the way, on slide number 6.

I think we sometimes get compared to some of the larger competitors who got hit hard 4, 5 years ago in Australia. I think the position couldn't be fundamentally different.

We have overweight areas that have actually underperformed for 4, 5 years and are very attractively valued. This was a conscious decision to pivot into that area.

As I said, having lived through a lot of these bubbles, whether Asian property bubble, dot-com, and GFC or the housing bubble, you almost have to be early. It's very hard to time these on the exit side.

You're seeing that in software, by the way. Mostly growth managers have really struggled to exit those names because they first creep on you, and then they start melting.

If you look at our positioning, we're essentially overweight consumer staples, utilities, and healthcare in a meaningful manner. Not emerging, we still have a lot of banks in various markets outside of China.

The flip side is underweight into tech. I think there are clear signs of double, triple ordering in memory as well as NAND as well as DRAM.

I think those things typically happen at the tail end of the cycle. They are clear signs of double, triple ordering.

By the way, that's perfectly normal. I'll just stop by saying that if you look at companies like Micron Technology, it was at the same absolute price point last year as it was in the year 2000 when they had fire-driven shortages.

If that is not cyclical, I don't know what defines cyclicality. Our view is that this is kind of very, very late in the game.

Vast majority of folks would have tough time exiting, not to mention the names that we own may actually go up because there's way too much capital that will leave. If you look at Nvidia, that's almost 8% of the S&P.

If you look at cumulative energy plus utilities, that's 5%, and that's trillions of dollars invested over decades. It may be easier to sell Nvidia, but it'd be much more hard to get into some of these names.

In the last few weeks, again, it's very early days. I don't want to take victory laps here, but I think you would see that the upside pressure on these names could be quite interesting, especially very similar to price action as we saw in second half of 2000, early 2001.

Tim?

Tim Carver

Great. Thanks, Rajiv.

Let's move to slide number 8. If we look at slide number 8, what I want to make sure everybody understands is, if we look at the relative underperformance of our strategies over the course of the calendar year, why is it that we sit here today at near record levels of funds under management?

I think that what really explains that is the way we position ourselves to prospects and to clients, the way we talk about our strategies with asset consultants. We always tell people that our objective is to outperform over a full market cycle by a couple of hundred basis points with lower volatility, protecting better on the downside, and that we won't participate in runaway markets.

I think what you're seeing here is clear acknowledgement that our clients aren't expecting us to keep up, and that explains a lot of the reason why we haven't seen more significant outflows given our relative underperformance. If we look here on slide 8, what I've highlighted here is that our promise is that we are going to do our best to try to deliver high single digit, low double digit rates of return over a full market cycle.

As you see here, that's exactly what we've done and what our client experience has been. The other key point, if we move to the next slide, is that our business is extremely well diversified.

While the headline numbers and the headline news is highly focused on the US equity market, what you see in our book of business is that nearly half the business, over $70 billion, is in an international equity strategy that did north of 20% returns last year. It's not a surprise that clients aren't leaving us when they've done 20% with us in the $70 billion book of business.

If you add EM alongside of that, that's over $110 billion that did better than double digit rates of return. While, of course, we didn't keep up with markets, I'm not suggesting we did, we're not likely to see catastrophic changes to the business or outflows when we have solid returns like this.

Again, if you look at the US equity strategy where our relative performance is most weak, it's the smallest part of our business, and I think again explains why the assets continue to hold up. If we go to the next slide, as Rajiv alluded to, inflection points matter.

The other key point that I'd make here is that in the short term, performance has been quite strong. Even though markets have been effectively flat for the past quarter, we've gained back quite a bit of what we gave up in the prior year, particularly on the developed markets side here really in the past 30 days, again, against sort of flat markets.

We can see that we can gain back performance just as quickly as we gave it up. I think that's why we've seen that clients stick with us.

They're not reacting to short-term performance as long as we continue to deliver in the way that they would expect us to deliver, consistent with the philosophy of our strategy. If we move to the next slide, I just want everybody to see what the client experience is like at GQG.

What this shows is had you been a client since inception, you've not only received solid returns, you see that even with the relative underperformance of last year, we're still at the top of the top quartile for that client experience. For almost all clients, with the exception of the most recent clients that came on board, the client experience has been quite positive.

Again, if we go to the next page, you see it again. Here, what you see is all four of our core strategies, if you pick any date and time where you have a 5-year return available to you, in almost every single rolling 5-year return period across all four of our strategies, we've outperformed.

There's been a tremendous persistence. The point of this is that the business is resilient because the vast majority of client experiences on a 5-year basis has been positive relative to the market.

When you add all of these things up, the very diversified book of business, the long-term consistency with our philosophy, the way that we communicate with our clients, and the absolute returns over time, I think this explains why we continue to have very solid, very robust assets in the face of short-term underperformance. With that, let me turn over to Charles, who can walk us through the financial results for the year.

Charles Falck

Thanks, Tim. If you'll switch to page 14, please, I'll touch on the financial highlights and then go into a little bit more detail around the income statement.

As Tim mentioned, we closed out the year at $163.9 billion in FUM. Average FUM was actually higher at 164.3.

That's a 10.8% increase over the prior year. That's really what drives the net revenue figure of $808.3 million over 760 the prior year.

We continue to show extremely strong operating income as well as net income. Both of those grew 7.6 and 7.3%, respectively.

You see the progression of net revenues in the bar charts on the bottom left, which indicate a compound annual growth rate of about 11%. Then the profitability as shown by the line in our operating margin, we increased our operating margin, which is already high, from 76% to 77%.

I think, very strong financial performance. If you switch to the right side of the page, we continue to pay out high dividends.

For the year, at $439.3 million, as a result of, as Tim mentioned, a 90% payout ratio on distributable earnings, which have also increased to $477 million. Illustrated on the bottom is our growth in net income as well as the diluted earnings per share of 16 cents per share.

With that, I'll move to the next page, please, for a little bit more detail on the income statement. You see how revenue is composed of management fees and performance fees.

Management fees I touched on earlier. We experienced a small decrease in fee realization from 49.6 basis points down to 48.4.

That's a result of a mix shift that resulted in vehicles with lower fees, as well as strategies with slightly lower fees driving management fees. On the OpEx side, we managed those very prudently.

We're able to reduce general and administrative by $6.2 million, or 14%, by having a prudent approach to projects and management of operating expenses. If you look at compensation and benefits, while that increased $4.9 million, and 4.9%, average headcount for the year actually increased more.

We went from 212 average headcount in 2024 to 240, which would be a 13.2% increase. One other item that I'd like to highlight on this page is our income taxes went up as a result of, obviously, higher and continued strong profitability.

The effective tax rate moved only very little, but up from 26.5 to 26.7%. That's where we would expect the effective tax rate to be.

It's been range-bound since 2022 between 26 and 28%, within that range. Moving on to the balance sheet, there's not that much to note there.

Very strong balance sheet with high cash balance that's used for working capital, as well as dividend payout, which I'll get to in a second. Then the deferred tax asset, which was created at our IPO, and we continue to depreciate over time.

One other thing of note is that we did not have any debt outstanding at the beginning or during or, for that matter, at the end of 2025. Moving on to page number 17, the dividend payout Tim mentioned is 3.65 cents per share was declared by the board earlier today.

That's equivalent to a aggregate payment of $108 million in total dividend for the fourth quarter, and continues to represent a 90% dividend payout ratio at 90% of our distributable earnings. With that, I'll turn it over to Steve for the update on distribution.

Steve Ford

Thanks, Charles. Appreciate that.

If we can move to slide 19, I just want to circle back to a couple of the points that Tim made and try to give you the view from the front lines of how we talk to clients and how we set expectations and what I think ultimately leads to some of the resiliency in the client base that Tim and Rajiv have both alluded to. The first thing that we talk about when we talk about our style of investing with clients is what is the expectation that you should have for returns?

Over the long term, we want to beat the benchmark over a full market cycle, but we do that by delivering high single-digit, low double-digit compounding. That comes out of every client-facing person's mouth at GQG Partners over and over again.

What I put on the right-hand side of this visual is just zooming out just a little bit past the very short-term performance that people get focused on to look at a 3-year number. You'll see our worst strategy compounded client capital at 13% annualized, which I think most all of them would have taken beforehand.

If you would have also asked the clients and said, "There's going to be a market where the index is going to compound at 23% annualized, what do you think the likelihood of GQG outperforming in that market is?" I think most of them would have said that that's not a high probability event at all, that we don't tend to outperform in runaway and frothy markets.

What I think that you're seeing here is part of the reason why there's resiliency in the core client base. We've put on the bottom of this just those same numbers rolled 1 month forward to the end of January, not even incorporating what's happened so far this month, and you already see that picture improving on both an absolute and relative basis.

This can actually move around relatively quickly when you're a high tracking error manager. I think it's why clients are going to be paying very close attention and be very thoughtful about maintaining long-term exposure to what we do.

Let's go ahead and move to slide 20. The reality is it's not just about excess return, it's also about risk-adjusted return.

When you look at this over most periods, and certainly over the longer term, our risk-adjusted returns, the picture gets better both against the benchmark and absolutely better against the peer group. It's those kind of things in common with the rolling returns that Tim showed before that all lead to that client experience and, again, I think part of why there's resiliency in the client base.

Let's move to the slide 21. It's worth spending a little bit of time here, more than we usually do, talking about the diversification, because I think, as Tim noted, it's easy to think of this as a very, very siloed type of business, or just looking at it through one investment team, but the reality is that the scale that we've achieved, the number of strategies we have, the geography-based diversification, the channel-based diversification, what you end up with is hundreds of thousands of individual client entry points with different rationales for portfolio construction over different timeframes that will be correlated in their decision-making, but ultimately quite idiosyncratic and diverse.

When you put on top of that what's going on, the divergence between, say, emerging and developed markets or ex-US markets, suddenly you get a distinct set of decisions being made across thousands and thousands of different investors. Certainly some of them will be correlated in their decision-making, but again, it's just part of why it's much more complex than looking at a 1-year performance number.

Let's move to the next slide. Let's talk about flows.

Since we publish flows on a monthly basis, I don't think there's any surprises here. As Tim talked about, we saw some outflows in the back half of the year.

I can tell you from the front lines, what we're seeing largely is clients reacting to shorter-term performance. Of course, we try to educate every client that we can on the front end that that's not a way to think about investing with us, but inevitably some do.

Some have lower thresholds for pain, and we can't help every one of them make great decisions about entry and exit with GQG. What I don't see is any deterioration in what I would call the pillars or the foundation to our distribution strategy and our client retention strategy.

If you think about platform access, if you think about platform ratings, if you think about consultant ratings, etc., all these kind of core things that are the cornerstones for the leverage that exists in our distribution, as of today, those all remain solidly intact. Let's move to the next slide.

We've talked a lot over time about our wholesale channel. Obviously, it's been a huge part of our growth over the last few years.

What I would say today when looking at the wholesale channel is at no point in our history have we had more access to platforms around the world than we have today. Over the course of '25, we continue to add product to different platforms, different strategies to platforms that we already do business with, etc., etc.

It doesn't matter what geography you're looking at, that's been the case. While that's not going to stem near-term outflows from short-term performance, what I do believe is that as that picture improves, we're in the strongest position we've ever been in the wholesale channel to create growth when the opportunity presents itself.

On the right-hand side, you'll see some thumbnails of actually content that we've produced. If you follow along with us on our investor website, you'll have noticed that our content strategy, I believe, continues to get better, and certainly the quantity continues to go up.

In an environment where we do have short-term underperformance and we know that clients are paying close attention to that, it's extremely important that we deliver transparency and insights about how we're investing and why. As I always say, there's really two reasons that people do business with us.

The first is performance and the second is insights. I think the feedback that we've received on the insights that we've delivered about the markets, about why our portfolios are positioned the way they are, has been extremely good, and a very important part of our overall client retention strategy.

Let's move to the next slide. I'll finish with this.

This is, on the back of the strength that we just talked about in our wholesale channel and the access that we have available, this gives you the sense of the attention that we're commanding in the institutional channel by looking at eVestment Alliance database, which is the largest global database of institutional investors. You'll see that we are essentially the number one most-viewed manager in the world across the strategies that we manage.

Again, I think that that just shows you that we're commanding the attention of investors. We have a very deep and robust client base, and as the performance picture improves over the short and intermediate term, I think our ability to capitalize upon that remains as solid as it ever has.

With that, I'm going to turn it back over to Tim.

Tim Carver

Great. Thanks, Steve, and thanks, team.

I think we can open it up now for questions and have a dialogue with shareholders.

Operator

Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced.

If you wish to cancel your request, please press star then two. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question.

We ask that questions be limited to three per person at the first time. Please rejoin the question queue for any follow-up questions.

The first question today comes from Nick McGarrigle from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.

Nick McGarrigle

Thanks for taking questions. Maybe just to start with one around positioning, how you kind of seeing markets—

Tim Carver

Hey, Nick. Nick, sorry to interrupt you.

We can't quite hear you. Could you maybe get closer to the microphone?

Nick McGarrigle

Is that a bit better?

Tim Carver

That's much better. Thanks, Nick.

Nick McGarrigle

Thanks. Yep, maybe just a question around portfolio positioning last 6 or 7 weeks.

I guess you've seen software roll over, haven't seen some of the defensives necessarily outperform enormously, but just how you think the last few weeks kind of colors your view around portfolio positioning moving forward, presumably taking some confidence from particularly the performance into Feb?

Tim Carver

Rajiv, you need to unmute.

Rajiv Jain

Nick. This is Rajiv.

Look, I think if you had asked vast majority of folks, folks like yourself, the expectation was that if the market go down, we'll go down maybe less, right? Our view was this is far more similar to dot-com bubble and the reaction afterwards, which means that the defensives, because the gap is so dramatic, they should actually go up, particularly the fundamentals are fine.

I think what has happened last few weeks, because if you look at our performance, it kind of stabilized pretty much end of October, early November, and we've kind of kept up despite the run-up. I think what has happened last few weeks gives me more confidence that the cracks are appearing everywhere.

I think the fact that EY is now questioning what Meta is doing, the cash flow numbers, Microsoft down I think over a third, Oracle has completely blown up, and I think it's a very narrow group of deepest cyclicals within tech which are working. I think that means that you are seeing classic signs, which typically happen at the tail end of the cycle.

It gives us more comfort. In fact, we haven't really changed anything over the last few weeks or even months.

Look, I think the underlying corporate earnings news has been fairly good across vast array of our names, not every name, but vast array of our names. As the narrowness of the market in terms of what's working within the AI theme, because even within the AI theme, cracks are appearing.

Private credit, I'll give you one data point that more than 60%, just over 60% of data centers being built in US are non-hyperscalers. The perception that the hyperscaler doing everything, first of all, is not true.

It's factually wrong. The second thing is that Nvidia has been one of the single biggest investors in AI infrastructure, okay?

A question here to ask is if things were so good, why does Nvidia had to invest another $2 billion in CoreWeave, which, by the way, has more debt service, and this is the fourth or fifth largest neocloud, has higher debt service than its revenue, okay? Our view is that you are teetering at the edge.

You can't keep kicking the can only for so long. We feel pretty good, and I think the market reaction kind of tells you that there could be -- who knows -- but you've seen the meltdown in software.

We feel it'll spread to other areas ultimately.

Nick McGarrigle

Just in terms of conversations with clients, you're maybe finding that hard to get through to clients last half year given everything was going pretty well up until November. Just the tone of conversations with clients in this year and maybe some comments around the January flows were quite pronounced, but is it fair to say that there's some seasonality in the way US investors allocate, you kind of see a larger than normal either inflow or outflow depending on the momentum in January versus other months?

Tim Carver

Nick. Look, a couple things I'd say.

Starting point is if you look at the Morningstar ratings of our products, if you start with International, it's a 5-star rated fund. Global and EM are 4 stars, and US is 3 stars.

All of them are gold or silver rated. I think that there's a perception that clients have more anxiety than they do.

I think and Steve can speak to this with more granularity than I can. He's in more meetings.

Clients understand where we are. Again, because they don't expect us to keep up in markets like this, they're actually quite pleased with our position, particularly just seeing in the short-term performance how much we're gaining when markets aren't rolling over yet.

That's just a really positive performance pattern in the ultimate near term. None of us are anchored to the near term, but as it pertains to the experience that clients have and therefore the client conversations we're having, I think clients are comfortable.

Now, look, there's clearly we had a lot of momentum in '23 and '24 with, particularly retail in the US equity strategy. I think some of that sort of performance chasing you're seeing on the other side on the way out, and that explains a lot of the outflows in Q4 and Q1.

There's clearly seasonality. There's no question that January, you do performance reviews for the full year, and it's not at all surprising to me that we had higher outflows in January.

By the way, it wouldn't be surprising to me to see that continue through Q1. It may take a little bit more of a market meltdown for us to see the outflows stem.

I'm not worried about meaningful, really meltdown in client assets. What we're seeing is the nice thing about this business and the way the portfolios are positioned, is that when we're underperforming in runaway markets, the market return outstrips client outflows.

That's been our experience so far, was last year, and continues to be. Then if the market falls, we would expect to outperform pretty materially, which should drive positive flows back to us.

I think we have a countercyclicality here that is very positive in terms of resiliency of the business. You net all that out, and where are you at?

We're at the highest assets that we've ever been at plus or minus sitting here as of the end of business yesterday.

Nick McGarrigle

Great. Thanks for that.

Just in terms of the seasonality, just I guess the implied outflow rate into the first 8 business days of February looks like around $2.5 billion scaling that up to a whole month, just to help us understand, is January typically a more pronounced month, either positive or negative, depending on the momentum leading into that because it's a reallocation month for US investors? Just maybe Steve can comment on that.

Tim Carver

Look. I'd be careful not to generalize, Nick, because it's hard to say that they reallocate every January.

What we do know is that every January, you're going to have a performance review. I do think, in this case, we are seeing more pronounced January and maybe, again, may extend into February, because the reviews happen in January.

We're seeing more pronounced flow outflows based on the relative underperformance of last year. I do think there's seasonality in that, but I'd hesitate to extrapolate that to every single year.

Steve, you can add your thoughts to that.

Steve Ford

I think that's generally a true statement what you said, but I'd be really careful saying that that was exactly what did or didn't happen with our numbers in January. We just don't have the granularity to truly know that.

Nick McGarrigle

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Elizabeth Miliatis from Macquarie.

Please go ahead.

Elizabeth Miliatis

Good morning, and thank you so much for taking our questions. Just the first one on flows and what you're seeing from a client perspective.

Sorry to keep harping on this, but from the disclosures in your pack, it sort of seems the outflows are pretty broad-based by asset class and channel as well. Is there any particular pockets of weakness?

Are you seeing a bit more of that lack of resiliency from your client base maybe on some of the newer clients, and so they've said, "We've not benefited from stronger performance, they're the ones taking the money out"? Or is there any particular pockets that you can sort of talk to, or is it pretty broad-based as the data might suggest?

Tim Carver

Thanks, Liz. A good question, important question.

If you look at the data, what you see is that obviously we've had sort of consistent institutional outflows that I think are not as related to performance, and then you've had near term really only two quarters of outflows, two quarters now plus a month, in the retail side. I do think, although we don't have data to prove it, but I do think that this is likely, again, more momentum-driven investors, performance investors who are following hot performance that we had in '23, '24 and then reversing here in '25 and beginning of '26.

Again, I want to be really careful not to extrapolate too much from that because we don't have the granularity of the data to know exactly which investors come in and out of the mutual funds, which are the largest product type that we have. I think it stands to reason that that's what we're seeing.

Elizabeth Miliatis

Got it. Then just on the costs, the cost base is definitely pulled back a bit.

Cost to income is, I think, towards the bottom end over the last few years. Particularly the second half is typically higher just because of the share-based comp, but it's still, if I look back over the last four halves, the cost base is actually quite low.

It's the lowest half out of the four. How should we think about costs going forward?

Should we assume a similar sort of cost to income? Should we assume a bit of total cost growth?

Can you give us a bit of a steer on it, because it does have quite a bit impact, and it's tricky to forecast that out?

Tim Carver

Look, we've not historically given any guidance. What I've said, and I'll continue to say, is that, while we never target a margin, we're never saying, okay, we want to have a cost-income ratio of 77%, we never say that, you can see it's been reasonably consistent around there.

I think that, if the business grows, particularly, one way to think about this is let's assume we had zero flows in or out and you had $10 billion of growth in assets through performance, well, most of that should subject to there are variable costs associated with that, but paying way to platforms and things like that, but otherwise, all that falls to the bottom line, and that should be margin enhancing, right? I think, we are clearly very mindful of managing our operating expenses, but we're also balancing that with being very very positive about where this business goes and making sure that we are making smart investments for the future.

We did increase headcount. We increased that, on average with lower expense headcount, and we're investing in the team and training the team and growing the team, and we'll continue to do that.

I think that from a modeling perspective, the vast majority of our hiring is behind us, where we will hire will be where we see opportunistic, great hires that we can bring on and/or where the business grows, and we need to continue to support the infrastructure for that growth.

Elizabeth Miliatis

Got it. Thank you.

Tim Carver

Mhm.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Julian Braganza from Goldman Sachs.

Please go ahead.

Julian Braganza

Good morning, guys. Just the first one, can you comment maybe just on the recent trends around gross inflows and gross outflows?

Just to understand the relative pressure there across new business and outflows, thanks.

Tim Carver

Thanks, Julian. Listen, we don't break out gross versus net.

We really only talk to net. I think that the gross trends, probably, not surprisingly, you're going to see similar types of trends where, when in these types of markets where we underperform, you probably have less aggregate selling.

I think you can see that reflected clearly in the net numbers.

Julian Braganza

Just a bit relatively speaking, any qualitative comments? Is it more accelerated outflows in the performance, or yeah, is it just the new business side more so?

Or is it both coming down pretty evenly?

Tim Carver

Sorry, Julian. Could you ask that again?

I'm having a little bit of trouble hearing the question.

Julian Braganza

I was just trying to understand if both inflows and outflows are coming down pretty evenly, or is there more of an acceleration of the outflows relatively inflows, or vice versa? Just relatively speaking between inflows and outflows, which one would be moderating faster?

Tim Carver

Sorry, Julian. We don't break that down.

I'm going to decline to comment on the difference between gross and net right now.

Julian Braganza

Okay. Fair enough, fine.

Then maybe just to clean the investment team, just interested in comments whether you're having turnover in the investment team just given the recent investment performance. Also, with this pullback in average comp per person, just keen to understand any comments around turnover in the investment team or even in the distribution team, thanks.

Tim Carver

There's been no material turnover in the investment team. We have we do have a sort of more junior analyst program that is a, people tend to stay for a couple of years, you may see a little bit of turnover that where people don't, don't re-up after that.

The senior investment team is very, very stable, the the team's functioning extremely well. Where you see the average, the average comp per employee go come down, that's not driven by investment team, that's driven by the full 200, some odd number of people across the firm where we are disproportionately hiring younger folks on the team and training them today.

I think the team is extremely well compensated. I think we have very, very positive ratings in terms of of people's experience with the firm.

Not I have I have no concerns culturally in terms of turnover. I think we're we're in a great place.

Julian Braganza

Thanks.

Rajiv Jain

Actually, let let let me add a couple couple of points here. I think I think the the perception in most shops after underperformance like this might be that, oh, whether the business survive or not.

That is not the case here. I think I think, look, this was a conscious decision to position this way, and we still feel we're early, not not not wrong.

Been there, done this before. We've look, I've underperformed more than what you're seeing here.

I think this is a there was specific calls made. We didn't we didn't accidentally end up here and and we're looking around, "Gee, what we don't know what's happening."

There's actually positive we're quite excited, by the way. Days like today obviously makes it more excited, as you might appreciate, right?

Because because the the as as as the old saying, the the the markets go down in an elevator while go up in an escalator. I think I think you're seeing that here.

Look, if you go back to post-GFC, post-Lehman, the the biggest trades, whether it's just banks or energy or commodities, I mean there was a commodities supposed to be commodity supercycle, or before the dot-com or before that the the housing the the property bubble in Asia. There there is a palpable excitement because, look, if if, we've done our work, and the data points so far are confirming that, and you begin to see, cracks appear in in in fairly well-held, well-held names.

If we take a 3-5-year view, 3-5-year view, the alpha proposition, we believe, could be actually pretty exciting. That's that's the, that's that's that's that's the temple.

It's hardly that, oh, there's going to be team turnover or anything like that. It's actually the opposite.

Julian Braganza

Got it. No, that's clear.

Then just a final question for me. Is there any discounting and repricing on headline fees to retain FUM at this stage, Tim, at all?

Even if it's around the edges, is there any repricing at all?

Tim Carver

Sorry, can you ask the question again? We're really struggling to hear.

Rajiv Jain

The line is not very clear, yeah.

Julian Braganza

Oh, apologies, guys. Can you hear me clearly now, Tim?

Can you hear me now?

Tim Carver

Much better.

Julian Braganza

Perfect. I'm just wondering, can you just also maybe just confirm just any repricing or discounting on headline fees to retain FUM, even if it's around the edges, just to try and understand if that's becoming a feature at all in your discussions with clients?

Tim Carver

No. No, there's been no changes based on performance to pricing.

Julian Braganza

Awesome. Thanks so much for that, guys.

Much appreciate it.

Tim Carver

Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. Once again, to ask a question, please press star one on your phone.

The next question comes from Shreyas Patel from UBS. Please go ahead.

Shreyas Patel

Hi, guys. Just a question on your performance.

When you look at the depth of your underperformance, and I guess your own attribution analysis of that, if this AI thesis plays out, would that be sufficient to kind of unwind all of that performance, or do you feel like there's a large component of that which has been driven by stock selection versus some of the sector allocation and won't necessarily bounce back if this thesis plays out? Just curious on your thoughts there.

Rajiv Jain

It's a good question. Look, could the stock picking better?

Of course, it could be better. There's always room for improvement.

Having said that, I think there is not well appreciated that the tentacles of this AI theme go wide and deep. If you look a lot of industrials, the power generators, for example, in Europe, in US, if you look at some of the industrials in Asia, obviously, tech Korea, almost two-thirds is memory, right?

I think not just we would be able to cover the gap, I think this could be far better because, we believe, that this could actually push over the economy in a recession. Look, if you look at unemployment in France, for example, in Germany, in UK, in Australia, in Japan is almost always fully employed, but the economy isn't exactly booming, then obviously US and Canada, China.

That this would push the economies over the edge into recession. Once that happens, a lot of those deep cyclicals are trading at valuations you basically never seen before.

If you look, for example, US banks, they've not really traded these multiples on a price to book or price to revenue basis in 25-plus years. I'm talking about the investment banks, right?

I think this will actually roll a lot of things. For example, if you look at the US banks, would they really be trading at these multiples if the IPO and M&A activity stops?

Private equity would not be able to exit a lot of the software exposure even other exposures. We feel this will have massive implications.

The question is not about 10 10, 1,000 basis points or something. In fact, we've gained a 1,000 basis points on an average in some of the bigger products we have without the market going down.

Our view is that this could be far more significant. It's a true alpha opportunity over multiple years.

That's what we believe. We could be dead wrong, but that's what we believe here and now.

It's not simply covering the ground. By the way, if you look at '21, '22, it took few months for us to recover.

Not the dissimilar a gap.

Shreyas Patel

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Andrei Stadnik from Morgan Stanley.

Please go ahead.

Andrei Stadnik

Good morning. Can I ask around your distribution?

Can you talk a little bit more about maybe some of the new vehicle launches that you've had recently and how are you thinking about evolution and next steps in terms of your fund or your vehicle lineup?

Tim Carver

Steve, you want to take that?

Steve Ford

Happy to. The most recent additions vehicle-wise for us have been in the ETF market in the US, as well as what's called a CIT product set here in the US as well, which is directed towards our version of what's similar to a super plan in the 401(k) market.

Those are fast-growing areas of the market. We've seen initial response very positive.

Does take a little bit of time for the new products just to build trading history, the AUM history, etc., that gets access to the platforms, but we've seen material additions to platforms in the back half of the year, and we'll hit the 1-year mark for that kind of middle of this year, and that's a threshold for a number of other platforms. Then beyond that, I think we are actively looking at other strategies that have the potential for the ETF vehicle.

We already have that in all the CIT vehicles. I think there's always an important investment question to answer as well, though, which is the balance between transparency and capacity in those vehicles.

That's an active consideration that we'll continue to make. If the investment team feels that they're comfortable with those vehicles, then we'll look to launch additional offerings as well.

Andrei Stadnik

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. The next question is a follow-up from Elizabeth Miliatis from Macquarie.

Please go ahead.

Elizabeth Miliatis

Hi. Just a quick follow-up just again on the cost side of things.

If we just look at compensation and benefits ex the share-based payments, that grew in '25 by about 3% versus average FTEs of 13%. Just wondering what that differential is and is it just a mix or paying people a little less bonuses, and is that something we should continue to see going forward?

Tim Carver

Liz. It's almost all explained by hiring more junior or lower compensated people as it's just a mix shift.

It's not a meaningful shift in overall comp to the existing team.

Elizabeth Miliatis

Got it. Sorry, should have probably not asked specifically about bonuses, just wanted to get a bit of color.

Thank you.

Tim Carver

Of course.

Operator

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time.

I'll hand the conference back to Tim Carver for any closing remarks.

Tim Carver

Great. Thanks again, everybody, for joining us.

We look forward to seeing many of you when we're down in Australia in a couple of weeks for the semiannual roadshow. Thanks, everyone.

Goodbye.