Polar Capital Holdings plc (POLR) Q2 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and indeed good afternoon. And thank you to those of you who are joining us today to hear from Polar Capital, who announced their results earlier this morning. If you haven't seen this already, You can find a note on our website with updated forecasts. But the purpose of this afternoon is to hear from the management team and then take questions from the audience. As ever, please feel free to submit questions as we go through the presentation and we'll take as many as we can at the end. But without further ado, let me hand over to Gavin Rochester, CEO. Hannah, thank you very, very much. And good afternoon, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. With me, I have Samir Ayoub. He is our CFO. And I also have with me Ian Evans, who is currently our global head of distribution. But as you may have seen, was we also put an announcement out this morning that he is my successor as chief executive. So we'll talk a bit about that later on. Once I've been through the results and some years been through the financial aspects of it. The year has been a good year for Polo Capital. I think if you compare our results to many of our peers, we've actually stood up reasonably well. Obviously, we don't want to get too overconfident, but core operating profit increased 27% for the year ended March, with operating margin increasing 29% to 32%. We had positive net inflows, albeit modest, in the 12 months in a very, very challenging environment. And our average AUM, which obviously drives revenue, was up 17%, notwithstanding the fact that our AUM point to point was marginally down. Average AUM was up. The big inflow story is that of emerging markets where we saw a lot of inflows, particularly in the first quarter of the financial year. And that team is now the...