3i Group plc (III) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to 3i's financial year 2024 annual results presentation. I'm Simon Borrows, CEO of 3i Group. Also on the call with me today are James Hatchley, our Group Finance Director, and Silvia Santoro, our Group Investor Relations Director. The slides supporting our remarks have been put on our website this morning. As you can see from this morning's numbers, We delivered another strong set of results for the year to 31st of March. And we've achieved those results despite the high interest rate environment, market volatility, and specific challenges across a number of sectors we're exposed to. Our purpose remains the delivery of attractive long-term returns to our shareholders and co-investors. We invest selectively in private equity and infrastructure assets. and take advantage of our permanent capital to run our winners and to build long-term compounders within our concentrated portfolio. We focus on thoughtful thematic origination linked to ambitious plans. Our objective is to at least double the profits of the companies we buy. Importantly, investing well is our overriding priority. and we don't have to buy into what we see as overpriced vintages to put third-party monies to work. In FY24, we generated another good return on equity of 23%, and that's after delivering 36% last year. Our NAV per share finished at £20.85 after a foreign exchange translation loss of £316 million. That compares to the translation gain of 623 million pounds in FY23, close to a billion pound negative swing between the two years. Private equity produced a 25% gross investment return, as well as good cash proceeds of over 1.3 billion. We ended the year at 4% gearing. and we've announced a 15% increase in the annual dividend. After payment of that dividend, we will have returned some 3.8 bil...